I think this will be my first (real) post on the forum, but I couldn't think of a community that would have a better answer for this. Please don't tease me
Most threads I've seen on this subject are approaching this question from a "what should I buy" point of view, which has the obvious answer of a 7200 RPM drive with a large cache, but since I'm already in the situation of having a massive, slow hard drive, I'd like to approach it from the other angle. Worst case scenario, I'll move the 5400 drive to a NAS/HTPC project and buy a new 7200 drive.
The question I want to answer is:
What games won't be affected much by a 5400 RPM drive and the consequently slow loading times?
Which I think translates into the question of: which games do dynamic loading of textures or other assets from disk? Or, which games rely on data streaming in from the hard drive to maintain FPS. I couldn't find a good answer anywhere for a large number of games. Even most games on "can I run it" only lists the amount of storage required, not the speed of the storage.
If this thread gets enough responses, I'd be willing and able to compile and maintain a list for the benefit of us shmucks who bought a 5400 RPM drive or can't afford something better.
If you want my personal story, I bought the biggest and cheapest 4TB drive on memory express during a sale they had in 2017. I made sure it was SATA III and had enough cache for my needs and all that, but then didn't notice that it was only a 5400 RPM drive. I guess I figured those had stopped existing. Now I'm getting the red bar on my 1TB 7200RPM drive so I'd like to distribute my games according to the reliance on the hard drive. I've already split my games with ultra-long load times onto my SSD (Total War, GTAV, Fallout 4), but I was wondering what could go in the other direction. As many of you probably know, coming back to an old game and finding out you've lost your 100+ hour save file because you decided to save some space for a 12 hour fling with the latest 80 GB download kinda sucks.
Here's a link to the list of games I currently have stored on my 1TB 7200 RPM drive for those of you who are curious.