Any of you use an SSD just for games?

[AnImuS]

I currently have an intel 80gb ssd for my bootdrive+games. WoW alone is taking something like 30gb of space with all the expansions released.

I was contemplating buying the crucial m4 128gb ssd to offload the future games i will be buying. BF3/GW2/Starwars mmo, etc. am i crazy? curious if people just stack everything on normal HDD's.

 

[GotNoRice]

I used to use my Intel 80GB in a similar fashion, as a boot drive and had maybe a few games on there and that was it. It didn't bug me too much since WoW is the main game I play and the main reason I got an SSD in the first place.

Still, with digital download services the new normal way to buy a game, combined with the hassle of moving individual games away from the download-service parent folder, there is a lot of hassle associated with having different games installed on different drives.

If 128GB is big enough to fit all your games including your Steam and Origin folders then it could work.

I'm not sure what hardware you are running but another thing you could look into is SSD caching. On a Z68 chipset you could use your existing 80GB SSD as cache for a mechanical drive. You would then install all of your games onto your mechanical drive and anything you use will be cached and benefit from the increased speed of the SSD.

It's nice because at any given time your SSD will be filled with stuff you actually use, while requiring zero effort on your part to manage anything, and you can do it with a smaller SSD instead of paying through the nose for an expensive larger drive.

 

[Makaveli]

Out of all my games installed only Starcraft 2 and 4 of my steam games are on my SSD. Not every game benefits from a SSD so there was no point in loading them all on taking up space.

Since you are a wow player and that does benefit from a SSD I would considering a drive just for it.

 

[PowerYoga]

it makes shogun 2 load times bearable. Over the course of the number of battles I had in Shogun i'd say it has saved me hours.

 

[birthdaymonkey]

I have a 256 GB WD SiliconEdge drive for my games. Bought it when it was available for $200 on a Shell Shocker.

It's not fast as SSDs go but it gets the job done much better than a hard drive. Map load times, for example, in SC2 are virtually identical to my Vertex 2.

I guess the moral of this story is that if you can find a good deal on an older drive with a high capacity, it's not much slower for games than a new(er) drive.