Slightly Green wrote:
aye, a SSD is the next thing on my list
If you're tight on cash then it's possible to get by with a 128GB. When I bought my SSD the 256GBs were still somewhat on the pricey side (£300+ IIRC) so I went for a 128GB which was under £150, and I'm still using it now. (I should upgrade really but I'm lazy.)
You'll most likely need a data drive in your PC as well for, y'know, data (movies, photos, emulation collections etc, stuff that doesn't benefit from an SSD). All you really need on the SSD is the OS, applications and games. 128GB goes a surprisingly long way if you're careful with it.
Amazingly even stuff like Hearthstone
visibly benefits from being on the SSD. I initially installed it on my hard drive because I thought, 'Meh, card game, how the hell does that need to be on an SSD', but when loading it up for the first time, and then when each card was being played for the first time, there'd be a small but definite 'judder' as it loaded that card in, but I got used to it. (Once a card had been played it was in RAM, so there'd be no judder thereafter, but it made the first game of any session quite annoying.)
Then I installed Hearthstone on an old Sony Vaio laptop which is massively less powerful than my PC, (albeit reasonably specced with a Core Duo and mobile Radeon 4650 GPU), but had an oldish Vertex3 SSD in it that I'd bought off a mate for £50 when the Vaio's original hard drive died.
And Hearthstone ran better on the laptop! The card judder annoyance was completely gone, because the data load from the SSD was so massively faster than from the hard drive on my main PC.
I immediately uninstalled Hearthstone from the hard drive on my PC and reinstalled it on the SSD, boom, exactly the same improvement, and it's been there ever since.
This is what prices for the new MX100 look like at Ebuyer at the moment, although if you can find end-of-line M500s for less then by all means go for them. (They're currently more expensive at Ebuyer though.)
One final note about Titanfall I do actually have that installed on my hard drive as I couldn't clear 50GB for the game install on my SSD, but it doesn't make any difference. Because the lobby system is so catastrophically shit and the transition from one game to the next is so remarkably clunky (there are no dedicated servers so it's console-style P2P wanky matchmaking), the loading times from hard drive aren't the bottleneck, the lobby system itself is, so there's no speed advantage to installing to an SSD. (Unlike for example in BF4 where on servers configured with quick start up times, I can be driving off in a vehicle whilst a mate running from hard drive is still staring at the loading screen.)
When it comes to Titanfall you can quite literally go for a piss and refresh your glass of wine between games, so hard drive loading times are the least of its worries.
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