How Much SSD Storage Do I Need For Gaming PC 2022. How much ssd do i need

If your requirements are not for gaming or professional work, I recommend a ~ 500 GB SSD to install the operating system and your favorite programs. You can use hard drives, external or other, for other storage needs.

How Much SSD Storage Do I Need For Gaming PC 2022?

If this is your first time building a PC, you may be wondering what the difference is between a regular hard drive and an SSD. A solid state drive (SSD) has no internal moving parts, making the read speed much faster than a typical platter drive. So let’s move on to find out more about how much SSD storage do I need for a gaming PC?

Solid State Drive Configuration

Solid-state drives come in three main forms. 2.5 inch SSDs are the most common in desktop computers while M.2 SSDs are the most common in laptop setups. You can also purchase an additional SSD card that fits over the PCI Express slot.

The problem with the form you want for your build depends on the type of machine you are building. Some desktop motherboards now ship with M.2 slots, so check the type of SSD you’ll need before purchasing.

How Much SSD Capacity Do I Need?

The size of the required disk depends on many factors. You will need a high-capacity SSD to store your games without uninstalling or reinstalling gaming computers. While SSDs below the inexpensive 256GB are often found, these drives should be avoided.

A typical Windows 10 installation is around 25 GB, while most game installations come close to 50 GB + in size. Some games, such as MMORPGs, can take up approximately 100 GB of space. If you plan on recording sports broadcasts, there won’t be much room for anything else. So let’s move on to find out more about how much SSD storage do I need for a gaming PC?

PC Game Install Size

• Final Fantasy 15 – 200 GB
• The Elder Scrolls Online – 170 GB
• Call of Duty: Black Ops 4 – 112 GB
• middle-earth: Shadow of War – 97.7 GB
• Grand Theft Auto V – 65 GB

Most gamers should start with a 1TB SSD and move there as their game collection grows. Most people combine their SSDs with a platter for general data storage. A good 1TB SSD typically costs less than $ 150, while the price of these drives continues to decline as technology improves.

SATA or PCIe Interface?

2.5 inch SSDs operate using the Serial ATA (SATA) interface, which was designed for regular disk drives in 2000. Most of the additional SSDs run on PCI Express, which has more bandwidth to handle. M.2 drives can be SATA or PCIe depending on the drive. M.2 drives can be difficult to identify, so make sure your motherboard supports them before purchasing. So let’s move on to find out more about how much SSD storage do I need for a gaming PC?

Endurance

The limiting factor when comparing SSDs to standard disk drives is that they have a finite lifetime. All-flash memory has this limit. When you buy an SSD, you’ll notice that disk manufacturers make two points about disk endurance. The total number of terabytes (TBW) and disk rights per day (DWPD) are recorded for these vendor-provided drives.

Most SSDs today are redundant, which means that the drive turns off some of its capacity as a backup. As soon as the drive detects wear, it will transfer data from the used cell to the new one, extending its life. Most modern SSDs can last 3-5 years or more with moderate wear.

If you’re upgrading your computer’s hard drive from a standard drive to an SSD, you’ll immediately notice a performance improvement. Load times in video games and startup times are two areas where the improvement will be immediately noticeable. “

Hard Disk Drives (HDDs), Solid State Drives (SSDs), or Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs): Which to Choose?

SSDs replace hard drives due to their faster load times as they don’t have to rotate the platform to find data. This makes SSDs the best choice for many players. In fact, they’re already integrated into the latest laptop.

A 256GB SSD is typically used for general purposes. However, this amount of space can disrupt the game experience. Many enthusiast games, such as The Witcher 3 and FIFA 19, require over 50 GB. If you need these games, a 256GB SSD can only hold four or five of these games.

This is the reason gaming laptops come in a 1TB SSD capacity, although 512GB SSDs are available to meet the minimum requirements of gamers. While less can negatively affect your gaming experience, anything else can store your videos and movies.

Investing in a 1TB SSD instead of a hard drive of the same capacity means that applications and related software components are launched quickly and easily. Obviously, solid-state drives are more expensive than hard drives.

