If Windows takes up 30GB, you pretty much need to wipe out everything just to play Unity on 80GB. I think 256GB to 512GB is the best bet for the standard consumer.

Your load times for a level of Call of Duty are always reflective of how long it takes to get texture data off the disk and into vram, and that is constantly being hammered. It sometimes even causes texture popping on crappy notebook hard drives.

I have 256GB SSDs in my desktop and notebook (with intents to find a nice 1TB drive next year, since we are at the tail end of SATA3) and my Steam library on my desktop is 176GB by itself.

My OS on its own (Arch) discounting pacman provided games (0ad, doom3bfg, darkplaces, doom, etc) is around 6GB, and most of that is Qt doc, Python2 site packages, 300MB of wallpapers, and 600MB of locale.

Right now, you maybe put your favorite game on the SSD, not the whole steam library - and that is what gamers often recommend themselves. FPS don't get influenced by the HDD, only loading times, and those are normally not too high. Many new games have only two loading times: loading the game and then loading the save. Afterwards, everything is streamed, and a proper HDD is fast enough for that. And that is what the people responding to your comment here miss completely.

Using a SSD is for many games a waste.

    You are right, it is a pity that you are downvoted.

The downvotes and the first-generation replies to my comment show that this is not the place for a discussion about the worthiness of SSD's for games.

If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

Improved loading times and better texture loading in games where it is heavy (think Fallout 3 or Skyrim) is a great reason to wack an SSD in your system.

> If you have the monty and the means why wouldn't you do it?

Oh, sure then :) It is only a waste in the relation of price per gigabyte vs. the possible performance improvement ingame.

> You're comment is very 'matter if fact' and baseless.

See http://www.hardocp.com/article/2013/12/10/hdd_vs_ssd_real_wo... if you want another source.

I just won't let me be told that the texture streaming outside in the open world needs that.

That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.

An SSD will not improve your framerate much at all (That's not what you use an SSD for).

You cited main loading times like loading a game and loading a save, which are enough reason themselves to want an SSD in there. Some games are painfully long in these areas (take any Total War game as an example) and an SSD will help.

I gave Fallout 3 and Skyrim as an example of texture loading where an SSD would matter. You claimed it didn't, as this is contrary to all avaialble information.

These games (like many open world games) stutter when new cells/areas are loaded (I'm not talking about regular texture streaming). Again, this is where SSD's will make a difference.

An SSD becomes even more useful when you start installing high-resolution texture mods to games like these. My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.

There is nothing about SSD's being used to store games that is a 'waste' if those things are important to you.

I have two SSD's in my personal machine, one 128Gb for the OS and one 500Gb for Steam and some games. They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it? There is literally no reason for me to not do this in a high-end system meant for playing games.

Other games will go on my regular HDD's because you are right at least in saying that not all games will benefit from it, but some will.

That HardOCP article (and HarcOCP are not really known for their quality articles anyway) is testing for framerate imrpovements.

I don't like your tone. If texture streaming would profit much from an SSD, you would see that in the FPS.

Fallout 3 was played by me on a very old machine, of course without an SSD, and I remember no noticeable cell loading outside. The streaming of those engines is just too good. Fallout: New Vegas I played for more hours I'm comfortable admitting, heavily modded, on a better machine, same story there.

> My own Skyrim installation uses nearly 4Gb of video memory when wandering around the wilderness. That would cause some pretty heavy thrashing on an HDD.

Ingame, in the widlerness? Try it out. I doubt it. Initial loading times will be better of course, and loading times when switching locations, but not performance otherwise. You underestimate the performance of a regular HDD that is not a shitty 2.5 model cooked to death in an overheating laptop.

> They didn't cost me much, so why wouldn't I do it?

Like I said: No reason not to, if you have the SSD anyway. But normally, SSDs are a lot more expensive than a HDD, see above.

Area/Cell transitions are MUCH faster on an SSD.

I'm playing through the game again currently.

> Area/Cell transitions are MUCH faster on an SSD.

I think we were not talking about the same thing (anymore?). Like I wrote below, explicit area transitions - entering a city, loading a save game - will of course benefit from an SSD, a lot. That is loading though. But you also have cell transitions that are streamed – you talked about texture streaming above - when travelling on foot through the game world. If I remember the engine from my morrowind mod days correctly, that is a special case in those games with its explicit cell system, but it probably basically applies to all 3D-games that include moving through big areas, since they all have to load textures at the time they come in reach. It would be quite interesting if an SSD would have a real effect here, and to my knowledge it so far does not. It would be interesting because those transitions can stutter if the streaming system does not work properly, or if the HDD is really too slow, which is a likely cause of bad minimal fps (and depending on the benchmark, could lower average fps) or rather explicit stuttering, measured in fps or not.

I'm not saying SSDs do not help with loading stuff, I say that to my knowledge, they do not help with streaming - which are two different things.

I never felt those explicit transitions were too bothersome when I played Fallout/Oblivion/Morrowind, that together with the streaming system outdoors is why I see an SSD as not necessary for those games. But of course, if it bothers you - and maybe loading really takes longer in Skyrim? - an SSD is a good load time minimizer.

