Playing Modern Games on a Hard Drive (HDD) in 2024…

[@nathanddrews]

Fun anecdote, back in like 1999 when playing Unreal Tournament I discovered that I could *halve* my map loading times and increase my frame rate by moving certain game assets from one drive to another, then modifying the INI files to point to the correct paths. It actually worked with almost all Unreal Engine games for about 10 years. Once SSDs went mainstream, I stopped doing it.

[@tz8785]

Sounds like a manual RAID 0 with striping at file level.

[@blunderingfool]

Okay that's seriously interesting, don't suppose you could give a mini-tut on that? I really want to know how that works. =D

[@nathanddrews]

@@tz8785 Pretty much! My PC at the time had a couple hard drives. I already knew that storing files, applications, and Windows on separate drives increased overall snappiness and performance, so when I was poking around in the UT99 INI files to customize graphics settings, I noticed that game assets were stored in their own directories (textures, sounds, etc.) and referenced as root in the INI. It is honestly as simple as copying the directory you want (ex: Texture) to another drive, then changing the path in the INI from root to whatever drive you placed it in.

[@joyphobic]

doubling the loading time doesn't sound good 😅

[@DaveOJ]

They definitely meant halving. ​@@joyphobic

[@cstubed]

RandomGaminginHDD 😄

[@NkosanaMakhubele]

😂😂

[@shaneeslick]

😂😂😂😂😂Nice

[@DanteToska]

😂😂 dude 😂😂😂 nice😂😂😂😂

[@IlMemetor72]

Lmfao perfect 😂😂

[@talysdarkthoughts552]

DIARRHEA GAMING

[@nexalight599]

For starfield there's a mod that pretty much fixes the HDD issues called "disk cache enabler"

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Ah will have to try that!

[@MrWayne6363]

Starfield is another story entirely. But, like Cyberpunk, I think it will improve with age.

[@hbibbekir]

@@MrWayne6363 with community made mods not bethesda fixing it cuz they never do unlike cdpr

[@Intelwinsbigly]

I can play cyberpunk at Max settings on a wd caviar from 2009. People who say hdds are dead or irrelevant are either impatient, PeTuLaNt, or don't have enough ram.

[@youtubeisgarbage900]

​@@hbibbekircyberpunk still sucks quit defending it

[@DaiAtlus79]

now for Baldur's Gate 3, there IS a section in the settings called 'Old HDD Mode' for if you use a spinning disc drive!!

[@Mitsuoxx]

Yes and it works perfect! Awesome game

[@DaiAtlus79]

@@Mitsuoxx that game is more optimized than people realize. its playing on the wifes rig - i7 2600 S, 16gb DDR3, and a 640sp RX550 4gb with a 4tb WD Blue HDD and its nice, mind you for speed it's running in 1366x768 but it flies at that speed!!!

[@yewtewbstew547]

@@DaiAtlus79 I don't know how much it has improved with updates, but on launch day it was very well optimized in act 1, floundered a bit on the CPU side in parts of act 2, and then CPU performance dropped off a cliff in act 3. CPUs that were managing a consistent 100+ FPS in act 1 were being dropped into the 30's in act 3. It was never too bad on the GPU side afaik.

[@DarkBowser64]

Indeed, this helps so much. It offloads your reliance on your storage media by storing frequently used data in RAM or VRAM that is not being used and making sure only to dismiss from RAM or VRAM that which is not often being used anymore if you should happen to change areas or something like that, so anything new that DOES have to load from discs is mostly just smaller files that don't take as long.

[@09Cat800]

Came to say this exact thing

[@gnulectures]

Bit of a random comment, but I've watched this channel for quite a few years and I really like your simple style of editing, no loud background music, flashy text etc. Also idk any other tech KZbinr who films out in their garden. Definitely adds a homely vibe to the content 👌

[@DirransRL]

It's why I stick around.

[@shaneeslick]

BudgetBuildsOfficial is another UK Tech Channel also films in his backyard

[@DanteToska]

GreenHamGaming films outdoors sometimes

[@gnulectures]

@@DanteToska oh yeah, he does! 😎

[@Lonewanderer30]

You're using an ancient HD, that's really skewing the results. The larger drives are so dense they achieve read speeds of 250 to 300 MB's a second.

[@Smokinjoewhite]

That's what I was thinking, the larger the drive the faster it will be due to density, an old 500GB drive is kind of worst case scenario these days. I would also love to see multiple 4 or 6 TB drives in a RAID 0 array and see how that scales from 2 to 3 to 4 drives.

[@hrishikesh4284]

You make the most calming videos lol

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Thanks 😁

[@ej_tech]

Christopher Frost Photography is even more calm and also UK based, but for camera lenses.