In these cases, having a 1TB SSD will allow you to manage multiple large projects simultaneously, while larger sizes will allow even more parallel projects or archival targets.

How Much SSD Do You Need?

SSDs have higher performance than hard drives, and many computer users are inclined to choose SSDs for their computers (click here to find out the differences between SSD, HDD, and SSHD).

SSD is expensive, however, and snake modules of 500GB or more can cost almost as much as an entire average PC. This means you will have to find a balance between SSD capacity and cost.

In this situation, the real question is how many gigabytes (GB) of SSD capacity can be obtained. This is one of the key decisions you should make when purchasing an SSD. The answer is not only complicated.

To get the answer to the question “how much SSD do I need”, you should think of the following 4 items.

#1: Total Storage Space of Your Current Hard Drive or SSD

This item is important because the SSD must be at least as large as your current disk to contain all the data stored on it.

How to calculate total disk space on current disk? There are two situations:

• If you are a Windows user, click the Start button and then click Computer to find out.
• If you’re a Mac user, click the Apple logo on the left side of the menu bar at the top of the screen, then click AboutThis Mac to find out.

While at least a small SSD for the operating system and major programs will improve your PC experience, if you mainly use your PC as a multimedia machine, the standard 7200 RPM hard drive can handle these low bandwidth files.

What Benefits From Being on an SSD

Your Operating System

Regardless of what you do on your computer, you need an operating system to keep everything working.

Regardless of the operating system used, an SSD will drastically reduce the time it takes to boot, update, and sometimes even repair that operating system.

Boot time comparison NVME SSD vs SATA SSD vs SATA HDD (Win10 Home)

Faster storage makes a real, noticeable difference to common computing, but especially when the underlying operating system is stored on an SSD.

While SSDs are cheaper per gigabyte than they used to be, in the old days this was by far the most popular and compelling reason to buy a hard drive.

Even today, most PC manufacturers recommend that you install the operating system on an SSD, even if it’s just a small drive that fits into a larger hard drive.

Your Programs

Think about the programs you use that take the longest to load. Or, if you want a lot of programs to run when Windows starts up, consider how winding it can take on an older computer.

Your program runtime will also be much faster with an SSD than without, especially if your CPU and RAM can keep up with faster storage.

High-Quality Video Footage and Projects

If you’re editing a video or working with a lot of high-quality resources in a different environment (like Blender rendering), an SSD can really come in handy.

Any seasoned professional can tell you how long it might take to edit a large high definition video or import a large enough resource into a slow storage scene.

While an SSD by itself won’t speed up actual render times, it will make the import and editing process much smoother and faster than otherwise, reducing the time you spend waiting for your computer to catch up with you.

You don’t want your storage to become a bottleneck and make other components wait idle until they can crush some numbers. Video editing or rendering are great examples of tasks where you need a sustainable computer build. For video rendering and editing, you need to load your resources and recordings into RAM before they can be processed by the CPU or graphics card. A slow hard drive would be a serious bottleneck here.

Games With Large File Sizes

As the fidelity and scale of the games increase, so does the file size of the games.

Infamous, Call of Duty: Cold War could someday occupy up to 250 gigabytes on your hard drive with all the modes and quality resources installed. This has since been reduced to 175GB, but still reflects the industry trend for larger games.

Adding an SSD will allow any game to load, but the latest state-of-the-art titles are almost starting to require it for a good experience.

On PS5 and Xbox Series consoles, NVMe PCIe Gen 4 SSDs are actually required to update their internal memory.

What Doesn’t Benefit From Being on an SSD

Music and Movies For Playback (Not Editing)

Did you know that the average bitrate for a 4K movie does not exceed 70 megabits per second?

This means that even if you are watching 4K video, your average 7200 RPM hard drive, which is equipped with speeds of up to 180 megabytes per second, is more than enough for the task.

There is no real reason to buy an SSD to watch high-quality movies or enjoy other high-end multimedia when the standard hard drive is more than adequate for the task.

Editing, however, is a different story.

Games With Small File Sizes

If you play games with smaller file sizes, especially older games, you may not need an SSD.

