nowhat
Member
Narrator: he does not.
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Hey Guest. Check out your NeoGAF Wrapped 2025 results here!
SSDs are cool, but...
- Thread starter Artistic
- Start date
StereoVsn
Gold Member
Yeah, the only place I have HDDs now is in my NAS for sheer bulk storage. And even there I have NVME drives for cache.
I even have SATA SSD in my older consoles and PC. There is no reason to have spinning disk except for backups and media. SSDs are faster (access speed is nice even on older systems), quieter, run cooler and last longer.
I even have SATA SSD in my older consoles and PC. There is no reason to have spinning disk except for backups and media. SSDs are faster (access speed is nice even on older systems), quieter, run cooler and last longer.
- PS3 - SATA SSD.
- PS2 - SATA SSD.
- Win XP PC - SATA SSD.
- PS5 and XSX external BC drives - SATA SSDs.
nowhat
Member
With at least RAID 1 I hope? But yeah. Spinning disks still have a place, if you're looking for storage/price. But they come with all sorts of caveats. Hell, tape may be more reliable if you're looking for a single archival media (you should not, redundancy is always king), but I don't think there are many consumer devices out there. Probably could be bought on the cheap used online though.
Wolzard
Member
There's a good reason for that, it's better for backups. It's also cheaper per GB and more reliable.
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YeulEmeralda
Linux User
HDD
StereoVsn
Gold Member
Unraid with 2 Parity drives and SSD cache pool. And cloud backup. You can't really beat spinning disk for bulk storage unless you spend a lot of money. I have 8 HDDs (mix of 8 and 12 TB) and the box is media server, backup server and I also run some container apps on there.
Do I wish I could replace HDDs with SSDs? Heck yeah, but not willing to spend a few $K on it even if I went for lightly used enterprise drives on eBay.
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spookyfish
Gold Member
"Please insert disk 143A."
Pisses me off. I got all these perfectly fine disks I could install on to, but these fucking modern games won't even give me the option.
StereoVsn
Gold Member
If you haven't tried installing Windows NT or 95 from floppies you have lived your life in vain!
Artistic
Member
PS is strictly a exclusive box for me.Oh, you're really dedicated to this Xbox thing, arent cha?
Just get yourself a PS5 Pro and call it a day...comes with 2TB and and you add even another SSD, plus an external drive HDD.
Artistic
Member
//DEVIL//
Member
Artistic
Member
The same issue exists on PS5 as well. Just storage expansions are a lot more inexpensive.
//DEVIL//
Member
PS5 doesn't use any expensive proprietary drives. Just go and buy any cheap Gen 4 NVMe drive and slap it in the PS5. This is the cheapest drive you can buy unless you want to go back to the ice age with mechanical drives.
PS5 is exactly the same as PC when it comes to drives. hell even some NVME gen 3 drives if they were fast enough, would work on PS5. I don't think they even sell Gen 3 stuff anymore, and if they do, you need to avoid them anyway, considering how slow they are compared to Gen 4 and 5.
Reizo Ryuu
Member
It's not just load times, it can also be the way the data is expected to be ordered and delivered; they could theoretically allow you to install it on an HDD, but if they optimised data streaming, or even plain loading, in a way where it expects the data in a certain sequence or time, and that doesn't happen, you could run into unexpected errors; most recent one I can think of is marvel's avengers, on an HDD install it would sometimes just not have certain areas loaded at all, best case scenario you'd walk around and there wouldn't be any enemies yet, worse case you'd fall through the giant holes in the levels.
The actual worse case scenario would for it not to load/boot at all, tecmo did some wizardry with this on the original xbox ninja gaiden, the disc had the data ordered in a very specific way so the xbox could load all the data as expected by the engine; people didn't find out about this until pirated copies wouldn't run, or run with errors, because they just ripped the data, but not how it was ordered.
The actual worse case scenario would for it not to load/boot at all, tecmo did some wizardry with this on the original xbox ninja gaiden, the disc had the data ordered in a very specific way so the xbox could load all the data as expected by the engine; people didn't find out about this until pirated copies wouldn't run, or run with errors, because they just ripped the data, but not how it was ordered.
