So I'm looking to potentially make a few slight upgrades to my PC... Thought about a new graphics card but now seems like kind of a bad time with all the Direct X12 shit surrounding Nvidia and me having to up my PSU if I wanted to go AMD... Figure I should just wait for Pascal and see what that's like.

So next on my list is storage... and I've had this curiosity and temptation to pick up an SSD for awhile now. I'm always hearing about how great they are and how they can be one of the best upgrades one can make to their PC. Only trouble is, they're still kinda pricey... $80 and upwards for 250gb doesn't seem like the best value, but every week it seems like I'm hearing more and more about SSD technologies advancing and being able to cram more storage for less money.

Now I'm just wondering if I should wait, or take the plunge since I have some cash laying around. (For once) I should note right now I'm using a Seagate 1tb 7200 RPM drive and it's serving me fine. Takes my machine roughly 25-30 seconds to fully boot... though sometimes when I'm accessing certain content there's a bit of a delay. (Not a huge deal or anything but it always worries me that something is going wrong)

Should also note the SSD will primarily be used as a boot drive along with key applications and games. (I plan on putting Fallout 4 on it)

So a few questions...

1. Should I buy an SSD

2. Which one should I buy? I'd like one that's reliable and has a good warranty policy, but I'm also kind of cheap. Let's say my max budget is $90.

3. I think my case's storage bay has slots to screw in an SSD on the little cage things. Besides that, do I just need a Sata cable?

4. How do I go about installing Windows on it? If I do a fresh install on the SSD, what do I do to make my HDD a secondary storage drive? I can't clone since I have way storage on my HDD...

Thanks for any advice!

Edit: Bought the SSD. Can confirm, they are awesome.

1. YES.
2. SanDisk Extreme Pro 240GB on Amazon (a little over budget but worth it)
3. The 480GB version of the same SSD above is only $200 on amazon. If you can save an extra $100.... That's totally worth it. (I've seen that same drive as low as $180 on sale) Wait for Black Friday deals!
4. Yes, you need to use a SATA cable. Everything works the same as a regular hard drive
5. Just install Windows normally from either the CD or a USB drive. Just insert it, press f8 on boot to bring up the boot menu and select the CD/USB stick and boot from there. Follow the steps and install windows on the SSD. You're good!
6. For using your HDD as a storage drive, everything should work by just using it regularly but not booting from it. When you get a chance, I would backup everything you want to save on an external drive, reformat the HDD and then put all of that stuff back on it (minus the old version of Windows). It's as simple as that.
7. Alternatively, you could backup all your storage stuff to an external drive, delete it from the HDD, and then use a cloning program to clone your old windows install on the HDD and move it to the new SSD.

Yes.

I think Samsung are pretty much the ones to buy atm, you can easily get a 128gb for that which is more than enough, though I'm sure you could probably get a 256gb during black friday sales but it'll be older and not as fast.

Yes just a sata cable.

Once you've backed up everything on your HDD just reformat it and it should be good to go.

An SSD is, no joke, the most important thing in a Windows PC to me. Cheap $400 laptop? I still want to put in a basic SSD to make my desktop apps load instantly, half the boot time, use slightly less power, and mean anything that does thrash the HDD dumping loads of data to RAM (great examples being every computer game's load screen) is now way quicker.

The really nice thing about right now (the last year, maybe two) is that the cheap mainstream SSDs are now almost as good as the premium drives. There's loads of good options and unless you're putting really heavy (almost server-grade) workloads onto them, they perform basically within 10% of the premium price drives. There is a new generation of premium drives that drop the old HDD connector (S-ATA) and plug in with basically a PCI-Express (the thing your GPU uses to talk to the system) extension cable (S-ATA Express) or straight into the mobo (M.2 etc) and a new lower overhead protocol (NVMe rather than the old HDD standard of AHCI) but that just means people with too much money can buy ridiculously fast drives that the rest of us will get for cheap in about 4 years.

It's hard to go wrong with something like a Crucial BX100 or Samsung 850 EVO (depending where you live, one of those might be a bit cheaper than the other) and that $80 for a 250GB drive (the Crucial is definitely widely available for that price, the Samsung might be closer to $90 unless you find a deal) is actually a pretty good deal considering just how fast these drives are compared to anything with a spinning platter. Keep the platter drive handy (buy a USB to S-ATA adaptor or external case) and you can use it for backing stuff up etc (because 250GB is normally big enough but you'll not want to leave your music or video collection on it, or games you're not playing right now - anything you're not using or that only needs to be accessed at slow speeds like media can be put onto a pen drive or external HDD to avoid running out of SSD space or having to pay $160 for the 500GB editions of these popular SSDs).