While SSDs still reduce load times in these scenarios, games with 8GB and less typically don’t need to download large amounts of data from storage too often.

Larger games – often 50-100+ GB these days – may actually need that extra bandwidth, but retro and simplified games usually don’t.

Most Images and Photos

This has to do with music and movies at the point of consumption, and possibly even most photo editing scenarios.

Static images, even high-resolution images in particular, don’t put as much strain on your hard drive .. unless you are dealing with a large number of them at once.

Even then, outside of professional editing scenarios, you don’t need expensive SSD storage for most image storage needs.

Of course, if you are doing high-resolution multi-layer Photoshop editing and your PSD files reach several gigabytes, then yes, SSD will help you save valuable time writing project files.

I think I want to emphasize here that small drives like 120GB and 128GB are not worth it. They’re fast and reliable, but you’ll often struggle with storage. 500 GB is a safe option. And if you can, 1 TB is even better.

What to condering when Choosing storage for a Gaming Laptop

SSD or HDD

A gaming solid-state drive is required for a laptop that is mainly used for this purpose. SSD has replaced HDD as the best choice for both multiplayer and business users due to its fast and durable performance.

This is mainly due to the design of the SSD, which allows no mechanical element to move during use. This is why these SSDs are already included in many newer laptops.

The data storage capacity of 256 GB for an SSD is quite common these days. This is often sufficient for general purposes. However, the respective needs of the player are different. In fact, having only 256 GB to play can seriously hamper your experience. Many wildly popular games like FIFA 21 and Assassin’s Creed Valhalla require over 50 GB.

If you install such games on a laptop with a 256GB SSD, you will only be able to keep 4 or 5 of them, and to install a new game you will have to remove the previous ones. This is one of the main reasons why most gaming laptops have 1TB of data capacity, and 512GB gaming SSDs are now available (at least for gamers).

Anything more may be unnecessary unless you do some serious video editing and movie collecting. On the other hand, anything less can make a big difference to your gaming experience.

As a gamer, it is also important to purchase an SSD with this capacity for data storage instead of a hard drive. This is because applications and the relevant operating system components run faster and smoother with an SSD, unlike the speed and performance that a hard drive can provide.

These are the main reasons why an SSD and adequate data space are crucial for the best gaming experience. Now let’s talk about other factors that should influence your decision when choosing a gaming laptop.

Processor

A powerful processor (central unit) can effectively complement a good gaming SSD. The 11th or 10th generation Intel Core i9 processor is enough to run any game on the market today. This processor will continue to be useful in future games that will be launched in the next few years.

The fast processor will also be able to efficiently access the appropriate portions of data and store it on the available SSD drive. The powerful processor can also improve communication processes between required operating system (OS) components, favorite games, and other third-party software.

For example, laptops such as the Acer Helios Predator 300 are equipped with the latest generation Core i7 processor as well as a 512GB SSD that can be expanded upon user request.

Other game tips you MUST READ:

Operating System Version

Since most gamers use Microsoft Windows, we’ll cover it in more detail than any other operating system. Windows 10 is the latest version from Microsoft and takes up more disk space than Windows 7. This means Windows 10 may not be suitable for gamers with an SSD as low as 256 GB.

Even though Windows 7 might be enough for the same gaming setup, Windows 10 is still recommended for users looking to play the latest games today.

This is because almost all game development companies and individual game developers are struggling to keep up with the latest updates and versions of Microsoft Windows, meaning their latest titles will likely be integrated with Windows 10 support these days, as this is the latest version from Microsoft.

Conclusion

To answer the question “How many SSDs do I need to play?”. We recommend having at least 1 TB. This gives you enough storage capacity for Windows 10, internal and external firmware components, favorite games, and other third-party software that can be useful in your daily activities.

And don’t forget to consider the other factors discussed earlier in order to get the best SSD laptop on the market. Also, it should be in your best interests to take a closer look at the battery life, size, display quality, and screen resolution of SSD gaming laptops from your shortlist.

