Should SSD or HDD be preferred for scenario-based games?

[Orodruin]

Hello everyone.

I need your opinion on something. I use 4 XPG SX8100 (2tb version) nvme ssd in my system. And my games are installed on these disks. Apart from that, I also have 2 Seagate (ST5000LM000) 5TB 2.5" HDD disks for general storage.

Generally, everyone recommends SSD for games, but I mostly play games that involve scenarios and take up a lot of space. (RDR2, Forza Horizon 5, Tomb Raider series, battlefield, etc.) I never play online games.

Do you think I will lose performance if I install games on HDD instead of several separate SSDs? Or will it affect the general game performance?

[Alex Atkin UK]

3 minutes ago, Orodruin said:

Hello everyone.

I need your opinion on something. I use 4 XPG SX8100 (2tb version) nvme ssd in my system. And my games are installed on these disks. Apart from that, I also have 2 Seagate (ST5000LM000) 5TB 2.5" HDD disks for general storage.

Generally, everyone recommends SSD for games, but I mostly play games that involve scenarios and take up a lot of space. (RDR2, Forza Horizon 5, Tomb Raider series, battlefield, etc.) I never play online games.

Do you think I will lose performance if I install games on HDD instead of several separate SSDs? Or will it affect the general game performance?

You might see more asset/texture pop-in or have more hitches as it loads new areas into RAM.  You really just have to just try it and see.

 

Fast travel will likely be a fair bit slower too.

[Doobeedoo]

It would be opposite actually for most online games being lighter and won't really affect performance. But for single player games they are heavier so you can see perfoemance issues.

[porina]

If you have the choice of SSD and HD for gaming I can't see where I would ever pick HD. It will negatively impact load times. How severely depends on the game.

[PDifolco]

37 minutes ago, Orodruin said:

Hello everyone.

I need your opinion on something. I use 4 XPG SX8100 (2tb version) nvme ssd in my system. And my games are installed on these disks. Apart from that, I also have 2 Seagate (ST5000LM000) 5TB 2.5" HDD disks for general storage.

Generally, everyone recommends SSD for games, but I mostly play games that involve scenarios and take up a lot of space. (RDR2, Forza Horizon 5, Tomb Raider series, battlefield, etc.) I never play online games.

Do you think I will lose performance if I install games on HDD instead of several separate SSDs? Or will it affect the general game performance?

Games with tons of assets already have longer load times, putting them on a HDD is a very bad idea

My fave game is TW Warhammer (3 now), it's like 120GB heavy, it takes 3 minutes to load a campaign on a HDD to 45sec or so on a SSD !!

 

 

 

[Murasaki]

13 minutes ago, Doobeedoo said:

It would be opposite actually for most online games being lighter and won't really affect performance. But for single player games they are heavier so you can see perfoemance issues.

A game being mostly online does not make it "lighter". If it has a terrible filesystem like 80000 small little files it wants to load whenever it wants, performance will be a cheesegrater on an HDD. But as always, varies per game.

[OhioYJ]

Obviously SSD would be preferred, but not feasible in some situations. My entire Steam library sits on on HDD, no issues.  Currently running a 24 TB WD Gold drive.  

[porina]

1 hour ago, OhioYJ said:

My entire Steam library sits on on HDD, no issues.

I used to do that until I realised there was no point. Not every game needs to be installed all the time. I haven't ever started 75% of my Steam library. Only active games get installed and kept up to date.

[lafrente]

If the game isn't loading resources from the disk dynamically, then it can be on the HDD. Unless you care about faster loading times.

[Doobeedoo]

4 hours ago, Murasaki said:

A game being mostly online does not make it "lighter". If it has a terrible filesystem like 80000 small little files it wants to load whenever it wants, performance will be a cheesegrater on an HDD. But as always, varies per game.

But it does in many games, MMORPGS would be an outlier that benefits more from SSDs. But most online games load maps and that's it, no streaming data.

The SP games do have larger textures and depending on game enough asseta along that to have to load way more.

[Orodruin]

8 hours ago, Alex Atkin UK said:

You might see more asset/texture pop-in or have more hitches as it loads new areas into RAM.  You really just have to just try it and see.

 

Fast travel will likely be a fair bit slower too.

There were no problems when using a 3.5 inch HDD before, but everyone states that SSDs are better.  I was wondering if it makes any difference other than loading times.

[Orodruin]

7 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

It would be opposite actually for most online games being lighter and won't really affect performance. But for single player games they are heavier so you can see perfoemance issues.

I never thought there would be a problem in single player games.  But why should these games have any impact other than loading times?  Would it be that bad?

[Orodruin]

7 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

It would be opposite actually for most online games being lighter and won't really affect performance. But for single player games they are heavier so you can see perfoemance issues.

I understand  Then it's best to continue with SSD.  Continuing to use HDD as general storage.

[Godlygamer23]

31 minutes ago, Orodruin said:

I never thought there would be a problem in single player games.  But why should these games have any impact other than loading times?  Would it be that bad?

