Dedicated HDD for gaming is a bad idea?

[RicHaj]

Hi there!

 

I had a 2TB mechanical HDD on my PC dedicated to nothing but steam games. It was my steam install disk and where i had all games and files from steam on. Recently that drive started to make audible noises and i had disk write failures onto it. This is just about after 3 years of usage.

 

So, now im replacing the drive and trying to salvage over 1TB of files so i don't have to re-download everything again. And a question came to me...

 

Is it a bad idea to have a dedicated drive just for Steam games like this? I ask cause i would imagine the download and update of games, plus playing them, would make the drive work quite a lot... and i started questioning if this is what caused the drive to fail, or if a 3 year old mechanical drive with regular use failing is nothing outside of normal...

[gtx1060=value]

pros: if you aren't concerned about redownload, if the disk cant be saved, only steam files that are on a cloud will be lost. If the files are mixed, the steam games downloading, running all the time could damage the disk and lose files other than steam files. more important ones

[Bcat00]

I dont see why its a bad idea. Would you rather have your main system drive die on you instead?

[Godlygamer23]

No. The drive is doing what it's supposed to do, and eventually things fail. It's just the way it works. That being said, this is also a good reason to keep backups of all of your data on a separate drive.

[Divide_By_0]

It really depends on WHO made the 2TB HDD. A WD/Seagate can last much longer than 3 years, where as some off brands may be otherwise

[RicHaj]

18 minutes ago, Divide_By_0 said:

It really depends on WHO made the 2TB HDD. A WD/Seagate can last much longer than 3 years, where as some off brands may be otherwise

In this particular case is a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 7200rpm  which i'll be replacing with another one of the same model. 

 

I have all these games installed at all times cause i work with them, so sometimes it's easier to just keep a game installed in the Drive instead of having to download it when i need some footage or something else from it. The drive has nothing else on it beside steam games, but there is often 300+ games installed on it at all times, so the consequence of that is that there is often a couple of games that update every day... and usually there is just about a 100Gb ''allowance'' of free space that i keep in the drive. 

 

I didn't find a HDD failure after 3 years of use anything too absurd, but i wanted to make sure... and of course, see if there is anything else i could be doing to assure the longevity of the drive. 

 

[Divide_By_0]

4 minutes ago, RicHaj said:

In this particular case is a Seagate Barracuda ST2000DM001 7200rpm  which i'll be replacing with another one of the same model. 

 

I have all these games installed at all times cause i work with them, so sometimes it's easier to just keep a game installed in the Drive instead of having to download it when i need some footage or something else from it. The drive has nothing else on it beside steam games, but there is often 300+ games installed on it at all times, so the consequence of that is that there is often a couple of games that update every day... and usually there is just about a 100Gb ''allowance'' of free space that i keep in the drive. 

 

I didn't find a HDD failure after 3 years of use anything too absurd, but i wanted to make sure... and of course, see if there is anything else i could be doing to assure the longevity of the drive. 

 

Defrag often. Keep it cool, thats about all.