[@naamadossantossilva4736]

Calming?Those stutters are rage inducing.

[@Stringypigeon]

Older/less intense games on the HDD, newer/intense perf games on m.2 NVME. HDDs still have a place in gaming, it just depends on what you are playing! Cyberpunk was the surprising one. It ran like a dream!

[@TheSpotify95]

yeah for me it goes: OS: NVMe SSD High performance and regularly played: NVMe SSD (a separate one) High performance, not regularly played, not large: SATA SSD Regularly played, not high performance: SATA SSD Not regularly played, not high performance: WD Purple HDD Not regularly played, large: WD Purple HDD (regardless of performance or developer recommendations)

[@shaneeslick]

@@TheSpotify95 Yeah now I have a B550 with 2 M.2 I did similar... 128GB Gen3 M.2 OS, I like having OS seperate so if it crashes I don't lose everything 2TB Gen4 for newer & most played games 1TB HDD for GOG Retro Games & 3TB HDD Storage for archiving Games I am not currently playing, so If I do feel like it I can just transfer back to M.2 Library so much faster than redownloading.

[@Stringypigeon]

@@shaneeslick same! I recently got another 1tb m.2 specifically for games in the second slot. Just the OS on the first one now. I think we've got a nice balance of it!

[@hrayz]

That's how I'm setup too. My 2TB M.2 has the games that really need it. Everything else is on my games 8TB HDD.

[@KhanhLam777]

@@shaneeslick I think you'll need at least 256GB for C:

[@NiCO-jo2vh]

HDD´s are still valuble. I can store so many games for emulation on it or multimedia files like music or movies. Still pretty good.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah perfect for storing lots of stuff for little money :)

[@shaneeslick]

Yeah also great for archiving your game library if you fill your SSD instead of needing to do a full download if you want to play again

[@jtenorj]

@@shaneeslick This is especially nice if the speed of your internet connector is, shall we say, not great.

[@shaneeslick]

@@jtenorj Yeah even with reasonable internets, I have Optic Fiber to the house with Unlimited Data & reasonable DL speeds up to 50mbps ($59AUD Basic plan but could pay more for faster) down here in Australia, so amount of Data is no problem & speed is decent but even so it still can't compete with 150mbps+ from HDD.

[@AntiGrieferGames]

Emulation is big Win for HDD

[@yardnuk]

Oh sheesh, 3:35 is giving me flashbacks to running GTA V on 4GB of RAM lol

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Haha I’ve tried that too

[@yardnuk]

@@RandomGaminginHD Do you reckon an SSHD would be better for gaming? Typically they only have a small amount of NAND flash (like 8GB or so), but I wonder if it would make a difference.

[@Boogie_the_cat]

​@@yardnukwell when games are more than 100gb I dunno if 8gb of NAND would help a lot.

[@yardnuk]

@@Boogie_the_cat Fair point.

[@TheSpotify95]

@@Boogie_the_cat when games are over 100GB, you need all the space you can get, hence anything that is not frequently played (at 100GB+) goes onto my WD Purple 6TB HDD. Not everything will fit on a 1TB or 2TB SSD, and of course prices have gone up since they dropped to their lowest (£35 for 1TB NVMe!).

[@DylRicho]

To be fair, this is one of the slowest HDDs on the market; even worse that it's heavily used. My WD Red Pro that I use for my games isn't limiting me at all. Seagate's obsession with SMR is what got me to switch from them.

[@oz7586]

Might as well see the worst case scenario

[@TheSpotify95]

I wouldn't say a Seagate Barracuda is the slowest, it's 7200RPM instead of 5400RPM. I'd probably recommend a WD Red or Gold. Probably not the Black, because although it performs the best, it runs hot, and fails due to running hot. The Purple is OK but not the fastest, the Blue is probably OK for general storage, and the Green is a budget drive which I wouldn't use as a primary drive.

[@DylRicho]

@@TheSpotify95 ​ RPM doesn't mean much by itself. The tiny cache will dramatically affect performance. SMR also hinders performance and reliability. It's akin to companies like Kingston swapping out the memory controllers in their SSDs, but only doing it after reviews of the original products have given them favorable recommendations. Specifically, this drive is from 2011 and it's also used. You can't expect to fairly and accurately showcase hard drive performance in gaming on 13-year-old second-hand storage. It's a little disingenuous to those who might watch this and decide that a brand-new hard drive will perform equally poor. Things have improved a lot since 2011. I have a very similar drive (ST3500418AS) still in use with half as many hours on it, and it performs 1/5 of my WD Red Pro.