Holy shit are they really that cheap in the US now? The 128 Samsung is £80 here, which is like $130.

Absolutely.

For me, just the simple speed of booting up windows and whatever program I want to load first is just incredible, I think it'd be impossible to go back to non-SSD.

For games it's not too noticeable (except for some games that had notably long load times before), but just having the stuff you use day to day, the OS, web browser, steam browser, media player, etc. it's incredible.

When I purchased my 128GB Crucial SSD it was $160 if that makes ya feel any better...
: )
Go for it, now is as good a time as any.
Samsung and Crucial are some of the best out there.

Fresh install, all ya need is SATA cable and a power connector of course.
Use this method to change your target locations to your Data (old mechanical HHD) drive:
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/redirect-folder-new-location#1TC=windows-7

Also, move the Windows page file to your data (mechanical) drive.
Right click "My Computer" or "This PC" - Properties - Advanced System Settings - Advanced Tab - Settings - Advanced Tab - Virtual Memory Change... button.
Click on the C: drive and select the "no paging file" bubble.
Then select your D: (mechanical) drive and click on the "system managed size" bubble.

Should be all set after that!

@alexw00d: Ye, those are the Amazon.com prices (just checked and they're Amazon, not Marketplace seller - Crucial BX100 250GB $79.99; Samsung 850 EVO 250GB $84.99).

Remember that the US don't get to see sales taxes so we're getting a 20% increase because of VAT. Also, I think prices have been getting better over here (or the 128GB drives are overpriced and make the 250GB option an even clearer choice). Right now the 850EVO 250GB is £66 on Amazon UK. Once you remove the 20% sales tax on that (=£55) then it actually does work out to be $85 at current exchange rate. So we're paying exactly the same (to the retailer) once you convert for US not showing sales tax at checkout.

@shivoa: Unless you live in one of the five lovely states that don't have sales tax. ;)

@zeik: When I go to the hospital it's always free (and when someone else in my community has something infectious, they also get free healthcare so they don't worry about cost and make it more likely I catch it). I'm pretty cool with paying sales tax on stuff. :p

Funny you guys should mention Crucial and Samsung, as those were the two I was considering the most. :P I've used Crucial ram before and it worked great. (Only switched because I got a larger capacity of Corsair ram for free)

I'm currently slightly leaning towards the 850 Evo, think I'll place the order tonight!

As for the hard drive thing, I think I'll take some of your advice and backup the important stuff to my external HDD and then just format it. Probably for the best anyway, since I'm sure half of the hard drive is full of dumb pictures and shadowplay footage I'll never look at again.

Thanks for all the advice everyone, really appreciate it! :) Feel free to let me know if there's anything else I should know or what have you.

Well sure, if paying taxes let that happen here I'd be all for it, but that's not going to happen in America anytime soon so I take the wins where I can get them. Better to have crappy healthcare and no sales tax than crappy healthcare and crappy sales tax.

It's been a good time to buy an SSD for several years. Once you use on as your system drive you will never be able to tolerate anything else.

I invested last year and it's been pretty good. Having my computer boot up almost instantly is a big quality of life improvement as well as the silent operation and fast transfers.

I would wait, i got a sandisk a while ago and its great but not all that when it comes to gaming. I only run 2 games off it they do load faster but the gain is barely noticed imo compared to a 7200rpm hdd. Now windows runs way faster but im not sure if its the ssd or just win7 vs win10 and a fresh install. For games graphics card is always your best upgrade, with an ssd your only going to be running a few things off it anyway since space is such an issue right now. I install 90% of programa on the hdd's i have

Using a SSD has been great for my OS. I have Windows 8 and yeah it starts up so damn fast compared to my past machines. It's great.

I think it only marginally improves any games in my experience, but I got a rather small one so I only usually have maybe one game on it at a time. For the OS though it is highly recommended.

It depends, is this purely a gaming machine? You could get better value elsewhere, like with a 144hz monitor or a nice mechanical keyboard/new mouse. Personally I'd get 144hz monitor over ssd any day, but you may be playing games where the 144hz monitor isn't that big of a deal.

Solid state is amazing but still very expensive, and it's not really a 'gaming' upgrade. If you're limping along on a budget it may sting in a year to see prices.

