Really dumb question but not really sure. If a game is installed on a HDD would the game perform slower compared to on a SSD?

[cwgzz81]

I know that a HDD is much slower than a SSD. Loading a game may take longer since it's slower... but I am wondering about the performance of the game. I want to download Forza Horizon 5 but I want it to be on the 2TB HDD that I have, but I genuinely don't know if that will affect performance or not since it is slower than a SSD... this may be an utterly dumb question but I really don't know. Thank you. 

[Moonzy]

other than pop-ins (which may cause stutters), i cant see why it would affect performance otherwise

 

but the largest factor is loading time, most probably

[Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh]

I have games stored on a wd blue 1tb ssd and a 4tb wd blue HDD and other then in slightly slower loading times, in open world and stuff there is no noticeable difference

[LAwLz]

I don't think it's a dumb question. But it might be a bit hard to answer since it depends on the game.

In general though, it will not affect anything other than the load times. You will not get lower FPS in games just because they are on a HDD, if that's what you are asking.

 

There are some games, RAGE being the classic example, that will "stream" textures from the storage rather than pre-fetch them during load screens.

In those cases you might also get "pop-ins", as in, when you turn around and look at let's say a rock, it might be completely blank for a split send, before the texture gets fully loaded and applied. It might be annoying, but it should not affect performance. I also don't know how many games actually stream textures that way these days.

I think most games still load all the textures during the load screen and in those games it is not an issue.

[mariushm]

Some games load stuff as needed, while you move around in the game (for example GTA V). Such games try to predict or have "checkpoints" spread over the maps where the game receives instructions like "a few seconds from now, I'm gonna need that picture to be shown or that sound to play" and the game engine queues the file to be read from disk.

 

If your hard drive is too fragmented, or there's other applications reading from the hard drive, then  the game may expect the hard drive to give it the file in a very short time but the drive is too slow at reading it, in which case you may experience texture pop ins, or sound not playing when it should play. 

A SSD is much snappier, and you'll experience much less of this. 

 

A lot of games will have one big load or load stuff at various places (for example half-life games, counterstrike, etc ) and for such games it's just longer time to read the files from storage, once the stuff is loaded the game no longer accesses the storage.

 

[manikyath]

ofcourse it always depends on the game.

 

generally, a well made game should be fine aside from load times (and in extreme cases texture popping), but if the game relies on disk IO for large segments of game logic or requires assets to be streamed in for certain render tasks... having a slow disk can have a significant impact.

 

a real-world example would be for example the background for the inventory screen being streamed from disk each time you open inventory. maybe this would only be a second or so difference at most, but still that is a HUGE downer on gameplay if your inventory screen takes a second longer to load than someone else's.

 

now... even the most disk IO heavy games i've tested so far have been very minimal past just the load times, and even then SSD versus an old  platter of spinning rust may only be about a 30% difference or so.

[Moonzy]

here's my personal experience:

Genshin Impact: during Co-op. people can swap characters, and HDD users will often experience stutter (for about half a second, very noticeable) while the game fetch the new character's files, while SSD users would barely notice anything (sometimes there's still mild stutters)
 

Monster Hunter World: 
- When loading quest, U can tell if there's a HDD user among the party because the load times will be atrocious

- When quest/session host's party member faints, and the host is using HDD, sometimes there would be a stutter, causing mass session disconnections and member to dropout of quests

[Mark Kaine]

depends on the game, on average  a ssd will perform slightly better, not just load times. 

 

2 hours ago, manikyath said:

a well made game should be fine aside from load times

yup, i feel its exactly this thats the problem...

[Beerzerker]

5 minutes ago, Mark Kaine said:

depends on the game, on average  a ssd will perform slightly better, not just load times. 

I agree - The biggest difference would be load times here, other random things like pop-ins will be affected too but you'd probrably not notice it much.
There is actually a benefit to having a HDD, it's not prone to sudden failure without warning like an SSD is. It's possible to know the drive is dying and be able to clone the drive before actual drive-death occurs.
With an SSD once it's gone, that's it with 0 chance to recover anything.

If nothing else, clone the drive before you need to and occasionally make a backup so you don't loose too much if it does say "Bye-Bye".

