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Gaming - Pc upgrade - View Post

dane007 said:
Tachikoma said:

mechanical is just a standard hard drive, (not ssd or hybrid), you can get them in rediculously large capacities for cheap now, i picked up a 3tb drive the other day for about $60.

It is best to use one to install your games and store your downloads and stuff on, rather than use the SSD, installing games to an SSD is only really useful for a small selection of games, the rest wont show much improvement in operation at all.

For your average game, install to the normal hard drive

For games that use heavy streaming from hdd assets, skyrim, gta, just cause, far cry, etc, install to SSD

Steam now lets you pick different drives to install games to now so it should be a pain free process.

I got a 3tb one. I wish they cost that low but sadly nz price are marked up hugely.  Are the  hybrid ones any good? Like are they alot faster then normal HDD?

hybrids more of a go between to use as a main hard drive, a throw back from when large capacity SSD was too expensive, in reality having an ssd as your OS drive and a mechanical as your storage drive ieliminates the need for a hybrid hdd.

they are much faster (depending on model) but for mass storage you wont really notice, and for game loading times the difference it would make is minimal (a few seconds here and there in games). theyre only really useful if you want a massive boot drive with better performance on the cheap, or if you do a lot of video capture/editing and want to have the capture hardware record 1080p/60fps to hdd without stutter in raw.

But you have a gtx980, you can just use shadowplay, it uses the cards internal hardware encoder to record and compress your gameplay, all the way up to 1080p/60fps, with audio, and optionally with mic and webcam overlay, direct to compressed video format which bypasses the need for super fast mass storage.

besides, if you are installing most games to hdd and saving the ssd for essential/os, then you can use the free ssd space as a store-pad, recording things to it then moving it manually to hdd when youre done.