Windows on its own is quite capable of filling up a 128GB drive with restore points, update backups, and all sort of other junk when left in the hands of a typical user for a couple of years. I recently wiped nearly 60GB of pure OS-level junk (i.e. not caused by applications) from a family member's Windows 8.1 PC.

IMHO, 120GB is way more than enough.

How sustainable is this for the average consumer with most national ISPs moving towards bandwidth caps?

I had to switch to business service because Netflix alone was blowing through the data cap - in fact it was blowing through even the data cap they had for their top tier consumer service.

Which nation are you talking about? I suppose I'd guess US but it would help if you said.

I'm still getting uncapped broadband (albeit with vague TOS provisions) in the UK. I think the rest of Europe is probably similar.

For the record - I'd like to move towards metered billing - but with a realistically low price per GB - not a punitive one based on profiting from people that don't have the knowledge to estimate their usage.

Give me 20-40 GB at a good speed for £20/month with prices scaling linearly from there and I'll be fairly happy and no-one will get burnt.

(just checked and most providers are offering uncapped at around 20Mb/s for £20/month)

In general, I get 50 megabits down/20 megabits up. And, because this is a capped service, I have a reasonably good chance of actually seeing that performance. If it was, "Uncapped" or "Unlimited" - then people would abuse the crap out of it, and all of a sudden that 50 megabits/sec down would quickly drop, making the system far, far less useful.

I've never been a fan of unlimited/uncapped services, they quickly degrade into poor experiences for everyone in a very short period of time.

Using the service I have paid for is not abusing it, anymore than watching too much cable TV or making too many local calls is abuse of those services. If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us. And the top ISPs all have profits in the billion dollar range, so it's not like they're hurting for money and just can't fix the infrastructure. Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure.

That said, not once have I ever seen my speeds drop below what they're rated to be.

"Watching too much cable TV" - Cable TV is a broadcast Medium, and watching it, like listening to broadcast radio, has no marginal cost or impact. You can leave your TV off for an entire month, or tuned to a channel for 24x7x365 - zero difference in cost to the provider, or impact to other people on the service.

"Making too many local calls" - More than one person has been required to purchase a business line when they overused their local calling privileges. Indeed, on some CO to CO trunks, if enough people (ab)used their local calling privileges, the entire exchange would be blocked and nobody could call in/out. Unlike the case of internet connectivity, there is no graceful fallback - once the trunk reaches capacity, it's dead for anyone else. (Lumby, BC to Vernon, BC - used to happen all the time - 48 people could bring down a town of 1800). That's why those types of deployments require some type of per minute charges to avoid that scenario.

"If it causes degradation for other users, that's the fault of the ISP that has over-overprovisioned us" - We totally agree here. Any ISP selling unlimited service, and not clearly explaining how many gigabytes "Unlimited" equals, is doing everyone a disservice.

"Caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading infrastructure." - We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

For example, if I've purchased a 1 Gigabit connection, the ISP darn well better invest in their infrastructure to make sure that none of their ports are blocking. Comcast utterly failed to do that with Netflix recently, and I find that annoying beyond belief. At the same time though, I don't expect Comcast to provision enough capacity to support all of their customers at 1 Gigabit (or whatever a high speed connection is) at the same time - that's cost prohibitive - particularly as it will rarely be happening.

On the Big I internet, this is solved by what's called 95th percentile billing. This is probably too confusing for the average user, so something simpler like, "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours, $20/addition Terabyte in Peak, and we make sure that none of our upstream ports our blocked on any of our peering routers" is exactly what I'd be looking for.

It sounds like those deployments required infrastructure upgrades, not more creative billing to stop people from utilizing it.

> We disagree here. ISPs should provide Caps to their customers, and clearly communicate what they are - and then compete to provide higher caps while ensuring they maintain the line rate they've committed to their customers.

Even this isn't the reality. It's rare for landline Internet to be advertised with the actual data caps in effect. In my case, the data cap is defined nowhere except the Acceptable Use Policy (a long document that nobody is going to read) and in a My Usage part of your account (which you obviously won't see until you're already hooked up.)

At the same time, who are they going to be competing with? How many people are going to lay down fiber side-by-side with someone else's fiber? What incentive is for them to compete based on the data cap instead of following current practices which ae basically "100 MBPS BLAZING FAST SUPER-SPEED INTERNET!!!"*

(fine print)

* Limited to 200GB/month. Users going over this limit will be automatically upgraded to the next highest tier after three offenses.

I'm not sure why you disagree with the statement "caps are just a way to squeeze out higher profits by reducing the necessity of upgrading the infrastructure." You're basically making the argument that yes, caps do have that effect, but are put in place as a necessary network management strategy, despite the fact that most of these networks worked quite well before data caps and don't work any better with them. While some or most of them are continuing to invest in upgrading infrastructure, most of them are also rolling around in billions of dollars of profit that they aren't investing...because there is no real market incentive to do what you're saying they "should" do.

