Like obviously not for newer cutting edge games but for newer indie games and older AAA games?
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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.
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…
Rust
BG3 requires an SSD
I mean it’ll work but you’ll have significantly longer loading times.
On Linux, I find that games run great from a mechanical drive. Loading times are slower than with an SSD, of course, but not enough to bother me.
Sounds good to me. Not that it matters but which distro do you use?
I use Debian.
Nice, I like Debian a lot actually. It’s my second favorite distro after Arch. Debian is the only other distro I’d consider switching to.
I use HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn’t failed me yet.
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.
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 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.
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 don’t have a bandwidth cap but my download speed is 40 Mbps max, soooo copying back and forth between HDD and SSD is way faster for me lol.
Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.
Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.
I hear you. Games preservation is a travesty of greed. I have a folder full of installers for old abandonware in case the publishers decide to revive a franchise and DMCA the sites hosting them.
Though Steam must have a rider in their publishing contract to never be forced to revoke licenses or something, because delisted purchased games remain downloadable even when the game has been completely wiped from existence. They’re the one store I trust to not completely screw me over - even GOG has had to remove downloads before.
(On the other hand the way they allow developers to remove demos when the full game comes out is absolutely rage-inducing, but that’s a rant for another time…)
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.
Yes, especially with a big wad of RAM. Exceptions exist, however.
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.
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.
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 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!