[@DylRicho]

@@TheSpotify95 I wanted to add some test results from my three drives using the 64-bit version of CrystalDiskMark 8.0.4. The format of the data is as follows: - SEQ1M Q8T1 read / write - SEQ1M Q1T1 read / write - RND4K Q32T1 read / write - RND4K Q1T1 read / write 4 TB WD Red Pro, WD4003FFBX (25,253 hours) - 214.94 / 212.97 - 214.02 / 214.12 - 2.88 / 5.69 - 1.19 / 5.71 1 TB Seagate Barracuda 7200.14, ST1000DM003 (66,714 hours) - 176.66 / 170.43 - 175.07 / 173.27 - 2.06 / 1.84 - 0.68 / 1.47 500 GB Seagate Barracuda 7200.12, ST3500418AS (63,527 hours) - 41.82 / 41.5 - 41.84 / 41.52 - 0.71 / 1.41 - 0.67 / 1.4

[@DylRicho]

@@TheSpotify95 Okay, I replied to you, but my comments are not showing.

[@Adaminkton]

I still use a HDD for all my games from > 2018. And fun fact some very old games had mission info presented during loading, and the only way to see it now is to use an HDD as anything faster skips them.

[@gnrtx-36969]

True gta iv on my ps3 loaded way slower than my nvme lap and I really wanna listen to that loading music

[@ultimate_miner64]

@@gnrtx-36969 I installed IV on my HDD for this reason haha

[@OutlawedPoet]

I keep my COD collection installed on my HDD since I'm an avid zombies player and those games take up a LOT of space with all of the DLC installed and aside from the initial loading screens, they all work flawlessly. I wouldn't keep a game I actively play installed on my HDD, but they're just irreplaceable for that bulk storage.

[@kian9108]

I mainly use my HDDs for storing roms for emulation and for games pre 2015. For example the batman arkham games run very well and has most loading screens hidden with animations. Also battlefield V because no matter how fast you load in you're still gonna have to wait for all other players to join. Good video!

[@shaneeslick]

Yeah I run my GOG games off HDD, I download the DRM Free versions so I can play them on my XP PC + CRT

[@danielkowalski7527]

@@shaneeslick crt.... poor eyes....

[@SonicTheHedgehogDXZ]

I ended up getting a 512GB SSD for those games that wont run well on my 3TB of HDD. Not ready to let then go yet specially with the rising prices of SSDs lately.

[@strixgaming9463]

Same here.

[@UmiZoomR]

Maybe if you're outside EU but you dont need to buy every mint just saying

[@05DonnieB]

You can buy 2TB SSD's for less than $100. Also, you can transfer data to an SSD

[@darthpotwet2668]

50 quid for 1tb ssd is pretty good

[@jamesschaller753]

Rising price? I got a 1 tb NVME for $60 on Amazon lmao

[@JDpewpew]

This is so niche and specific video idea 😂 I love it!

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Thanks 😁

[@sir.fender6034]

Great video. I still use HDD's often. I use a 4-bay NAS with 4 8tb HDD's and then I have attached 2x 1TB NVME's for read only high speed data caching over a 10 gigabit connection. When I play a game from Steam, the data contents will pull from HDD's into NVme for super fast load times. When data needs to be written back to the host, the data is then sent to the HDD's. I am experimenting with Live Access data streaming for all my server needs but I need better CPU's for threaded task.

[@NitrousXProductions]

Main issue that HDDs face is the shaders to be loaded into memory. It takes awhile to load in. But once they are loaded in most cases they will run ok. I run most of my library on SSDs. But for cold storage I'll move my older titles I don't play on to HDDs.

[@xdizzle0460]

I still have my hdds from 2015-2018. Ive always just added drives and never taken any away. Never had a single problem.

[@dinglebop9998]

The first time i played BG3 was on a HDD. Most of the intro/tutorial was fine, but that cutscene where the ship crashes had my character T-posing in the most dramatic background of the fall down to the ground

[@Aips.]

I am one of the owners of a slow HDD. In Helldivers 2 when I first land on a mission all the partners and my character are just flying guns. And the dude standing by the galaxy map is usually just a flying head.

[@Vitis-n2v]

Old games usually used to use a big archive file or multiple big archives for the assets which made them being in one long sequential block of data on an HDD together with a HDD friendly data layout of the assets inside of the archive which really helped a lot since HDD is mostly fast when doing long sequential reads but with SSDs going mainstream they just stopped optimizing the game files since SSD doesn't suffer speed penalty due to data locality. Some pretty modern game that still do this optimization is for example capcom games like monster hunter world where you got a "chunk" folder that has the archives with game assets and the biggest one is 42GB in a single file.

