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.
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Congrats, you have just invented caching, but worse
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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
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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:
- assuming 150MB/s HDD read speed (fairly fast for a hdd) it would take 11 minutes to move a single 100GB file. This speed would be vastly lowered if copying many small files
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
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)
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.
