Would I really notice a difference between different SSDs?

[Cancer12]

I just ordered some new parts, and I'm thinking of adding a new SSD as well to make the transformation complete. I want to spend between $150-300 on one, so looking around this will get me about a 64GB drive. The size is fine, its going to hold my OS, swap file, word, and 2 or 3 games I'm playing at the moment. Everything else will be on my TB drive.

So, I'm overwhelmed looking at all these drives. Will I really notice a difference between them?

Also, I plan on my TB drive to hold all my games, can I easily transfer them to my SSD if they are my game of the moment?

 

[pjkenned]

After owning both Intel and Indilinx drives, there isn't so much of a difference between them. On any given task it feels like (single) HDD to SSD is 98% of the improvement. Moving between Intel and Indilinx is not really noticible unless you have one thing that demands tons of 4k blocks (Intel way better) or sequential write (Indilinx way better). For most stuff, getting a good SSD is the game changer. On the other hand, if you have a nice raid card with lots of cache and 5+ drives, you may not notice a huge difference.

 

[jimhsu]

For moving game directories, symlinks or junctions are your friend. What I typically do is install everything onto the SSD, and when something doesn't need to be used right now, move it to the 1 TB hard drive and symlink it back to the original directory.

See http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlinkshellext/hardlinkshellext.html

Also consider which games tend to benefit the most. Generally, MMORPGs are on the far end of "benefiting a lot", while most modern games (i.e. Crysis) benefit minimally.