I’d say it’s only useful for older and less intensive games. Most modern games need an SSD, not just for load times, but for performance as well. I have a 2tb mechanical hard drive for storing my 300gb of music, documents, virtual machine ISOs and pre-2020s games. Everything else goes on SSDs.
Yeah, as long as you’re not too concerned about load time, then an old HDD is still fine.
I’m an addict. I have a ton of games on my computer. I have 4 NVMe drives and that isn’t enough to hold all my games. So I have smaller indie games and older games like L4D2 on my old school 4TB HDD. No ragrets.
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.
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…
Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam’s updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.
Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!
I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the
same connection it’s hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.
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.
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 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.
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 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.
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)
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.
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!
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I’d say it’s only useful for older and less intensive games. Most modern games need an SSD, not just for load times, but for performance as well. I have a 2tb mechanical hard drive for storing my 300gb of music, documents, virtual machine ISOs and pre-2020s games. Everything else goes on SSDs.
Yeah, as long as you’re not too concerned about load time, then an old HDD is still fine.
I’m an addict. I have a ton of games on my computer. I have 4 NVMe drives and that isn’t enough to hold all my games. So I have smaller indie games and older games like L4D2 on my old school 4TB HDD. No ragrets.
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.
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 🤷🏻♂️
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…
BG3 requires an SSD
Rust
Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam’s updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.
I used to do that. But then I realized it was faster to redownload than copy over from my HDD. I have gigabit fiber internet though.
Edit: I had a really crappy HDD though
Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!
I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the same connection it’s hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.
I still run a lot of my games off of spinning rust. Boot times are a little bit longer, but at least i can store a ton of games.
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 HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn’t failed me yet.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
SSD is crazy cheap these days. I will never go back. 5 second loading times plus all the other tasks are easily 10x faster.
Yes, especially with a big wad of RAM. Exceptions exist, however.
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.
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!