Alright, but what if you've already bought the best card you can shove into your rig? And honestly, SSD is still a good investment, because its already been mentioned, loading times can really svck the life out of games, but i've also stated theres alot more subtle effects going on in the background.

I agree with both.

If you're on a budget with your rig, SSD's are not the place to get your performance increases.

SSD's are the last place I'd look for it. Since they're expensive and do not alter actual ingame performance at all.

I;m regretting my SSD.

I'll shell money out for it next time if I pass the budget with allows me to buy everything else I would possibly want, or if any significant games demand one in some way.

For people thinking of budgeting out their SSD, just keep in mind that the controllers on the SSD try to evenly distribute data across the SSD, to preserve its life span it moves data onto the least used blocks, trying to keep the wear as even as possible. Smaller SSD will die faster, because information cant be shifted as freely, so the side effects will rear alot sooner. Also, running more then like 70% capacity will start to rapidly decrease its lifespan as well for the same reasons.

Just some food for thought. SSD are a pain in the ass if your not fully committed.

I'e had zero problems with four SSDs :shrug:

The earliest generation of SSDs had some issues with read/write slowdown over time, prior to the implementation of TRIM and garbage collection.

In any event, the lifespan of any modern SSD is still significantly longer than the lifespan of a mechanical HDD, as there are no moving parts.

I would buy one if they weren't so expensive.

If you take care of them, yeah. Otherwise you'll still see some, admittedly unnoticeable degradation over time. Theyre generally so fast anyway that shaving 20% off the top will go unnoticed. Also thats just a drop in the water when you realize that any other number of things will mess them up/make them not work properly. 90% of the issues i see with people using SSD these days are because theyre doing something with them thats screwed them up, like messing up the firmware, or not setting up the bios correctly for their setup, or not disabling hibernate.

I'm not bashing, but i dont want to shove the idea into peoples heads that its just super simple when really it can wind up in a colossal waste of money, all because some kid left his system in RAID when they installed their OS.

SSDs still will experience significant slowdown. SSD speed depends on consecutive blocks available to write to and they experience significant slowdown when less than 20% free space remains to any new writes.


This hasn't yet been proven in reality, it's completely theoretical based on the principle that the lack of moving parts will make them last longer. Enterprise actually I know for a fact has a tug-of-war with SSD technology. The consumerization of SSD is pushing prices down, which is good, but the method of doing so is by using constantly bleeding-edge techniques, which limits the ability for quality assurance. You'll notice a large amount of DOA and "dead a month later" reviews for numerous SSDs because of the lack of QA.

Oh yeah. My new computer has a 120GB SSD, with about 20GB to spare at the moment. I'm probably going to have to start deleting things from it sooner or later, with the amount of mods I intend to install.

No, that's not quite the way it works.

First and foremost, you're not getting speeds as fast as a true SSD since it is still working off of a mechanical drive and secondly, the SSD on the disk drive will only cache files that you use a lot, it basically learns the programs and files that you use the most and caches them. Now, the problem with your drive is that it only has a 4GB NAND chip meaning that you really only have a 4GB SSD. Therefore, it can fit the critical boot up files of your OS, select files that you may access often and maybe a program like Office and that's about it, it's certainly not going to be any benefit for a 10GB + install of Skyrim.

I'll have it installed on my SSD; it will be interesting to deal with it with multiple mods installed

Considering that I've only recently heard of these things, no, I won't. However, my loading times for games is still next to nothing, so I don't see any reason to get one for now.

I might. To see how it loads. I plan on installing it to a RAMdisk to test out loading times as well.

That's one heavy SSD....

If I had one, I'd install Skyrim on it. Unfortunately, those things are still too expensive for me. Maybe if I save up over the summer.... hmmmmm.

Timely question. My answer is yes I am.

I just build a new gaming computer for Skyrim and the next generation of other games. And I am using SSD as a gaming disk for the first time. It seems to work very well, but I have not yet installed any games on it.

I'll definitely install it on my solid-state if I can free up enough room, yes

Absolutely. I saw a huge improvement in the exterior cell transition loads with Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and Fallout New Vegas.

Instead of a jarring 1 second pause it's almost, not quite, but almost instant now. It makes for a much nicer experience.

I would if I had one. I'm still waiting for the price-per-GB to go down a bit more before I take the SSD plunge.