Harddrive or SSD for gaming

[Perrin]

I built my PC and only included a 500gb ssd which I'm using for windows and my games but I need more storage. Will a HDD work for gaming or do I need to go SSD? And any recommendations on a specific device to get?

[steelo]

5 minutes ago, Perrin said:

I built my PC and only included a 500gb ssd which I'm using for windows and my games but I need more storage. Will a HDD work for gaming or do I need to go SSD? And any recommendations on a specific device to get?

I have both and use a ssd as a boot drive and to store the games I play most often. hdd will work fine for gaming but loads much much slower. I'd highly recommend another ssd if you can afford it.

[Alex Atkin UK]

18 minutes ago, steelo said:

I have both and use a ssd as a boot drive and to store the games I play most often. hdd will work fine for gaming but loads much much slower. I'd highly recommend another ssd if you can afford it.

Going forward, games are going to need an SSD more and more, but for older games there is generally little to no benefit.

Strangely I found on some games the gap in load times between an SSD and HDD narrowed as I upgraded my CPU.

I tend to play a lot of open world games though, those typically run much better off an SSD.

[Kisai]

25 minutes ago, Perrin said:

I built my PC and only included a 500gb ssd which I'm using for windows and my games but I need more storage. Will a HDD work for gaming or do I need to go SSD? And any recommendations on a specific device to get?

If you're primarily using steam, you can move the Steam Library to another drive, and you can move specific games to specific drives. So whatever you play is on the mechanical drive unless it's big and load-heavy, then you move it to the SSD.

 

I would however suggest, that the "500GB" SSD is too small for a gaming machine, and while I don't advocate for being cheap, you're better off buying a series of 2TB external drives, and move games off your boot drive when you no longer play them, than buying large internal 7200rpm drives. 

 

As the drives in my system go back to at least 2010, I only bought 7200RPM drives until SSD's became cheap enough and I felt like reinstalling the OS. I'd reinstall the OS again only to a new larger and faster SSD. It's otherwise not worth the effort.

 

Max out the RAM in the system and the loading time won't be an issue as the disk cache will take care of it.

 

[Alex Atkin UK]

10 minutes ago, Kisai said:

Max out the RAM in the system and the loading time won't be an issue as the disk cache will take care of it.

That's not really how it works.  More RAM only speeds up load times for areas you've already visited in a game, you will still be limited by how quickly it can be loaded INTO RAM.

 

The getting external HDDs is not a terrible idea though, as they tend to be sold a lot cheaper than internal drives.  Although one catch there is some are archive drives and they don't actually tell you, so you wouldn't want to run a game directly off one of those.

[SkilledRebuilds]

Disk Cache doesn't solve slowdowns in Writing..

 

Larger Developed Games and especially (updating game files and laincher compression decompression) My SSHD destroys my HDD, and my SSD destroys the SSHD.

 

Best Example..

World of Tanks doing a 500Mb Update across USA and ASIA lainchers, both the same, on different locations..

Downloads at same speed...

 

Applying the update and thats the difference..

Tiny Files...lots of them...

Ssd vs HDD 20seconds vs 6 minutes.

Diskcache didnt do dick...

 

It also USED to be a Thing that loading over USB (Externals) would be slower due to how USB mechanisms handle queue depths and are not as fast at pumping instructions out.

[dizmo]

I'd go with an SSD simply for the speed. Some games do require an SSD to run, but they're few and far between.

[Kisai]

1 hour ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

That's not really how it works.  More RAM only speeds up load times for areas you've already visited in a game, you will still be limited by how quickly it can be loaded INTO RAM.

Not what I was getting at. If you have 32GB of RAM, and that level in your game is progressively a 2GB load, the game will have no problem loading that level over and over again, which is primarily what happens in single player games. You can expense time loading the next level, but reloading the same level over and over with the initial load time will be a pain.

 

As an example. GTAV. Worked fine. At 4K. The initial load time took more time than I wanted it to, but was honestly no worse than some 200MB games on the same drive.

 

Now if it comes down to doubling the SSD size or the system RAM, the SSD would make more sense as long as you are playing from that drive. Otherwise you can just straight up buy another SSD and install games to that one instead. Nothing requires you to install everything to C, but keep in mind that if you install things spanning drives, when you reset the OS, the behavior is underfined. This is why usually the OS and applications are installed to C, and the steam library should be on a different drive for all but the game you are spending time on.