Is a 128GB SSD better than a 500GB hard drive for gaming?

The short answer is that the SSD is better for your operating system and favorite games, while the HDD provides more overall capacity for your money. The ideal setup is to use both, with the SSD as your primary boot drive and the HDD for bulk storage.

Speed – No contest, the SSD wins

When it comes to speed, SSDs blow traditional hard drives out of the water. A SATA SSD has typical sustained read/write speeds exceeding 500 MB/s, compared to just 100-200 MB/s on a spinning hard drive.

What does this mean in reality? Much faster boot ups, game launches and level loading. As an example, here‘s a comparison of some game load times on equivalent PCs with either SSD or HDD primary storage:

As you can see, switching from an HDD to SSD can cut load times by 50% or more. This vastly improves the gaming experience. No more yawning through long loading screens!

SSD access times are equally impressive – typical 0.1 ms read latency for an SSD versus 10-20 ms on a hard drive. This near instantaneous response keeps everything feeling snappy.

Capacity – The HDD has far more room for games

Now for the Achilles heel of SSD storage – capacity. After Windows and essential applications, you might have only 80-100GB free on a 128GB SSD. With many modern games exceeding 50GB (not to mention DLC expansions), your SSD will fill up frighteningly fast.

Here are some install sizes for today‘s most popular games:

• Call of Duty Modern Warfare (2019): 175GB
• Red Dead Redemption 2: 150GB
• Flight Simulator 2020: 170GB
• Forza Horizon 5: 103GB

You‘ll run out of space after just a couple of AAA titles! This is where the 500GB+ capacity of an HDD shines. You can store 5-10 major games on there no problem. Imaging having to delete and re-download games constantly on a filled up SSD – no fun.

In my opinion, a minimum 500GB total storage is recommended for any gaming PC build in 2024. Use at least a 256GB SSD paired with a 1-2TB HDD.

Reliability & Lifespan

When it comes to reliability, SSDs again have a clear edge due to their simple electronic storage versus the mechanical nature of hard drives. HDDs have many fragile moving parts – rapidly spinning platters, swing arm heads floating nanometers above – which can fail over time due to shock damage or general wear and tear.

By contrast, SSDs have no moving parts, just reliable flash memory chips. The calculated mean time between failures (MTBF) figures reflect this:

• 2.0 million hours MTBF for a typical SATA SSD
• 1.2 million hours for an enterprise-class HDD

SSD lifespan is less of a concern nowadays too. The top models are rated to endure hundreds of terabytes written over a 5 year warranty. Unless you are copying huge datasets daily, modern SSDs easily outlive a typical gaming PC upgrade cycle.

Cost Per GB Comparison

The one area HDDs still dominate is cost per gigabyte. High capacity hard drives remain remarkably cheap:

• 500GB HDD – $0.15 per GB
• 2TB HDD – $0.08 per GB

Whereas SSD pricing is higher:

• 512GB SATA SSD – $0.20 per GB
• 1TB NVMe SSD – $0.15 per GB

However, the raw $/GB metric ignores the massive performance benefit per dollar that SSDs provide. A 500GB HDD may seem cheaper than a 250GB SSD for example, but the SSD breathes new life into a system.

I strongly recommend using an SSD as the primary boot drive even if it means sacrificing some capacity for cost reasons. Keep your most played games and OS on there to benefit. Use the HDD for bulk storage of media files, older games and backups.

Recommended SSD + HDD Combo

Based on the above comparisons, here is an optimal SSD and hard drive combo to use in a gaming PC build:

SSD: 256GB PCIe NVMe M.2 SSD ($40-60) – for OS, applications and your 1-2 most played games

HDD: 2TB 7200RPM SATA HDD ($45-55) – for game library, video files, images etc

Focus your budget on the best possible GPU and CPU first, but try to stretch for a 250GB+ SSD and 2TB+ HDD minimum. This gives you the best of both worlds – speed and capacity. Make sure to enable symlinks in Windows to seamlessly install games across both drives.

Some tips for maximizing limited SSD capacity:

• Move user folders (Downloads, Videos etc) to HDD
• Change default install locations to HDD for less needed programs
• Disable hibernation and reduce page file size to free up GBs
• Store media files on HDD then play/access them from there

Following this SSD and HDD game storage setup will give you an optimal gaming experience.