> "You get a 1 Gigabit connection for $75/month, with a 10 Terabyte/month Limit during Peak hours, and Unlimited Terabyte limit in Off peak hours,

What a world that would be. In reality data caps are usually 300GB in networks that can obviously support much more than this. I could blow through my former data cap in 12 hours. Heck even in your scenario, I would only be able to use my rated 1 gigabits for 2-3 hours at max utilization. It seems misleading to advertise Internet as 1 gbps if you can actually only get 1 gbps for 3/720 (0.4%) hours of the month.

EDIT: I misread that as 1 TB instead of 10TB, but I don't think 4% of the month is much better.

But, if they want to do both - Profit + good service, then caps are needed.

The competition, btw, is definitely fiber (See what happens to Comcast Service when a fiber competitor comes to town - it gets much better) and wireless (I haven't used a wireline carrier in singapore for 2+ months. All LTE, all the time.)

Regarding my limits - the nice things about Tier-1 ISPs (which Comcast is) - is that they don't pay for data use, as they engage in what is called "Settlement Free Peering" - what they do pay for is (roughly) Trenches + Vaults + Data Center Real Estate + Power + cooling + security + Chassis + Fiber + Interconnect Ports + Line-Cards. These are all a function of peak usage, not total usage. So - outside of peak-usage, which has reliable patterns of behavior, there is no costs to the ISP, or fellow users of the same resources, to your usage. Peak Usage may be as few as 4 hours/day, or 120 hours/month * 1 gigabit = 54 Terabytes. In a month, 1 gigabit could theoretically draw 324 Terabytes, so - that's 270 Terabytes off Peak + 10 Terabytes on Peak allowance = 280 Terabytes/month.

By doing just a bit of scheduling, you don't have to pay any extra, the ISPs network isn't overloaded, and you have a reasonable allowance of data to work with.

Of course, if they start selling 1 Gigabit Service, that's a lot of switch ports/chassis/routers/interconnects/etc/etc... they are going to have to upgrade to handle the new peaks.

I have an uncapped service (Virgin Media) in the UK which I wouldn't trade for anything. So much so that if I were to move house their service availability would be a factor to consider.

I get 152Mbps down/15Mbps up and I have never dropped below that level but more than a few Mbps for a short time.

There is nothing abusive about using that which you paid for. If you sell me a 100mpbs pipe, I should be able to use that pipe 24/7.

Of course, the reality is that it would be expensive to make sure everyone could use their 100mbps pipe 24/7, so ISPs sensibly over-provision to save money.

But ISPs miscalculating their provisioning requirements (or as it appears in most cases, simply grubbing for money), is not the end-users fault and not the end-users problem and it does not mean that they are doing anything abusive.

Games are the main problem. When one of those 60GB bastards comes out, that's nearly one third of my monthly bandwidth, so I have to think carefully about scheduling it. But I regularly re-install 4-8GB from the cloud because it's a marginal impact compared to the entertainment it will bring.

I use Netflix as a replacement for OTA and cable TV. So my girlfriend, who likes to watch a lot of TV, has used 221GB 7 days into the billing cycle.

I really don't get a data cap of 300GB for today's culture of "stream everything". I can see something like a 1TB cap to knock out the heavy torrenters, but 300GB/month is 10GB/day. A decent sized family will bust through that easily (Dad watching a 3GB movie, Mom streaming 1GB of Pandora throughout the day, Daughter downloading 7GB of new Xbox/PS4 game content, Son binging half a season of a Netflix show at 5GB).

[+] https://openconnect.netflix.com/hardware/

You seem like a very atypical use case. You can't be playing any of the modern AAA games, for example.

Or any modern sample library (which can get to 80GB for a single piano).

Or any video editing projects and/or templates.

Just some examples of professional stuff (for graphic designers, musicians/producers and videographers) that take huge space.

You don't want to bring around extra drives and cables when you perform.

You don't want vibrations, bad handling etc while performing / touring etc, to crap your HDD.

You get much much faster random reads, which is what playing large sample libraries is all about.

Even Indie games like Cities: Skylines which is PC/Mac only recently sold more than 1M copies in a short amount of time. [2]

I don't really play much but i follow PC Gaming and it has been on the rise for years. Free to play MOBA games like League of Legends have over 8M concurrent players in peak hours with 27M people playing at least game per day. That is more than the viewership of even the most popular TV series, every day of the week.

[1] http://www.dsogaming.com/news/the-witcher-3-out-of-its-4-mil... [2] http://www.polygon.com/2015/4/14/8414099/cities-skylines-hit...

Perhaps 8.1 and Windows 10 are better about what they save, but going with anything less than 128 for Windows + apps + data seems risky to me.

For Python/Django/Twisted development in a couple LXD containers, it's the just right amount of computing power at an incredibly low price.

I agree with the sentiment, though, carrying around a lightweight laptop without having to worry about theft/accidental damage is priceless.

And yes. Carrying a worry-free laptop is priceless.