[@revialle5434]

Capcom games are really well optimized, unfortunatrly DD2's release was a dumpster fire which makes me feel worried for MH Wilds, which will be running on the same RE engine

[@ErraticPT]

Surprisingly the only game I found to absolutely need (instead of just running better with) a SSD was Starbound. A game with block/pixilated graphics and otherwise could run on a potato of a PC, it appears the game streams all assets one by one and doesn't cache anything at all. This leads to constant stuttering on slow HDD and resulting framerates in single figures, switch to even a cheap SATA SSD and the game is buttery smooth on decade's old PCs.

[@mihajlohranisavljevic6412]

I have HDD and it works perfectly fine, sometimes i wait to load game yes, but once it loads it works just fine.

[@normanchiu847]

Hopefully you can do this test again on a more recent hdd. I know hdds from 10 plus years ago only reach 70mbs to 100mbs transfer rate but more recent hdds can reach speeds od 250mbs nowdays. Thanks for all the videos its always fun to watch these.

[@SOREI]

I was gaming on a 7200RPM drive for years up until last year lol, complete breath of fresh air. I was even using that 7200RPM with my old RTX 2070/R5 3600 build. I'm now using an NVMe with my RTX 4070/R5 5600 build. The loading times are insane and I'm baffled as to why I never upgraded to an NVMe in the past. I've always had my OS on a SATA SSD though.

[@Galax2000]

Problem with optimisation... Games could run of a hdd but they dont bother making it possible

[@viejitaloca]

true, there shouldnt be a need to have a 4090 to play on high settings for newer triple A games, there is a LOT that can be done to improve performance in games, but devs dont bother at all, specially with the release of dlss and fsr, developers just rely on those render methods instead of properly optimizing their shitty games

[@LennLeaf]

I only store my saves and games that don’t need much performance to play on my HDDs

[@fattomandeibu]

As a bloke who started gaming on computers when floppy disk drives were still out of the price range of most gamers, this kinda just makes me think "what next?" rather than if a hard disk is still viable. So far I've went from cassette tapes(you got about 130kb per side of a C60 cassette) and cartridges(cartridge games had no load times at all, worked exactly as they would in say, a Super Nintendo, but were typically expensive and had limited capacity, typically 16kb max, so would be fairly simple when compared to a cassette game) to floppy disk, to hard disk, to optical disc, back to hard disk and now SSDs.

[@Sunlight91]

I don't think a new storage technology will come to consumers any time soon. Beating NAND flash memory economically is very hard. It's the main reason why Intels Optane failed even though it had much better endurance and latency.

[@fattomandeibu]

@@Sunlight91 Look how long we were using hard disks for. If you don't count the short time('94-'98 approx.) optical drives where used for a bit when the hard disk capacities couldn't quite keep up with how big games were. It was well over 20 years. Not saying new improvements will happen tomorrow, or even a couple of years, it just makes me wonder what it will be. I mean, if I think back to my first 2 computers, the OS on those were kept in ROM(for those not young enough, Read Only Memory is effectively read-only RAM, you didn't even need to load the OS, they could just be directly mapped into the CPU's memory address space for instant access) and wonder if maybe some advancement of that sort could be implemented. Star Trek stuff at the moment, but who knows, maybe they'll work out non-volatile RAM before I'm dead. Unlikely, but it doesn't hurt anyone to think about it.

[@shaneeslick]

G'day @fattomandeibu I'm a '71 model, Ah yeah I remember "The Good Old Days Too" 😂 We now have RAM Sticks with more storage than the PC & Games that took forever to load but now are so small in size if you blink/sneeze 🤧you miss seeing them download/load

[@carl8790]

@@fattomandeibu In-compute-memory seems promising, but it's still at research stage. Problem is if we do get non volatile memory at RAM speeds, which RAM speed specifically? Faster SDRAM will always be around the corner to widen that gap even more.

[@fattomandeibu]

@@carl8790 That's always been the case. In fact, since the late '80s one of the biggest bottlenecks in computing is the disconnect between RAM and CPU speed, hence why CPU cache was made and why we got things like slot CPUs until they worked out how to put the cache into the CPU die itself. If it does happen, it'll likely be slower than your system RAM, but still fast enough to be usable. I'm no expert, though, hence my "Star Trek stuff" comment.

[@chrisallan6069]

I’ve played all these on hdd and not had any of these issues

[@w9s992]

yeah hes harddrive is a bad unit

[@TheG_Boy]

Wait was i not supposed to use HDD this whole time???

[@mihajlohranisavljevic6412]

No , using hdd is fine i do not know what is happening in this video,for me on HDD once game loads it works just fine, maybe just maybe textures in far distance will take a second to render but thats it.Everything goes to RAM memory anyways.

