Like obviously not for newer cutting edge games but for newer indie games and older AAA games?
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I mean it’ll work but you’ll have significantly longer loading times.
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.
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 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
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 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 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.
SSD is crazy cheap these days. I will never go back. 5 second loading times plus all the other tasks are easily 10x faster.
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.
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.
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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.
Yes, especially with a big wad of RAM. Exceptions exist, however.
I use HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn’t failed me yet.
