How much HD does a modern gamer need?

[Franklinwallbrown]

150gb? 64?

 

[newtekie1]

It really depends on how many games the person will be installing and playing.

 

[technicks]

2 x 250gb would be nice.
I have a 160gb and gonna buy one extra next week.
But i am not a hardcore gamer. 3/4 games on my hd is enough for me.

 

[Necrofire]

Umm, 500GB hard drives are the best bang for buck right now.

Also, go to Fry's Electronics during a sale and you get them even cheaper.

For instance, a 160 is ~$50, or you could get a 500 on sale for ~$100.

I have 2 500 SATA, a 250 IDE, and a 200 IDE right now.

 

[Franklinwallbrown]

I'm not hardcore either & I was thinking of going SSDs for gaming & OS.

 

[Necrofire]

SSD would be nice for OS, but who can afford it right now?

 

[ShadowFold]

Im a 100% gamer I do nothing else on my computer cept go here and maybe 3 other sites. I BARELY use 100gb. I have like 12 games installed and alot of music.

 

[intel igent]

well it really depends but id say at least a 250gHD

ive got a 36g raptor (boot + some games) and a 120g for everything else (more games, music, movies, data, etc...) but im starting to get constrained and now wish i wouldve built my rig initially with larger drives.

when i built my rig it was like $100 for the 120g and i paid almost $200 for my baby raptor :shadedshu

next 1 will be a monster. can you say TERABYTES!

 

[Necrofire]

I keep a backup of all my games in ISO form, and also keep a backup of ALL my stuff on my 500 gig on the other 500. I'm 145 gigs free on my 500.

Also, 500 gig hard drives are *usually faster than lower capacity hard drives.

 

[NastyHabits]

Three laws of computing:
1. Your CPU is never fast enough.
2. You can never have enough ram
3. No matter how big your HD is, you will fill it up.

All seriousness aside, I would not buy anything smaller than 250 GB. Unless I wanted one small superfast HD for my OS and a second large HD (or huge raid array) for everything else.

 

[Graogrim]

Hard drives are easy to fill up these days. I wouldn't take anything smaller than 320. Be patient for a few weeks watching for sales in various places and you can usually find a killer good deal on a 500.

 

[ShadowFold]

I havent reformated in over 3 months and I only took up 103gb of my 250gb HDD

 

[WhiteLotus]

i only have a 160GB but i am filling it up. i am thinking of getting an external drive though, i dont really want to lose all my media files.

as for gaming, when i finish one game i copy the save game profile and then remove the game. then when i want to play it again i install it and input the save game. these days it doesnt take long to install a new game.

 

[Necrofire]

I store crap, lots of it.

Unfortunately for 10K hard drives, there are some TB hard drives that are faster than the 10K 36 or 74 gig ones.

You might as well get a 1TB hard drive if you want a fast hard drive for the OS, since it's generally MUCH cheaper per GB than a 10K.

 

[tzitzibp]

Three laws of computing:
1. Your CPU is never fast enough.
2. You can never have enough ram
3. No matter how big your HD is, you will fill it up.

All seriousness aside, I would not buy anything smaller than 250 GB. Unless I wanted one small superfast HD for my OS and a second large HD (or huge raid array) for everything else.

+1

For example:
1st PC (media center)(2006 build):-
1x80gb(os)@34gb free,
1x320gb(music)@ 60gb free,
1x500gb(movies)@8gb free,
soon to add a 500gb for movies...

2nd PC (game rig)(end 2007 build) :-
1x150gb raptor x (xp sp2)@ 117gb free...mainly used for benchmarks
1x500gb (vista)@ 290gb free....56 games installed
1x500gb (storage)@170gb free

there is never enough storage space......

 

[Necrofire]

there is never enough storage space......

You can never have enough.

 

[Graogrim]

I havent reformated in over 3 months and I only took up 103gb of my 250gb HDD

Well you're just not trying hard enough. Get out there and download more stuff!

 

[Necrofire]

Well you're just not trying hard enough. Get out there and download more stuff!

He's right, get out onto the internets more often.

 

[Kursah]

I have a 500GB HDD, and it's nice to have so much space, and the HDD isn't slow, not fast by any means but faster than my old rig's IDE133 all around.

You also need to think about how much space games are taking up. One guy earlier said he had barely 100GB taken up, I have roughly twice that. Modern games are taking many gigabytes more space than games of even a year or two ago. Even CoD4 takes around 8GB for install, C&C3 was around 7 iirc, while a couple years ago, around 4-5gb was standard fare. And games will only continue to take more space, and more good games will come out.

I plan on getting another new gen 500gb or two (I found a newer version of my HDD for $120 at Newegg, Seagate Baracudda 7200.11 (mine is 7200.9)). If you want to know you'll have enough space, here ya go. I have a 20gb partition for XP and the rest for my storage, gaming, etc. I haven't had to do much with the 2nd partition in over a year, and I still have a lot of free space, but these newer games will definately take larger chunks out. The price of SATA HDD's makes them the way to go right now.

 

[Wile E]

I have over 2.5TB of storage between all of my machines and externals. Almost 2 full TB are taken up. lol.

 

[Franklinwallbrown]

I just want to know if getting SSDs will make enough difference while gaming. The cheapest one I could find was a 32gb on Newegg for $300. I figured 2x those in raid0 would be quite fast, but I wanted to know if the speed would be worth losing the 86gb HD space? I mean if the gains are marginal, then I don't care. a couple of seconds (let's say 3 or less) isn't much to me. I just wish I knew how much faster they were.

 

[PrudentPrincess]

I'm using 750gb of my terabyte and I haven't even begun to transfer all my music.

 

[Franklinwallbrown]

OMG! You must like music.

 

[PrudentPrincess]

Yeah i've got ~30 gigs of the mp3 collection already on there but I have about 7 or 8 stacks of 100 cd's in my room.

 

[Franklinwallbrown]

Ya know, I never got why people buy music off of the internet. I mean you can buy the CD & put it on your computer (WAV), then just keep the CD, which is kooler than a MP3 file off the internet.