[@pcracinggames]

6:13 "go on, i'll pretend i don't see you"

[@MarshallRawR]

0:14 Legend says he's still spinning while getting that b-roll

[@giga_bomber]

Great video. Just updated my pc and needed more storage so I decided to pick up a 4tb 7200rpm drive for installing my games and storing media. For $50, it's plenty of storage which helped with the budget.

[@GrabASpriteB]

I have a 256gb SSD boot drive and for games that need it, but everything else runs on a relatively recent 2tb Seagate Barracuda. It was like $60 shipped and much cheaper than SSDs at the time. They're not terrible and work pretty well for everything but the specific games that need them. But for most of my games, videos, photos, and my cluttered downloads folder, it works fine and I only end up waiting a few more seconds if that in FPS games. Singleplayer games do take a little bit to load but the key is not to die and have to restart the level.

[@2handsome398]

I use a 1tb SSD paired with a 5tb hdd. SSD for the OS and modern games, hdd for storage and emulated games. A modern hard drive is more than fast enough for disc based consoles like GameCube or even PS3 since that thing was limited to Sata 1 speeds.

[@gamerdudegamerdude4961]

New/todays HDDs are pretty fast compared to 5 or 10 years old ones, should've used newer HDDs for testing.

[@jhopkins1515]

I have also noticed that SSD prices are starting to go up. 6 months ago I purchased one 1 TB 2.5 drive for $35.2 2 TB NVMEs for 65 each. Today the cheapest I can find used is nearly 50 for onetb and $100 for 2tb

[@UmiZoomR]

Seems cheap enough

[@Aavash_Purple]

You can get decent PCIE gen 4 1tb around 70$ nowadays

[@ThisisCitrus]

I played all of BG3 on a 7200 HDD and it wasn't nearly that bad, load times were minutes long but once it did the assets were all loaded in. It does have an HDD mode though.

[@danielkowalski7527]

why hdd/sdd modes are diffrent? ssd = for low ram systems? or what?

[@reinn-df2ti]

I dont understand either....why there are two options there in the setting, is hdd mode reduce assets to be loaded or what@@danielkowalski7527

[@intellex551]

The company I work for has a ton of old 5400rpm laptops. I keep telling them that just cloning them to super cheap SSDs would make the experience so much better ( we all use an rds server) but they seem to want to pointlessly upgrade everything.

[@fajaradi1223]

Looks like ... Somebody is getting kickback from all those purchase orders.

[@bigeststarspark]

I currently play baldurs gate 3 on hdd - yes it takes some time to load the textures, but then it's completely fine and playeble

[@camjohnson2004]

Love your videos. First off if the HDD you showed in the B roll is the HDD you used for these tests you're off to a bad start. That drive has a max speed of around 132MB/s (i have the exact same one as a backup drive i use before wiping a customers PC if it needs a format). If you were going to use a HDD in 2024 i'd recommend at least a Ironwolf drive or better, these drives have a max transfer speed of between 210 and 250MB/s with lower access times than the model you have shown. I have multiple Ironwolf drives in my NAS in RAID and they are quite capable of transfer speeds of 500MB/s in this config, That said, even a Crucial BX series drive with no DRAM cache is better than even the best single HDD

[@austinalacrity6229]

I salvaged a Seagate 2.5" 5400RPM HDD out of an Xbox One X. Booting windows on it was worse than watching paint dry.

[@berserkfury101]

One major caveat with Cyberpunk re HDD mode it dramatically reduce crowd sizes if you notice the streets in the video were essentially empty.

[@shinysky8119]

since 2077 2.0 there is no HDD mode anymore

[@Dwidson89]

I store on the SSD some of the games which I play often, the others are sitting on a 7200rpm HDD. 🤘

[@SiggyPony]

I was using a HD for my games up until now 😅 I just built a new computer for Horizon Forbidden West. It's funny going from 550mb/sec to over 5000mb/sec I played all of Horizon Zero Dawn on a HD and I don't notice much difference now in the NVME drive. I never tried probably any of the games your trying, I'm glad I didn't lol that said it would have been my CPU causing the most issues

[@kasyanchik]

hey there! it so happens that I’ve a question you can help me with and I’d be glad if you could answer I have recently just updated a PC for Horizon FW as a target experience (this was my gf’s bidding basically lol), but the PC still uses 4Tb 5400 HDD (WD Purple) to run games from (with 240 Gb SATA SSD for boot), and I’m trying to persuade her to get an NVMe (her MSI B460M PRO has a lonely M2 slot just for that) for faster loading, so my question is this: if you haven’t experienced much difference with playing Horizon ZD on HDD, would Horizon FW feel the same, or should I really go through with an NVMe?

