depends entirely on the game, how it loads stuff and how big the stuff is.
100 GB openworld game? HDD probably is going to struggle with the asset loading, probably leading to stuttery gameplay or very noticeable pop-in
<10GB game with closed arenas/levels? Probably loads everything at the start of the level, might take slightly longer on HDD, but probably doesn’t make any difference after that.
I was playing Layers of Fear but noticed very occasional stutters when entering new areas, especially when certain visual effects appear on screen. I’m thinking it’s probably just a bad port. Otherwise, very playable. If you’re not familiar it’s a Unity game from 2016. In general I’ve had good luck running indie games on a HDD.
The short answer is yes. A high rpm HDD like a Western Digital Black or a Seagate Barracuda will game just fine. Obviously your performance will vary depending on the game but it’s never going to be unplayable. Faster load times are nice but I have never seen a load screen take longer than a 30 ish seconds at most, even on newer titles.
Old games and indie are mostly fine. Anything newer or open world and you’ll need a SSD or a level 2 cache at least. NOTE: this only applies to CMR hard disks, SMR hard disks are unusable.
Yeah I know, thing is I have a lonely, sad 1TB HDD from 2008 that somehow still works and I thought it would be a shame to not game with it. I want it to spend its final years gaming with me. I know, I’m weird. Once it dies, I’l probably get a SATA SSD. I have an M.2 SSD but it’s almost full.
Agree with this. SSDs are cheap enough these days that there’s no point living with the disadvantages of a hard disk any more apart from in cases where you won’t notice the difference at all (i.e long term storage with not many reads and writes)
I don’t want to store things I care about on a drive that old in case it dies. Steam games are a different story. I can just redownload them. I have plenty of storage dedicated to media as it is anyway.
HDDs don’t usually affect the performance of a game or how it operates so they’re fine even for newer games, the only thing it’ll change is that you’ll have significantly slower loading times
That’s not always the case. Some games stream in assets as you play so you might get bad pop-in or freezes. Forza Horizon 5 was nearly unplayable on an HDD for me, because the map couldn’t load in fast enough while driving quickly. No issues after reinstalling it on an SSD.
Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn’t move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.
It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.
When I played Subnautica on a HDD during Early Access the pop-in was unbearably bad, but optimizations during development fixed the worst of it. The removal of digging and terrain modification alone basically solved pop-in for most areas - the mushroom forest was still pretty bad, but they also patched that later in development.
Initial load-in will likely take a while though. It took a few minutes to get into the game from the main menu the last time I had it installed to a HDD.
Although not required, most games benefit massively from being played off a SSD .
World of tanks for example, an SSD is the difference between loading in during the count down. Or showing up in game after the match has already started…
You can move things to and from different drives in the steam settings pretty easily, so in the past I used to archive larger games I was not playing to a large HDD on my system to avoid having to download it all again.
When I wanted to play again I moved it back to my SSD.
Are you asking from a technical aspect, or a financial one?
The former is like asking if you should make roundtrips from unoptimized unorganized cargo to organize to your sorter, to then build a map. Solid states have the exact advantage of having an inboard CPU to organize the assets as you play, so it’s presorted data so the CPU only has to build your map. This is also accounting parallel cell fetching, which HDDs can’t do.
I play pretty much all my games from a HDD.
I once moved Control (2019) and DMC5 (2018) to my SSD, barely any difference. though i suspect it would probably have a bigger impact with recent games.
I use a 5TB array of old HDDs for my gaming rig set up with LVM for expandability and raid 0 style striping for speed.
The longest game for me to load is Risk of Rain 2 coming in at about 3 minutes from launch to main menu, even cp2077 only takes about 2 minutes from launch to “in game”.
The thing you’ll notice most is your drives will slow down significantly as you start to fill them up, it takes longer to read data from the outside of an HDD than the center.
The advice part:
Git you a couple high rpm high capacity HDDs, set em up in raid 10, have fun!
I would at least take SATA SSD nowadays as it’s pretty cheap but honestly I can’t see myself go back to SATA after having enjoyed M.2 SSDs for years now.
If you want 8TB of storage I can see why HDD would be great but for 2TB or less SSD are accessible if not cheap.
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depends entirely on the game, how it loads stuff and how big the stuff is.
100 GB openworld game? HDD probably is going to struggle with the asset loading, probably leading to stuttery gameplay or very noticeable pop-in
<10GB game with closed arenas/levels? Probably loads everything at the start of the level, might take slightly longer on HDD, but probably doesn’t make any difference after that.
I was playing Layers of Fear but noticed very occasional stutters when entering new areas, especially when certain visual effects appear on screen. I’m thinking it’s probably just a bad port. Otherwise, very playable. If you’re not familiar it’s a Unity game from 2016. In general I’ve had good luck running indie games on a HDD.