I'd probably need a stronger graphics card to really take advantage of 144hz, but that would be cool. Probably a next year purchase. I think I'm going to try to snag a mechanical keyboard around Christmas time if I see any good sales, and maybe even if I don't. I actually don't use kb/m too much outside of shooters, so it hasn't been a huge priority. (Though I definitely want one anyway because the basic HP shit I'm using now is pretty bad)

I caved and ordered the SSD last night, already been shipped so the damage is done. I'll see when it gets here if it was worth it lol.

Oh it'll be worth it. The only people who say they don't need an SSD are those who never had one.

There's no need for that. Better to let windows handle those settings.

Just wanted to update and say I've had my new SSD for a few days now, with Windows 10 as well, and it was indeed worth the purchase! I had some initial trouble getting the OS on it, as Windows recognized the SSD but my Bios didn't for some reason. I shit you not, I ended up fixing the issue by moving the sata cable to another slot. PC is weird sometimes.

But yeah, it's fast. Really fucking fast. Like holy shit people weren't exaggerating fast. My HDD took maybe 30 seconds to fully boot up and this new SSD takes probably 5-7 seconds. I also love that it shuts down pretty much equally as fast. Opening programs and having them open instantly feels weird. You truly don't realize how delayed things on a mechanical hard drive actually are until you've used an SSD lol.

The difference in gaming isn't that exciting... though on the bright side New Vegas and Skyrim now take like 2 seconds to load a file. I'm really glad I opted for a 250GB one as after I had everything installed I had less than 200 GB to work with. 120GB would be wayyyy too limiting.

Can't wait to install Fallout 4 on it and get low-loadtime bliss!

But yeah, if anyone stumbles upon this topic and was like me, take my advice and seriously get one. They are really sweet.

I put my long load time games on the SSD; GTA5, Kerbal Space Program, Battlefield 4. I'm saving electricity because I can just shut down when I'm away since it only takes a few seconds to boot into Windows. My monitor takes longer to power on and display than it takes to cold boot. I'm ready to throw another 500GB in there so I can have more games and programs load quickly. Definitely one of the best investment my PC that I've made. It's pretty much a requirement for any future builds.

Yes.

I would, and have, bought a 256 GB Samsung SSD. I fought the upgrade easy since I had never actually experienced SSD in person; I can't imagine operating without it now. Restarting your PC for whatever reason isn't a hassle, takes seconds. I also will load my current two biggest games and enjoy the quicker load times.

This is truly an upgrade most PCs should be getting in 2015.

Love my SSD. Windows takes like 3 seconds to load up. Apps load quicker.

You truly won't understand how invaluable they are until you have one for yourself. I got one and it changed my computer use habits drastically. They're incredible.

I'm still using my old 128GB SSD (nothing important is stored on it don't worry) back from when they were $1 per GB here in Australia and I'm so used to it now that it kills me every time I have to load up a computer other than my own. The only problem now is that the size is getting way too small. I just recently installed AC Unity which is 50GB (and by the way I'm actually having fun with, and it seems to run pretty well on max settings at 1080) and it was a reaaaalll struggle to clear up enough space...

An SSD is good for you OS and maybe on program you use a lot. But after that you are better off with all other applications and storage on physical drives. A really good small SSD just doing you OS and few apps is a better idea than a dodgy-SSD that holds everything you store.

Oh man, three years ago was a good time to invest in an SSD. Those little things are magic. Invest in yourself!

I have 2TB+ of ssd storage in my PC and 5 laptops with SSDs in them. SSDs are the best.

There are some decent SSDs on Newegg for about 70 bucks (240gbs) . Pretty good deal if you ask me.

$147 pretty good for 500 GB? Or should I wait for Black Friday?

An SSD is pretty much the biggest upgrade you can do for your computer right now. At about thirty cents per GB on average, they're becoming more and more practical. I'd absolutely recommend grabbing one right about now. The Samsung 850 EVO is currently the top-seller among SSD's, and you can grab a 250GB one for about $78 on Amazon right now.

Yeah, that's the one I ended up getting. It's been fantastic!

@barrock I'd wait and see, but that price seems alright.

I'm probably going to have to get used to having an SSD, since I normally use the time between starting up my computer and everything loading up on a IBM 350 to either make a sandwich or take a shower.

SSD drives should be standard in every build these days, having windows boot up instantly is reason enough to do it. Also your computer is less likely to slow down over time!

An SSD is hands down the best upgrade you can make these days, it'll make your entire computer feel fresher and faster. Ultimately you probably won't see many improvements gaming wise, but I still highly recommend it.