[@SiggyPony]

@@kasyanchik I found Zero Dawn quite playable from a HD, I wasnt bothered by the loading times. I've been playing Forbidden West from the NVME Its definately fast if not instant on the NVME. I think a good apprach might be to install it on your HD and see what the load times are like. If its very annoying / to slow etc, then look at getting an NVME :) trying to from HD wont hurt. I suspect it might be more then playable off an HD.

[@kasyanchik]

@@SiggyPony thanks a lot for the reply! tried Forbidden West today for a little bit, loading times do seem a bit long, but manageable I’d say, so I’ll have to find another way to coerce my gf into an NVMe investment, she just doesn’t realize how much she needs it (and will need it as more games rely on SSD more these days) someday I might even try to get it and install it without her knowing, just to see if she notices that the loading speeds are 4x faster 😁😁

[@KimBoKastekniv47]

I was a gamer on a budget 10 years ago, but still went for an SSD, haven't looked back ever since.

[@FFox98]

Most of these issues can be easily be fixed with a disk cache enabler plugin which does what it suggests. enables buffering for your drive.

[@jeffoops9458]

i have an SSD as my main drive and my steam library on my HDD. grand theft auto. fallout 4 and a few other all have the stuttering you just shown time for me to get a bigger SSD. as i can see where my problem is. thanks so much for showing us 😁

[@Mobedan]

I had same texture and sound delay bugs in Alan Wake 2 with game installed on SSD. This game is just broken sometimes.

[@Aavash_Purple]

same here

[@unknown_5107]

I can buy 1tb HDD in 128Gb ssd price, it's still useful.

[@misterPAINMAKER]

You should had tried a new 220MB/s HDD. It is very capable for any game.

[@RobertT1999]

Crazy timing on this video for me. It was only last night where I told my friends that I probably won't buy Helldivers 2 as it recommends it to be installed on an SSD. I had experience with Tekken 8 being on a HDD until I eventually moved it over to my SSD due to long loading times as well as massive audio desync issues related to cutscenes slowing down (it was so bad that if I paused the cutscene after it finally loaded in the next part of the game, I could watch the cutscene catch up to the audio in the background). But since then and me noticing the recent trend of an SSD being part of the recommended specs, I've realised I need to heavily invest into replacing my HDDs with SSDs because my boot SSD is not comfortably large enough.

[@kaizerlock8287]

If it's your first time buying NVMe SSDs, recommend buying the PCIe 3.0 like *Intel 670p*. Sure, you lose some speed, but it was negligible for you to notice it. And since it's run at slower speed, it didn't get as hot as PCIe4.0 SSDs, thus prolonging it's life.

[@RaneBoDasch]

I got an HDD as 1 0f 6 storage drives. Mostly for media but It does fine for emulated games too. I have had 2 fail on me but they lasted through years of use and abuse. Wouldn't recommend buying one these days unless you're building a system for someone you hate lol.

[@steve_1507]

I keep almost all my games on a hard drive. They are cheaper, and I only use an SSD as boot drive because the OS requires access to a lot of files really fast.

[@GroetenUitNederland]

Lots of manufacturers(MF's) increased their orders for chips during COVID-19 from TSMC and other chip makers. Since these orders have to be made well in advance. A lot of MF's had to many chips left after COVID-19. They sold less products then during COVID-19. So untill last Black Friday prices where low. After prices went up because most overstock from chip orders where used. This is especially the case for SSD's and RAM stick. Which mostly consist of chips

[@agak229]

I actually played through baldurs gate 3 on similar tier hdd and that was the breaking point for me to permanently move to ssd

[@mrb6094]

There used to be a thing called "short stroking" for hard drives. Storing data in specific areas of the disc for faster access.

[@JoshuaG]

Crazy how even a storage device can be a bottleneck in gaming these days, back then it didnt matter 😂

[@maniatore2006]

I think that is not a HDD Problem, it is more a Programers thing.. i belive all games would be run just fine on a HDD if the Game developer it just want it.. but the Industrie want to sell new SSDs and new CPUs and GPUs. Thats the world goes. Loading Time is one Thing, the Stuuters an other. Forza Horizon 4 and 5, GTAV and many other Games runnning just fine on my OLD HDD and so many other Games.

[@EastAngliaUK]

these are still good for putting videos and films on or back ups.

