Iโma say it: Spinning disks are still a good choice for gaming. I wouldnโt 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, Iโd 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
I tend to agree for most things, but modern Blizzard titles are near unplayable without SSD because of they way that they load assets. Youโd 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 canโt think of them off the top of my head.
Honestlyโฆspinning disks are good for anything. Yeah I donโt 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 instantlyโand no loading screens in games, everโthereโs 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 thatโs a luxury. Thereโs no going back because your circumstances allow it. If someone needs more storage but they canโt afford an SSD then there is going back - and I for one would choose loading screens over no screens.
Thereโs 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 yearโs gfx card for ยฃ1700 and this yearโs CPU for ยฃ700 and this yearโs newest nvme for ยฃ300 etcโฆetcโฆbuy what you can and want to afford.
Theres only one type of mod that racked up 100gb of Skyrim mods. And itโs not because of looting mods!
What happens between a dude, a super mutant, and a fisting sexbot is their business.
100GB for a game? Rookie numbers by todayโs standards. Removing that still wouldnโt be enough for modern โAAAโ games
::laughs in Ark: Survival Evolved::
*Laughs in Spider-Man 2 Brazil* (the unofficial PC port)
Itโs a 256GB download, and when thereโs an update, you have to re-download the entire game again. I hope you have gigabit internet.
Spider-Man 2 got a PC version, but it was a completely different game from the more well-known console versions and wasnโt nearly as good. A linear progression of levels instead of an open world and you could only swing from โwebbing points.โ
I unironically want Todd Howard to release Skyrim again with full pathtracing support
