this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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I'ma say it: Spinning disks are still a good choice for gaming. I wouldn't run my OS off one, but I would and do install my games library on one.
Awful idea for games with a lot of leading screens, such as Skyrim.
Total War Warhammer is arguably unplayable on HDD.
Did you know that you can move things between drives? No one plays their entire Steam library at the same time, but I can store much of it ready to play on large-capacity HDDs, which are dirt-cheap. If I suddenly got back into Skyrim again, I'd spend a few minutes moving it to one of my SSDs.
Congrats, you have just invented caching, but worse
SSDs have limited write endurance, so moving a lot of large files on and off of them will wear the nand flash out shortening its lifetime and potentially killing it
If yoh DO want to run off of a HDD, it is a good idea, but for older games that were designed to run on them, modern games are more reliant on fast drives
Edit:
This is the conventional wisdom, but honestly I've not seen any detectable wear on any of my several year old SSDs even with daily use. I've seen more SSDs fail just due to age/power on hours professionally and never wear-related
That's probably because you are not moving 100s gigabites of daya on a regular basis (i assume)
But for gamers moving game installs that they don't feel like rebuilding the mod load out for between an HDD and an SSD that might be moving an extra 100GB month or so, probably less frequently depending on how much they're moving games around, plus it's no more wear than if they simply uninstalled and reinstalled the game as needed. Ultimately I don't think that'll make much difference.
I'll look at the wear stats on my main desktop with its 8 year old SSD when I get a chance and share
Skyrim is not going to take a few minutes. A few hours, at best.
Not even remotely true on modern hardware. It's pretty quick.
It has nothing to do with modern hardware since you're still limited by the read speed of your disks. Given we're talking about spinning rust, that will take tens of minutes to complete a couple hundred gig, and even more so if you're transferring tons of small files.
I could easily see it taking over an hour for a 200+gb install. Even going at the theoretical max, you're looking at 20min just in data. Tacking on added latency from opening and closing many small files and any kind of fragmentation/disk location, that's going to add significant time to the transfer.
Depends on the game. I’ve definitely seen requirements list an SSD specifically and the game was designed around that assumption.
I tend to agree for most things, but modern Blizzard titles are near unplayable without SSD because of they way that they load assets. You'd be technically in the game, but half of the models take 5 minutes to load in.
The are other games that load in things like this, but I can't think of them off the top of my head.
Honestly......spinning disks are good for anything. Yeah I don't have any in my gaming rig but my NAS is only spinners. Cheap and fast enough.
It all comes down to how much money you have. If you can only afford spinning disks, then get them - and enjoy your gaming. If you can afford faster drives then great, good for you!
I used to think this too until I got a proper NVME (instead of another SATA SSD). Once you get used to programs opening instantly—and no loading screens in games, ever—there's no going back to spinning disks. Waiting 10-20 seconds for a program to open on a HDD feels like an eternity now.
Edit: formatting, spelling
Yeah but you must recognise that's a luxury. There's no going back because your circumstances allow it. If someone needs more storage but they can't afford an SSD then there is going back - and I for one would choose loading screens over no screens.
There's way too much snobbery around PCs imo. I want to encourage the world to be more compromising so that there is no societal pressure to buy this year's gfx card for £1700 and this year's CPU for £700 and this year's newest nvme for £300 etc...etc...buy what you can and want to afford.
You make good points and I have nothing further to add.
Have you seen the prices for 8 TB ssds?