[@gejamugamlatsoomanam7716]

Cyberpunk now is much better optimized than loading screen simulator.... i mean starfield

[@Tortilla-s4i]

im on i7 4790, gtx1060 6GB, 240 ssd, 500gb hdd. not planing upgrade jet :D

[@aku2dimensional]

I used to run a WD Blue WD10EZEX 1TB in an old office machine, most games I played weren't very demanding, but they did have long loading times and stutters. I had grown tired of waiting for Fallout 4 to load both vanilla and modded games so I switched to a Crucial MX500 1TB and I kept my old drive for storage. It was a large improvement, although using an HDD wasn't a bad experience for me overall. I used that MX500 for a couple more years until F4 had over 350GB of mods on top of my other games and upgraded to a WD Black SN850X 2TB. There wasn't much improvement between 6GB/s Sata and NVMe Gen 3 but guess I'm one of the cool kids now.

[@GeisemoOUTATIME]

in cyberpunk the roads arent the only thing missing on my side, sometimes the whole city and i end up falling through the map, landing on water, making me load a save and taking 20 min to load, yea next paycheck the first thing to buy will be an m2 ssd

[@JamesSmith-sw3nk]

Good video. Do a follow up video with a VelociRaptor 10 000rpm sata drive that has a large heat sink on it.

[@frankshaw2057]

A modern laptop 2.5 HDD run in a desktop with its digital cache actually would probably do fairly well. I don't recommend them but they run quite a bit better than some old clunker HDD's.

[@diegoescalante4503]

Quite funny to think now we making hhd tests when ive been using a laptop hdd that i had laying around as my extra storage and never encontered many issues

[@cxlciummmiv]

My almost 5 year old 1TB HDD has died. I never had an ssd and let me tell you, after getting a nv2 one it feels like magic. Though rn my pc’s screen randomly goes black and the fans spin really fast and the pc won’t boot into windows no more. Any thoughts on why this is happening? I’m suspecting that my gpu might be dying aswell.

[@UrielVentris1984]

so your using a hdd from 2011, every hdd, that is 7200 rpm from 2022 or even 2020, is much much faster has greater capacity and better optimization for games. not to mention when a drive is full, like that tiny drive things slow down. so you basically set yourself up for failure, a nice high end hdd like an exos or firecuda will run any ssd required game, especially with ram cache, its the vram and ram that actually runs our games, all the drives have to do is load the games into those two parts and let it run. i still play starfield on hdd, and warhammer 3, yea the initial load for warhammer 3 is about 3 minutes but after 30 seconds in the ram, for starfield the initial load is about 30 secs to one minute then about 5 seconds for the entire night. so yes its still very practical for those of us who hoard i have 100 tb to use all hdds. ram is even more important then ssds. operating systems are always on ssds however.

[@counterstrifekid]

I still have most of my games on HDDs to this day.

[@blackshark.69]

you make very down to eath videos caring for budget gamer . thank you

[@johnhooton8299]

Using a 2 TB HDD on my 8-year-old HP Envy, but just spent £88 at Scan on a 2 TB SSD so things should improve, but in all honesty, most games run fine after their initial loading...

[@Xyzex]

My 2018 laptop is probably one of the last gens of laptop that uses HDD as standard issue internal storage device. And I did played Cyberpunk 2077 there.

[@kobejanvicente1686]

It's amazing that some of these games are in perfectly acceptable framerates despite it being on an HDD.

[@maualcarazz]

Well, storage media shouldn't really affect framerate, only loading times and 3D model/texture pop-in from slowly streaming the assets

[@Ethan7_7]

I keep my big games on HDD, like: Tomb Raider, Resident Evil, Forza 5(not the best idea) My MP game(s) on a 2.5 SSD, like: Fortnite, Apex And only Minecraft and all the PC stuff on my C: NVME

[@Monarchias]

I hope we get a Part 2 of this video. As these days everyone is going for an nvme drive, there is a probability that 2 or 4 or even 6 sata connections are free. What if we use more than 1 HDD in a similar scenario? How better a raid0, raid1, etc drives would perform in these same games? We should expect a better performance, isn't it? But how better that would be? And as the market flooded with even sata2 drives, how different it would be with sata3 and sata2 raid volumes? Please, make a Part2 with these specs. Greetings to you.

[@micksterminator3]

I upgraded from my x58 build to a 10 series i7. It only came with a 512gb nvme ssd so I bought a WD 3tb refurbished external HDD directly from them. It performs great with what I've tried. Def gonna invest in a 2tb nvme ssd in the future.

[@Crazycacctus]

My HDD is really old and like really really slow that I can't even boot games at this point and even steam sometimes takes ages to boot or crashes...

[@MCMonsterbuilder]

I ran HDD's for way too long and the worst thing were the download speeds of games not necessarily the download itself but the decoding and checkign of files that all modern launchers do during/after a download took so long. I then upgraded to to HDD's in Raid 0 for my game drive and it helped but now I am on full NVMe SSD's for my personal rigs and in all the budget build I do to sell I do not put a HDD in anymore only sata ssd's.