Written By Ronald Patrick

From Fortnite, PUBG, Overwatch, and even Minecraft, this guy has played them all in the name of testing laptops, and he knows everything there is to know about smooth, lag-free gaming.

Similarly, the heaviest version of macOS requires 18.5 GB of disk space. If you decide to go with Linux, you will have to spend around 20 GB for the installation. Most operating systems grow larger with each update, so you need to have adequate space.

What Is The Ideal SSD Size For Windows 10?

According to the specifications and requirements of Windows 10, to install the operating system on a computer, users must have 16 GB of free SSD disk space for the 32-bit version. But if users are going to go with the 64-bit version, 20 GB of free SSD disk space is necessary. Here you have the answer to the question of how large an SSD is needed to install Windows 10 and run properly.

To see how much Windows 10 is taking up, we first need to install Windows 10 on the computer. After the installation process is complete, go straight to your operating system unit to see exactly how long it is taking up.

After that we will get that Windows 10 takes about 20 GB of disk space, including drivers (e.g. NVIDIA drivers).

Note: – You also want to know how to recover deleted data from SSD. Complete and explained solution.

How Much Space You Should Reserve for Windows 10?

Typically Windows 10 receives updates every week, which improves both the overall system performance and the security of your computer.

To make sure Windows 10 is updated without space issues, you must have at least 10 GB of additional free space for these updates. In addition, keep in mind that Windows 10 usually starts a new version for this purpose every 6 months, it is recommended that you have at least 30 GB of free space so that you can back up the current version and install a new one.

If you want to run Windows smoothly and without problems, make sure you have at least 20 GB of free space. It will be used to work freely with temporary files and cache. Also, if you activate swap memory and hibernation features, you need 10 GB more space.

After all, make sure to install Windows 10 in at least 60 GB, because only after that will your operating system run without any problems.

Note: – You should also know the easiest way to recover files after formatting the SSD. Best and easiest solution explained here.

Investing in a 1TB SSD instead of a hard drive of the same capacity means that applications and related software components are launched quickly and easily. Obviously, solid-state drives are more expensive than hard drives.

Should I Get An HDD For Music Production?

In general, an SSD is recommended for music production. Software vendors specify that a drive with a minimum speed of 7,200 rpm (revolutions per minute) is required for music production. A typical hard drive runs at 5,400 rpm. When it comes to speed, the speeds of HDD devices can go up from 50 megabytes per second to 120 megabytes per second. While SSD device speeds go from 200 megabytes per second to 550 megabytes per second.

So yes, SSDs are much faster and much more reliable. If you’re on a budget for an SSD, I totally recommend getting one. However, it’s not the end of the world if you don’t. Especially in a home studio.

Here are the very clear benefits of having an SSD:

• Your computer will start up in a few seconds.
• Your music production software will start up much faster.
• Your virtual instruments and plug-ins will also launch much faster.
• There will be little or no delay when using virtual instruments.
• If you are recording, there will be little or no lag.

Conclusion

SSD is the best option for music production applications. However, size is a big problem in this case.

I’d say 120GB SSDs aren’t worth it. There is a lot of frustration and a lot of maintenance work due to limited space. As we know, the software grows over time.

500 GB drives are a great option because of their usability and price. This size will allow you to work on your music projects seamlessly. You still need to clean the drive from time to time, but because you want to improve your computer’s performance.

If you have the chance for a larger drive, you’ll have more freedom. Although occasional cleaning is still recommended.

While an SSD by itself won’t speed up actual render times, it will make the import and editing process much smoother and faster than otherwise, reducing the time you spend waiting for your computer to catch up with you.

Conclusion

SSDs are preferred in music production mainly due to their high processing speed. SSDs are also less prone to damage or failure. Beginning music producers can get away with less space because they are not involved in large projects.

Full-time music producers need all the available disk space. Nor can they risk using a hard drive as it degrades the quality. While 500 GB is enough to get started, they often need to invest in external storage and in the cloud. It’s also very important to optimize the space you already have by removing anything you don’t need.

Sources

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My name is Vinnie and I’m here to support you in creating your own home studio, whether it’s photography, audio recording, podcasts or movies!

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