[manikyath]

2 minutes ago, Beerzerker said:

There is actually a benefit to having a HDD, it's not prone to sudden failure without warning like an SSD is. It's possible to know the drive is dying and be able to clone the drive before actual drive-death occurs.
With an SSD once it's gone, that's it with 0 chance to recover anything.

If nothing else, clone the drive before you need to and occasionally make a backup so you don't loose too much if it does say "Bye-Bye".

yes and no, though...

 

an SSD rarely dies "out of the blue" either. it dies from writing, and a lot of it. a HDD wears out from being used, wether that's reads or writes. so it can be argued that the primarily 'read-only' nature of a game's files are better off on an SSD. all of the "random instant death" options an SSD has, are pretty much also things a HDD can "random instant death" from too.

 

Also, news flash from reality: i've only ever seen two failed SSD's, one instance was actually even recoverable (it just randomly spit out broken data, which made windows unhappy.) as opposed to the douzens and douzens of cases where people bring in suffering HDD's, often that bad that even just recovering some photos off the disk is uncertain without going trough expensive data recovery specialists that basicly transplant the platters into a working disk. the problem with a HDD is that while yes death is usually a slow process for them, more often than not users will wait until it's too late to take action.

 

TL:DR is that you need to take care of your system either way, and checking up on health is a necessity for all components that wear out from use (even fans, for that matter...)

 

either way.. all of this is besides the topic of the thread.

[Mark Kaine]

7 minutes ago, manikyath said:

an SSD rarely dies "out of the blue" either.

also true probably.  i have Kingston a400 thats "dying" since years now...

 

20mb/s write read speeds by now... but it still works! you just know its not reliable anymore,  or usable really lol. 

[Killam0n]

Ideally you want to load games off of an SSD. If the game needs to load random small files its always going to perform much better from an SSD than a traditional spin drive.

 

Operations per second mechanical doesn't come anywhere near solid state.

 

Playing Fallout 4 PC on Spin drive is "fine" but the constant load wait times killed all enjoyment for me playing it. Playing halo infinite on my xbox one is not advisable from non SSD drives like the internal drive.

 

External SSD on an XboxOne will load much faster than the internal drive ever thought of. I use a samsung 2tb drive to sata-usb3.0 adapter.

[Beerzerker]

On 5/18/2022 at 5:19 AM, manikyath said:

yes and no, though...

 

an SSD rarely dies "out of the blue" either. it dies from writing, and a lot of it. a HDD wears out from being used, wether that's reads or writes. so it can be argued that the primarily 'read-only' nature of a game's files are better off on an SSD. all of the "random instant death" options an SSD has, are pretty much also things a HDD can "random instant death" from too.

 

Also, news flash from reality: i've only ever seen two failed SSD's, one instance was actually even recoverable (it just randomly spit out broken data, which made windows unhappy.) as opposed to the douzens and douzens of cases where people bring in suffering HDD's, often that bad that even just recovering some photos off the disk is uncertain without going trough expensive data recovery specialists that basicly transplant the platters into a working disk. the problem with a HDD is that while yes death is usually a slow process for them, more often than not users will wait until it's too late to take action.

 

TL:DR is that you need to take care of your system either way, and checking up on health is a necessity for all components that wear out from use (even fans, for that matter...)

 

either way.. all of this is besides the topic of the thread.

Must disagree with some of this and some of what I was saying was (Maybe) misunderstood too it seems.

It already understood an SSD dies from use.... Alot of it in most cases.

The thing about sudden death stems from one time it's working fine, the next time you start the machine, it's just gone, no symptoms of pending drive failure and that has been proven to be all too true, all too many times before.

And I actually have, not just seen at least 6 failed SSD's, three of these failing within 4 months of being purchased brandnew.
Out of all the failed SSD drives I had, the only one that gave ANY indication of pending failure was an old OCZ drive and I mean it was an OLD one.

An HDD most of the time will give you some warning before it checks out for good so there is a chance of saving things before it goes critical - Can't really say it's the same for an SSD that way.

And I don't believe it's as far off topic as you'd think, the OCZ drive I had that died did suddely experience slow(er) performance not long before it went. There is a bit of argurement to be made about relevance to topic vs performance here with that.

And I do remain behind what I said - Regardless of reasons for failure, long life or whatever else it's just smart to backup your data/drives and have it archived somewhere safe.