[@RandomGaminginHD]

Yeah I noticed that verifying files took ages for epic game downloads. Painfully slow

[@sitordan]

My main gaming drive is an HDD (2TB Seagate) and I play them games without problems. Only a couple of titles are installed on a SATA SSD. I use my nvme drive for system and applications.

[@guidobyfredo]

I installed valorant on 320GB 2.5 laptop HD and when it finishes loading its already 1 minute into game.

[@TheLastLineLive]

I only use nvme SSDs nowadays, but I do have an 8tb external hdd that my emulation stuff is tied to as well as my movies and shows and such, it does the job well with that.

[@baggiesjoe1608]

I used to buy sky boxes for £5/£10and take out the seagate 500gb/1tb hard drives back in the day a lot cheaper than buying a hard drive 😅

[@isaidstream4547]

What if you buy a proper new HDD or Gaming HDD or a NAS HDD to test games vs SSD in 2024?

[@JaiLeeroy]

I think it comes down to the cache of the hard drives. Really can blur the line between ssd and hdd. Especially hybrid drives which I believe are still cheaper than ssd

[@douglasbarr213]

I am currently running an AMD Ryzen 5 7600X with a Radeon RX6700XT and a 1tb Boot NVMEx4 drive but my game storage is a 2tb Toshiba 7200 HDD with 128mb. Cache and I have not noticed any artifacting or glitches with any of the games I play. Having said that I do not have access to Cyberpunk nor any of the ones you experience the glitches with. I do have HALO Infinite and it loads and plays well also Final Fantasy 7and all the remastered Halo games, The Witcher (not the updated vers) Shadow of the Tomb Raider and several older titles all of which have no problems.

[@Sunlight91]

I'm now using SSDs for 10 years. My first one, the MX100 256GB is still the Windows 10 boot drive which I occasionally use. Mostly though I have become a Linux user since W11 was released.

[@Wolfpackgamer]

Just a reminder prebuilts in 2024 still come with hdd storage i just went to alienware they offer hard drive for extra storage on there 4grand 4090 rig. There r15 4070 512sd 1tb hdd storage.

[@Carstuff111]

I ran Cyberpunk 2077 on a 7,200 RPM Western Digital Black 500GB drive when I first got the game 2 months after release. It ran horribly, as in it wasn't just missing assets, but I got low frame rates too. A friend gave me a 1TB NVME SSD as he had just upgraded to a new one, I put Cyberpunk 2077 on there and it nearly doubled my frame rates.

[@mapesdhs597]

Although it won't make anywhere near as much of a difference vs. using an SSD instead, getting hold of old cheap Enterprise drives can give a nice speed bump over the typical 7200rpm consumer models like the Barracuda. The Hitachi HUS and Seagate ES.3 can be especially cheap, both 2TB and 4TB. One can sometimes nab them new/unused for cheap aswell. Handy for bulk storage for sure. Or if you want to be a little adventurous, there's 10K/15K SAS for better access times (HBAs are cheap). However, the speed gain from an SSD is definitely worth it if one can stretch to a relevant product (in the UK I'd probably go for the WD SN580).

[@DirransRL]

My PC is currently only using a Boot SSD and a HDD. Even keep my games on an external drive without issues.

[@jtenorj]

If the external can use USB3 with a USB3 port on the PC and a USB3 cable it should be fine. USB2 though? idk

[@RoyHess666]

Imagine standing in your back yard, holding a HDD in your hand, filming it and slowly turning for 5 minutes - Worship that silver shiny thing - Neighbor probably 😀

[@Vanny_Dorito]

would have been interesting to see how it handles Ratchet and Clank: Rift Apart with the portals.

[@ThomasPerl]

Star Citizen is really something else when you are on a hard drive i have heard. It's not always easy with a good spec'd PC but on a lower end PC with 16GB (or less) slow RAM an aging CPU and a hard disk you more than quadruple every possible wierd bug and glitch you can get.

[@LOD2003]

i wonder how much difference using a 5400rpm HDD would make

[@RandomGaminginHD]

I tested this before. Cyberpunk had all sorts of missing textures haha

[@Xyzex]

To actually stress the HDD more, limit the RAM usage and put virtual RAM inside HDD to get the laggiest gaming experience.

[@saiftube5833]

i got this little pc i5 2500k gtx 1650 for 140 used with 12gb ram and 120gb sata ssd not worth getting a expensive ssd when i could get used hdd for 5 bucks store all my games that are big and some like 500mb games that sometimes have long loading screens on ssd like roblox

[@saadhero9107]

Great video! I was hoping you would use crystal disk to showcase the speed of the drive. I tend to throw more simpler games on an HDD