Solid State Drives (SSDs) have become more and more commonplace, usually as an addition to, and in some cases even as a complete replacement to the more traditional mechanical Hard Disc Drives (HDDs).
The advantage of SSDs is that there are zero moving parts (it's all electronics, with no mechanical parts, pretty much in essence a memory stick turned up-to-eleven), and seek times are many orders of magnitude higher than with traditional mechanical HDDs (because, essentially, there is no seeking time). HDDs have a mechanical reader head which physically moves inside the device along the surface of the discs, reading the data. This causes a (relatively) long time in physically moving this mechanical "arm" from one place to another.
Curiously, when reading sequential data (ie. data that exists in the HDD as one single consecutive block), HDDs aren't usually significantly (or even any) slower than SSDs. However, since data can very rarely be read sequentially, and instead it's all over the place, practical reading speeds tend to be significantly slower with HDDs than with SSDs. (Defragmentation can help this a bit, but it doesn't completely make a HDD as fast as an SSD in general use.)
On the flipside, SSDs tend to have much smaller capacity and much higher price than HDDs. Multi-terabyte HDDs are relatively inexpensive, while even a half-terabyte SSD can be quite costly. SSDs also have a limited lifetime, or more precisely a limited amount of writes before they start failing. (However, mechanical drives also have a limited lifetime, and it's actually much more random and can vary by a lot.) Another advantage is that SSDs can be made physically much smaller than HDDs (and thus are very suitable for laptops, but also PCs with a small form factor. Or to just have more room for ventilation.)
For the longest time SSDs were a luxury that only few people dared to afford, and they tended to be very small (in comparison to your typical average HDD of the time). We are talking about eg. 64 or 128-gigabyte SSDs, in an era where 1-terabyte and larger HDDs were very common. However, as technology has progressed, quite unsurprisingly SSDs have steadily become larger and cheaper. However, even at the time of writing this, budget PCs typically still either have no SSD at all, or a relatively small one.
If you have a limited budget for your gaming PC, chances are that you will want, at most, a comfortably large HDD and a smallish and cheap SSD. (For example a 1-terabyte HDD and a 128 or 256-gigabyte SSD.)
Now the question becomes: What will you be using the SSD for, exactly?
The most typical PC building guides out there will recommend installing Windows on the SSD, and using the HDD for games.
What? Why???
If I have purchased an SSD, I want my games to load and run faster. Why should I care if Windows boots up faster?
If your Windows installation is on the SSD, then sure, the complete boot sequence from starting the PC to everything having fully loaded may be reduced from something like one minute to something like 10 seconds. Yay! Fast bootup!
But then what? You started up your PC faster. So?
Now your games will be launching from the slow-ass HDD, and you will get very little benefit from your expensive SSD. The SSD becomes almost completely useless, and a waste of money. Your gaming will not improve one iota.
Of course I install Windows on the HDD, and games on the SSD. I don't care if Windows takes one minute to fully boot up. I care that games load and run faster.
And no, after booting up Windows doesn't have to read much from the disk. At least not anything that would require extreme speed and from which games would benefit a lot. You might get a slight amount of speedup with some games in some situations, but that will be minuscule compared to the entire game itself being on an SSD.
"A 128GB SSD is too small for all my games!" you might say. Well, I don't keep 128GB worth of games installed at one time on my PC. I'm not the kind of gamer who plays fifteen games at the same time. I play one or at most two games at the same time, and play them through before moving to something else. Even if, and that's rare but if, there's a situation where I'm running out of SSD space, I can install the game that benefits least from the disc speed on the HDD. It's not like I'm losing anything.
The advantage of SSDs is that there are zero moving parts (it's all electronics, with no mechanical parts, pretty much in essence a memory stick turned up-to-eleven), and seek times are many orders of magnitude higher than with traditional mechanical HDDs (because, essentially, there is no seeking time). HDDs have a mechanical reader head which physically moves inside the device along the surface of the discs, reading the data. This causes a (relatively) long time in physically moving this mechanical "arm" from one place to another.
Curiously, when reading sequential data (ie. data that exists in the HDD as one single consecutive block), HDDs aren't usually significantly (or even any) slower than SSDs. However, since data can very rarely be read sequentially, and instead it's all over the place, practical reading speeds tend to be significantly slower with HDDs than with SSDs. (Defragmentation can help this a bit, but it doesn't completely make a HDD as fast as an SSD in general use.)
On the flipside, SSDs tend to have much smaller capacity and much higher price than HDDs. Multi-terabyte HDDs are relatively inexpensive, while even a half-terabyte SSD can be quite costly. SSDs also have a limited lifetime, or more precisely a limited amount of writes before they start failing. (However, mechanical drives also have a limited lifetime, and it's actually much more random and can vary by a lot.) Another advantage is that SSDs can be made physically much smaller than HDDs (and thus are very suitable for laptops, but also PCs with a small form factor. Or to just have more room for ventilation.)
For the longest time SSDs were a luxury that only few people dared to afford, and they tended to be very small (in comparison to your typical average HDD of the time). We are talking about eg. 64 or 128-gigabyte SSDs, in an era where 1-terabyte and larger HDDs were very common. However, as technology has progressed, quite unsurprisingly SSDs have steadily become larger and cheaper. However, even at the time of writing this, budget PCs typically still either have no SSD at all, or a relatively small one.
If you have a limited budget for your gaming PC, chances are that you will want, at most, a comfortably large HDD and a smallish and cheap SSD. (For example a 1-terabyte HDD and a 128 or 256-gigabyte SSD.)
Now the question becomes: What will you be using the SSD for, exactly?
The most typical PC building guides out there will recommend installing Windows on the SSD, and using the HDD for games.
What? Why???
If I have purchased an SSD, I want my games to load and run faster. Why should I care if Windows boots up faster?
If your Windows installation is on the SSD, then sure, the complete boot sequence from starting the PC to everything having fully loaded may be reduced from something like one minute to something like 10 seconds. Yay! Fast bootup!
But then what? You started up your PC faster. So?
Now your games will be launching from the slow-ass HDD, and you will get very little benefit from your expensive SSD. The SSD becomes almost completely useless, and a waste of money. Your gaming will not improve one iota.
Of course I install Windows on the HDD, and games on the SSD. I don't care if Windows takes one minute to fully boot up. I care that games load and run faster.
And no, after booting up Windows doesn't have to read much from the disk. At least not anything that would require extreme speed and from which games would benefit a lot. You might get a slight amount of speedup with some games in some situations, but that will be minuscule compared to the entire game itself being on an SSD.
"A 128GB SSD is too small for all my games!" you might say. Well, I don't keep 128GB worth of games installed at one time on my PC. I'm not the kind of gamer who plays fifteen games at the same time. I play one or at most two games at the same time, and play them through before moving to something else. Even if, and that's rare but if, there's a situation where I'm running out of SSD space, I can install the game that benefits least from the disc speed on the HDD. It's not like I'm losing anything.
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