Do you need to move your OS to a SSD if you buy one?

Factual Questions
1

I’m thinking of buying a 240GB SSD and I want to install mostly large (40-80GB plus) games (and mods) on it, so I need as much space as possible. If I leave the Windows OS on my HDD, will that affect the loading of the games from the SSD?

Also, SSD’s don’t directly affect FPS, but some games like the Flight Simulator X have huge terrains which load only once you fly above them and if you have a HDD, the textures will load really slowly, so if you want to fly a little faster, you fly above a blurry texture of a terrain, so a SSD would probably help here a lot. But, would it help if the Windows is still on the HDD?

I really have no problems with my OS, the only thing that could somewhat improve is perhaps the booting up time, but I boot up just once or twice during the day, so I couldn’t care less if it boots up in 10 seconds more if that is the only real gain I could get from moving it to the SSD, I only care about the performance of large games.

2

No, you don’t need to move it.

It would improve speed loading the OS itself (such as that booting time), but the move is not required.

3

It is not required, but I would recommend it as it will speed up the operations of all computing tasks.

4

Make sure the OS settings for VM paging files don’t let it leak onto your SSD.

Or more accurately, after you’ve got some experience with your new rig with the OS on the HD and the games on the SSD, try placing the pagefile on one or the other disk deliberately to see which works better. What’s unhelpful in this case is when the OS starts doing whatever it does for whatever reasons it chooses without your knowledge.

Another question is whether you might get even more speed-up by using a separate disk controller interface card for the SSD. And specifically one designed to control SSDs. Many mobo disk controllers are not exactly tuned for absolute max performance.

5

Are you saying some SATA interface cards perform much better with SSDs than others? Which ones?

6

I can’t imagine another controller would provide more bang-for-the-buck than another SSD as the boot drive.

What you can do is research the motherboard and manual online and see if you have more than one on-board controller. If you do, and probably do, you put the new SSD on the other controller. This will improve performance and is free as you already have that controller available. When I had a desktop, I had primary (for OS and day-to-day) on the first controller, secondary (for games) on the second controller, and the DVD-burner on the second one as well.

What I would do is keep the OS and day-to-day on the original HDD, but, move the page/swap file to the SSD. That swap file on the SSD will help with day-to-day tasks.

7

Apart from the swap file, which may not be getting much use if you have ample RAM, getting the temp directory onto the SSD will help performance, as will much of the other stuff in the Windows and Users directories, depending on what tasks you run. Nava’s bottom line is the point - no, it’s not necessary to move the OS to the SSD, but for most people, it’s where you are going to get the most benefit. Of course, if running applications with huge disk I/O requirements, like your game programs, is what you primarily do, maybe you don’t want to do it. I would simply factor system usage into the size SSD I required if I was buying a sizeable SSD anyway.

8

I think LSLGuy is talking about using the M.2 socket on the motherboard and if you do not have that on your mobo then getting an expansion card for it.

9

240 GB is pretty small to put large games on it PLUS the Windows OS. If you’re happy with your boot performance and overall system performance, and only care about game performance, I would not try to move the OS onto the SSD. You’d probably find you would have a lot less space available on the SSD than you want.

I have a Windows machine with a hard disk and an SSD. I have the Windows OS on the hard disk and use the SSD exclusively for a Linux virtual machine, which is where I do all my compiles and is mostly where I care about performance. Your situation, where you care mostly about game performance, seems similar.

10

If you’re interested in gaming I would definitely just use the SSD for the games. If you are picky about what background processes are running, the Windows drive shouldn’t be accessed much during gaming anyway so it can be a slower HD.

What you said about flight simulator is true in my experience, I had the same issue in Planetside 2, Arma 3, GTA V, and Space Engineers. A SSD made all of those run very smoothly while flying. You might experiment with putting your Windows swapfile on there as well, Windows loves using swapfile even if you have plenty of RAM.

11

As others have said, no, you certainly don’t have to put Windows on the SSD, but I think not doing so is a mistake. Unless your current Windows drive is already a big mess, the total size of Windows and all its ancillary crap is potentially no bigger and maybe even smaller than the size of a single one of your games, and its presence on the SSD (including its paging file) is a big boost to performance for absolutely everything you run. IMO, if it’s at all possible, putting Windows on the SSD should be a high priority and not having it there is typically a poor cost/performance tradeoff.

However, much depends on how big your current Windows install is and whether you would consider reinstalling on the SSD from scratch to make it leaner (for instance, if you have a large number of very big apps, relocating them to an HDD), and much also depends on how any particular game is designed. It may be a case of “try it and see”, but I’m just saying that the core of Windows 7 (don’t know about later versions) plus many essentials like Office, is really not that big of a disk footprint. If a 240-whatever GB drive is not big enough for many of your games, the presence or absence of Windows isn’t going to make that much difference – but it WILL make a big difference to performance.