500GB hard drive good for a cheap gaming computer?

[froggyboy604]

Is a 500GB SATA hard drive a good size hard drive for a cheaper gaming computer for playing games like Minecraft, Runescape, Dota 2, League of Legends, Warcraft 3, Starcraft, Counter Strike, Half Life 1-2, Need for Speed World, etc.

 

[USHost247]

If your going to get a gaming pc, you may want to invest in a 1TB HDD as some games are going up in the 20-40GB range. I have a 1.5 TB in mine, then a 500gb and then a 500GB external.

 

[froggyboy604]

I guest, 1 TB would be a better size for a Gaming PC.

I'm just afraid that I end up buying too much space, and I never end up filling the entire hard drive before the hard drive breaks from a mechanical failure, electronic problem or power surge.

I also have a slow internet connection, so it is very unlikely that I would buy or download many 10 GB or bigger games.

 

[USHost247]

Its better to always have more space than you will use than have not enough space. 😉

 

[Aki-P]

I disagree here. The more space you have on the C drive the more you require to have available as unoccupied for optimal performance.

500GB is more than enough to start with. Keep 15-20% of free space at all times, I personally stay above 20%. Use the 500GB windows drive dedicated to games and programs while a separate 500GB, 1TB, 2TB etc are dedicated to everything else; documents, photos, video files, etc.

And don't cheap out with one of those "Green" hard drives, they run at 5900RPM as opposed to 7200RPM. The speed difference is significant.

When you have the money, consider a Solid State Drive aka SSD. The performance difference is night and day. Everything boots like instantly, your drive never fragments unlike a hard drive thus causing it to slow down over long term use, and with the high read & write speeds, isn't bottle-necking the rest of your PC hardware.

 

[froggyboy604]

Thanks for the tips.

I guest, I can also add more hard drive space latter on since it's simple to install an extra hard drive to a desktop's hard drive tray which usually supports 2-3 hard drives. I can also copy all my data from my old hard drive to a new bigger hard drive in the future with a program like Norton Ghost, Clonezilla or the Windows imaging program in Windows' Backup program.

I also wish to have a SSD drive in the future for faster drive performance. Hopefully, the price of 500GB-1TB SSDs would be cheaper in the future

 

[Aki-P]

A lot of standard ATX cases fit at least 6 hard drives, you can fit more if you use hard drive mounts in the DVD drive bay area.

You can also get something like this: http://www.amazon.com/SABRENT-3-5-Inch- ... .5+adapter

Which allows you to fit two SSDs in 1 Hard Drive bay. So if you had 6 Hard Drive bays, you can fit 12 SSDs. It's a good space saver. SSDs don't generate as much heat as Hard Drives, so it should be okay putting two together like this. Especially since most cases have fans in the front anyway.

I'm assuming you're custom building a PC here and not buying one of those brand name garbage.

SSDs comes in different sizes than the standard hard drives:
60GB
120GB
240GB
480GB
960GB

Currently the lowest price you can get for 480GB is around $280 USD + tax.

That's already pretty good value. You can't compare this to a 500GB HD that sells for around $70 because again, the performance is night and day.

It's like trying to compare a watermelon to an apple. They've dropped significantly in price already. The SSDs use to cost well over $1 per gig.

For about $80-100 you can get a 120GB SSD now, and for about $160-200 you can get a 240GB.

 

[CM30]

It's a bit on the low side, but hey, you can buy extra hard drives (including portable ones) if you need more space down the road.

But from what I can remember, none of the games you mentioned are particularly resource intensive ones...

 

[froggyboy604]

Thanks for the tips. I think I pick a full size ATX case with lots of hard drive bays, and a better motherboard with many SATA ports.

I also heard newer motherboards, and computer cases now have E-Sata, USB 3.0-3.1 external connections which have faster transfer speeds than USB 1.0-2.0, so the speed difference of external and internal drives are not as noticeable.