question about SSD+HDD systems

[Chaoticlusts]

I'm going to be upgrading to an SSD as my OS drive soon...but there's no way I can afford one large enough to put my games on (steam directory alone is 170gb with only about half the games I own installed and I have a lot of non steam games..so I'd realistically need at least 300gb for games alone) just my OS and main programs...

my question is will there be any real difference in game loading times/performance if they're not on the SSD but the OS and other stuff is? I'm assuming if there's any it will be fairly small but figured i'd ask incase i'm entirely wrong ^_^

it's damn annoying you can't split your steam directory so you could put certain games on one drive and others on another >_<

regardless still getting an SSD, I use my computer for so much general usage speedup will be soooooo nice

 

[showb1z]

Actually, you can split the steam directory using windows commands.
Check out this thread:
http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1138731

 

[Chaoticlusts]

Thanx heaps for the link ^_^

 

[mclaren777]

Let's pretend you're like me and your three favorite PC games aren't on Steam. Would someone like me notice improved loading speeds using SSD for my OS and HDD for my games?

 

[Zap]

Most games won't benefit much from an SSD, especially if you play mostly multiplayer. I run games off a VelociRaptor and I'm usually still one of the first loaded and ready in almost any multiplayer game I play online. Then... the game makes me wait with a countdown timer.

 

[Emulex]

makes a hella difference. just tier your storage so you have the most used in the ssd group. write a script to move the games around - they don't have to be present when not being played?

i think you can bust out the cmd/powershell/zsh to figure that out.

on play call move all other games to hard drive, if they aren't moved, then move game from hard drive to ssd, then execute.

I regret 80gb - i would choose 120gb as the min except for light users (laptop/business) it's really easy to start bumping into the headroom of 80gb.

 

[postmortemIA]

loading game on SSD is a lot quicker than on any mechanical drive. I tell from my experience, I have tf2 on velociraptor and then on diff partition on ssd.

Usually when server changes map, you are very first one with new map loaded, and there you can see how much it takes for rest of them with mech. drives.

 

[Chaoticlusts]

Most games won't benefit much from an SSD, especially if you play mostly multiplayer. I run games off a VelociRaptor and I'm usually still one of the first loaded and ready in almost any multiplayer game I play online. Then... the game makes me wait with a countdown timer.

From what I understand there's quite a significant speedup for load times (assuming you actually have it on the SSD hense my OP) I can certainly understand that being somewhat useless if your playing purely multiplayer but that's not everyone...having fast loading save games in say Fallout: NV or being able to log between characters in WoW twice as fast would be quite a plus

@mclaren
If you only have a handful of games you spend 95% of your time playing i'd say just make sure you have space for them on the SSD...the biggest game tends to top out at 20gb with the majority being below 10...so if there's 3 like you said those and an OS should happily fit on a reasonable sized SSD..I was running into issues cause I have hundreds of steam games and dozens of non steam and I tend to jump between them a lot so mebbe some big ones can go on the SSD thanx to the original response I got but the majority will have to stay on standard HDD storage