I’ve heard the game’s name, but otherwise not familiar with it at all. The stutter could be some kind of dynamic shader compilation too, who knows.
The short answer is yes. A high rpm HDD like a Western Digital Black or a Seagate Barracuda will game just fine. Obviously your performance will vary depending on the game but it’s never going to be unplayable. Faster load times are nice but I have never seen a load screen take longer than a 30 ish seconds at most, even on newer titles.
Old games and indie are mostly fine. Anything newer or open world and you’ll need a SSD or a level 2 cache at least. NOTE: this only applies to CMR hard disks, SMR hard disks are unusable.
Some indie games and AAA games from 10 years ago should be fine.
That being said, SSD costs are low enough these days that you should be able to play off an SSD.
Yeah I know, thing is I have a lonely, sad 1TB HDD from 2008 that somehow still works and I thought it would be a shame to not game with it. I want it to spend its final years gaming with me. I know, I’m weird. Once it dies, I’l probably get a SATA SSD. I have an M.2 SSD but it’s almost full.
I’d use it for data storage. Movies, games, backups.
Agree with this. SSDs are cheap enough these days that there’s no point living with the disadvantages of a hard disk any more apart from in cases where you won’t notice the difference at all (i.e long term storage with not many reads and writes)
True, but the point was to use this particular HDD for gaming.
I don’t want to store things I care about on a drive that old in case it dies. Steam games are a different story. I can just redownload them. I have plenty of storage dedicated to media as it is anyway.
HDDs don’t usually affect the performance of a game or how it operates so they’re fine even for newer games, the only thing it’ll change is that you’ll have significantly slower loading times
That’s not always the case. Some games stream in assets as you play so you might get bad pop-in or freezes. Forza Horizon 5 was nearly unplayable on an HDD for me, because the map couldn’t load in fast enough while driving quickly. No issues after reinstalling it on an SSD.
Lots of people did (and still do) play Forza on an Xbox one which uses an HDD, and back when I did as well the game ran just fine
Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn’t move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.
It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.
I heard Subnautica runs like ass on a HDD. I haven’t tested it myself though.
I’m playing Subnautica on a HDD and have no issues whatsoever.
When I played Subnautica on a HDD during Early Access the pop-in was unbearably bad, but optimizations during development fixed the worst of it. The removal of digging and terrain modification alone basically solved pop-in for most areas - the mushroom forest was still pretty bad, but they also patched that later in development.
Initial load-in will likely take a while though. It took a few minutes to get into the game from the main menu the last time I had it installed to a HDD.
No.
I have literally only ever seen 2 games that required an SSD in their minimum requirement specs: Starfield and the Oblivion Remaster.
So you’re probably good if you don’t plan on playing any newer Bethesda games 🤷🏻♂️
BG3 requires an SSD
Rust
Although not required, most games benefit massively from being played off a SSD .
World of tanks for example, an SSD is the difference between loading in during the count down. Or showing up in game after the match has already started…
You can move things to and from different drives in the steam settings pretty easily, so in the past I used to archive larger games I was not playing to a large HDD on my system to avoid having to download it all again.
When I wanted to play again I moved it back to my SSD.
I use HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn’t failed me yet.
Yup, I have a 500gb HDD for Steam Games, loading screens are a few seconds longer than you would expect but that just makes time for a beer break.
Are you asking from a technical aspect, or a financial one?
The former is like asking if you should make roundtrips from unoptimized unorganized cargo to organize to your sorter, to then build a map. Solid states have the exact advantage of having an inboard CPU to organize the assets as you play, so it’s presorted data so the CPU only has to build your map. This is also accounting parallel cell fetching, which HDDs can’t do.
Financially, nothing will ever beat magnetic tapes. But 3-2-1 storage requires you to burn to somewhere.
I play pretty much all my games from a HDD. I once moved Control (2019) and DMC5 (2018) to my SSD, barely any difference. though i suspect it would probably have a bigger impact with recent games.
Have you tested Control with the most recent update? I think minimum system requirements went up.
I use a 5TB array of old HDDs for my gaming rig set up with LVM for expandability and raid 0 style striping for speed.
The longest game for me to load is Risk of Rain 2 coming in at about 3 minutes from launch to main menu, even cp2077 only takes about 2 minutes from launch to “in game”.
The thing you’ll notice most is your drives will slow down significantly as you start to fill them up, it takes longer to read data from the outside of an HDD than the center.
The advice part: Git you a couple high rpm high capacity HDDs, set em up in raid 10, have fun!
SSD is crazy cheap these days. I will never go back. 5 second loading times plus all the other tasks are easily 10x faster.
I would at least take SATA SSD nowadays as it’s pretty cheap but honestly I can’t see myself go back to SATA after having enjoyed M.2 SSDs for years now.
If you want 8TB of storage I can see why HDD would be great but for 2TB or less SSD are accessible if not cheap.