Like obviously not for newer cutting edge games but for newer indie games and older AAA games?
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The short answer is yes. A high rpm HDD like a Western Digital Black or a Seagate Barracuda will game just fine. Obviously your performance will vary depending on the game but it’s never going to be unplayable. Faster load times are nice but I have never seen a load screen take longer than a 30 ish seconds at most, even on newer titles.
You can move things to and from different drives in the steam settings pretty easily, so in the past I used to archive larger games I was not playing to a large HDD on my system to avoid having to download it all again.
When I wanted to play again I moved it back to my SSD.
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on Linux you can get away with it if you have enough ram.
I have literally only ever seen 2 games that required an SSD in their minimum requirement specs: Starfield and the Oblivion Remaster.
So you’re probably good if you don’t plan on playing any newer Bethesda games 🤷🏻♂️
Although not required, most games benefit massively from being played off a SSD .
World of tanks for example, an SSD is the difference between loading in during the count down. Or showing up in game after the match has already started…
Rust
SSD is crazy cheap these days. I will never go back. 5 second loading times plus all the other tasks are easily 10x faster.
depends entirely on the game, how it loads stuff and how big the stuff is.
100 GB openworld game? HDD probably is going to struggle with the asset loading, probably leading to stuttery gameplay or very noticeable pop-in
<10GB game with closed arenas/levels? Probably loads everything at the start of the level, might take slightly longer on HDD, but probably doesn’t make any difference after that.
I was playing Layers of Fear but noticed very occasional stutters when entering new areas, especially when certain visual effects appear on screen. I’m thinking it’s probably just a bad port. Otherwise, very playable. If you’re not familiar it’s a Unity game from 2016. In general I’ve had good luck running indie games on a HDD.
I’ve heard the game’s name, but otherwise not familiar with it at all. The stutter could be some kind of dynamic shader compilation too, who knows.
Some indie games and AAA games from 10 years ago should be fine.
That being said, SSD costs are low enough these days that you should be able to play off an SSD.
Yeah I know, thing is I have a lonely, sad 1TB HDD from 2008 that somehow still works and I thought it would be a shame to not game with it. I want it to spend its final years gaming with me. I know, I’m weird. Once it dies, I’l probably get a SATA SSD. I have an M.2 SSD but it’s almost full.
I’d use it for data storage. Movies, games, backups.
I don’t want to store things I care about on a drive that old in case it dies. Steam games are a different story. I can just redownload them. I have plenty of storage dedicated to media as it is anyway.
Agree with this. SSDs are cheap enough these days that there’s no point living with the disadvantages of a hard disk any more apart from in cases where you won’t notice the difference at all (i.e long term storage with not many reads and writes)
I don’t like putting games on my ssds, just a waste of space to me
I still run a lot of my games off of spinning rust. Boot times are a little bit longer, but at least i can store a ton of games.
HDDs don’t usually affect the performance of a game or how it operates so they’re fine even for newer games, the only thing it’ll change is that you’ll have significantly slower loading times
That’s not always the case. Some games stream in assets as you play so you might get bad pop-in or freezes. Forza Horizon 5 was nearly unplayable on an HDD for me, because the map couldn’t load in fast enough while driving quickly. No issues after reinstalling it on an SSD.
I heard Subnautica runs like ass on a HDD. I haven’t tested it myself though.
I’m playing Subnautica on a HDD and have no issues whatsoever.
When I played Subnautica on a HDD during Early Access the pop-in was unbearably bad, but optimizations during development fixed the worst of it. The removal of digging and terrain modification alone basically solved pop-in for most areas - the mushroom forest was still pretty bad, but they also patched that later in development.
Initial load-in will likely take a while though. It took a few minutes to get into the game from the main menu the last time I had it installed to a HDD.
Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn’t move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.
It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.
Lots of people did (and still do) play Forza on an Xbox one which uses an HDD, and back when I did as well the game ran just fine
No.
Yup, I have a 500gb HDD for Steam Games, loading screens are a few seconds longer than you would expect but that just makes time for a beer break.
On Linux, I find that games run great from a mechanical drive. Loading times are slower than with an SSD, of course, but not enough to bother me.
Sounds good to me. Not that it matters but which distro do you use?
I use Debian.
I would at least take SATA SSD nowadays as it’s pretty cheap but honestly I can’t see myself go back to SATA after having enjoyed M.2 SSDs for years now.
If you want 8TB of storage I can see why HDD would be great but for 2TB or less SSD are accessible if not cheap.