Some games dynamically load in assets in the background, and you might be loading several at a time, and they might be small files. That's where hard drives fall flat on their face, and SSDs shine, because of the latency differences between the two. In that state, it's a similar environment to an operating system in terms of file sizes where many files can be quite small.

 

I'm speaking generically of course between hard drives and SSDs, but generally an SSD is going to be far faster than a hard drive in latency driven scenarios.

[Doobeedoo]

2 hours ago, Orodruin said:

I never thought there would be a problem in single player games.  But why should these games have any impact other than loading times?  Would it be that bad?

Well it depends from game to game. Some may be more open world and when you enter the game to play, it's not that whole game loads and that's it. Data streams on demand where you move in the game, so assets load in and out. It doesn't necessarily mean game can be unplayable, though number of games in system requirements require SSD as baseline. Makes sense, they existed for a long time and are cheap too. Some games don't play nicely on HDD though.

1 hour ago, Orodruin said:

I understand  Then it's best to continue with SSD.  Continuing to use HDD as general storage.

I mean I've been using SSD only for a while now. I'd use HDD just as an side archival storage for stuff to keep that don't require fast access so like documents, songs, images, videos and so. You can experiment maybe transfer some gams between the two to see how it is, as some can be fine.

[Orodruin]

12 hours ago, PDifolco said:

Games with tons of assets already have longer load times, putting them on a HDD is a very bad idea

My fave game is TW Warhammer (3 now), it's like 120GB heavy, it takes 3 minutes to load a campaign on a HDD to 45sec or so on a SSD !!

 

 

 

Then there will be a serious slowdown in games like RDR2.  Frankly, I don't want to bother testing it, but I looked at YouTube videos on the internet.  HDD seems to have really long loading times.

[Orodruin]

12 hours ago, Murasaki said:

A game being mostly online does not make it "lighter". If it has a terrible filesystem like 80000 small little files it wants to load whenever it wants, performance will be a cheesegrater on an HDD. But as always, varies per game.

I think HDDs will no longer be useful for anything other than data backup and NAS work.  SSDs are very fast, but once they fail, all the data in them is lost.  Can't be saved.  If it is an HDD, the data inside can be recovered by replacing the head.  I guess this is the only advantage of HDD now.  Even though Sddler is fast, I don't trust it very much.  Once, after a power outage, my SSD broke and everything inside was gone.

[Orodruin]

10 hours ago, OhioYJ said:

Obviously SSD would be preferred, but not feasible in some situations. My entire Steam library sits on on HDD, no issues.  Currently running a 24 TB WD Gold drive.  

24 tbs.  Huge capacity.  So, is there any performance loss in games?  I guess loading times are taking a long time.

[Orodruin]

9 hours ago, lafrente said:

If the game isn't loading resources from the disk dynamically, then it can be on the HDD. Unless you care about faster loading times.

How do we know if the game loads dynamically?  So, in which game types would HDD make more sense?

[Orodruin]

4 hours ago, Godlygamer23 said:

Some games dynamically load in assets in the background, and you might be loading several at a time, and they might be small files. That's where hard drives fall flat on their face, and SSDs shine, because of the latency differences between the two. In that state, it's a similar environment to an operating system in terms of file sizes where many files can be quite small.

 

I'm speaking generically of course between hard drives and SSDs, but generally an SSD is going to be far faster than a hard drive in latency driven scenarios.

I understand now.  Thank you very much for this beautiful explanation.  I will continue with ssd.  I like to keep some games on my discs permanently.  I hope high capacity SSDs become affordable.  It can be purchased like HDD.

[Orodruin]

2 hours ago, Doobeedoo said:

Well it depends from game to game. Some may be more open world and when you enter the game to play, it's not that whole game loads and that's it. Data streams on demand where you move in the game, so assets load in and out. It doesn't necessarily mean game can be unplayable, though number of games in system requirements require SSD as baseline. Makes sense, they existed for a long time and are cheap too. Some games don't play nicely on HDD though.

I mean I've been using SSD only for a while now. I'd use HDD just as an side archival storage for stuff to keep that don't require fast access so like documents, songs, images, videos and so. You can experiment maybe transfer some gams between the two to see how it is, as some can be fine.

Thank you very much for the information.  SSD prices are still high.  Especially 4tb and 8tb ssd prices.  I hope it becomes more affordable like HDD.

[Doobeedoo]

2 minutes ago, Orodruin said:

Thank you very much for the information.  SSD prices are still high.  Especially 4tb and 8tb ssd prices.  I hope it becomes more affordable like HDD.

Well yeah large multi TB capacity ones are for sure. Though a far cry from many years back when per GB they costed 10x more then today.

[OhioYJ]

1 hour ago, Orodruin said:

24 tbs.  Huge capacity.  So, is there any performance loss in games?  I guess loading times are taking a long time.

They run fine in my opinion.  Sure they might load quicker on an SSD but I don't feel like any of my load times are excessive. If it was bad I'd probably buy another drive and move games between the HDD and an SSD, but honestly I don't see a need to.