Kind of, with older SSD, not even the latest NVME. Seek times are basically non existent. On HDDs, the data is stored on platters which are disks. Think of circles around the and an arm that can move from the center of the disk to the outer edge to line up with the various tracks. If all data is written together it will be in a single row (track) and once the arm (head) moves to the correct row (track) to read, it's able to grab everything in a single rotation. If data is scattered around it needs to keep stopping the data transfer, and then move the arm to the new row and start back up. That is the seek time.
Due to that many games duplicate a bunch of data so data is located next to on another for loading. Helldivers 2 on the PC was a recent game where the install was ~130GB. They test removing all the duplicate data and the game went down to 30GB, on SSD and NVME there was no different in loading. On HDDs the load took something like an extra 12-15 seconds.
Open world games on the worse case scenario as they are always streaming in assets, and a delay for a load will be seen as an object popping in. But IMO, the need to duplicate data to minimize seek times on HDDs is vastly over stated. It was a technique that was absolutely needed in the 360/PS3 era. Even thought those consoles had HDDs, they still played the majority of games off DVD/Bluray disks. The PS4/XBO moving to copying the games to an HDD eliminated a ton of loading, and the absolutely need for seek time reduction was eliminated. But old habits die hard. Hopefully things change and games stop being 100-150GB each. I really don't need 70GB of uncompressed audio in langauages I'll never use.
Kazekage1981
Member
Anybody have a Gen5 NvME SSD with 4+GB/SEC read and write speed?
I don't have any Gen5 drives, but I do have Gen 4 x4 that can do over 7GB/s. Almost all NVME drives you run into are x4 drives, with some rare exception like the special WD drives that went into the Xbox Series which are Gen 4 x2.
Anybody have a Gen5 NvME SSD with 4+GB/SEC read and write speed?
With gaming standard SSDs over SATA are fine, going to NVME isn't that noticeable. The zero seekt imes are where most people see a difference. Blind A/B/C testing of SSD/NVME Gen3/NVME Gen4 was margin of error. Most games do processing and loading of data structures which makes most load time differences between 1-2 seconds from a 500MB/s SSD and a 7GB NVME Gen 4.
Many games max out at 3-4GB of RAM usage, but let's say it's one of the latest that can use up to 16GB of system RAM, and then 16GB of VRAM on a high end GPU. You're looking at 5 seconds to completely fill both with entirely different data, systems just aren't using direct storage on a PC to be able to access memory like that. The higher bandwidth just doesn't benefit gaming.
YeulEmeralda
Linux User
Why are you guys archiving so many games?! Let Valve do that.
T4keD0wN
Member
Rift Apart peaks at around 700mbps during the most intensive moments, exceptionally rare, stays well within sata speeds 99% of the time. Ive measured it.
I am sure there are games that see higher usage nowadays tho, but whether they need it or just make use of it because they can is another matter.
Anyway buying sata is nonsensical in 2025 since it costs about as much as nvme.
nkarafo
Member
Yes but motherboards only have 1 to 3 NVMe slots while the SATA slots number can be as high as 8.
I suppose that's not an issue if you are not a data hoarder but i am and i need all these slots to be used.
LordCBH
Member
970? Look at Mr Rockefeller over here. All games should support my old 750 Ti
Black_Stride
do not tempt fate do not contrain Wonder Woman's thighs do not do not
^That was installed on an HDD....clear streaming issues.
Ive also tested Space Marine 2 on an 7200HDD.......the audio will fall out of sync after a while due to streaming issues.
Alot of games still run fine on HDDs but with the fidelity games have today you either expect them to use 32+GB of system RAM and fuck you VRAM or have streaming issues, games are massive now, shaders and textures are massive, placing all that in RAM isnt realistic expecting it to stream in at run time on a hard drive is also unrealistic.
Blame MS for having proprietary SSDs expansions but dont expect devs to support HDDs in this day and age for any game that is cutting edge by any measure.
T4keD0wN
Member
True. I also have a data hoarding problem.
Easy to avoid running games on sata drives, for cold storage it's the most efficient option, just move what you actively play to one of the nvmes and dont forget about the extra slots you could get with the expansion devices if your mobo has them, but it might disable some sata slots.
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RafterXL
Member
No other game that I've played needs more than SATA speeds. Until I upgraded last month, 2/3 of my storage was SATA drives and they played everything the same as my NVME. Just don't buy new ones, but there is no reason you can't keep using your old ones for years to come.
Exactly. If you are buying new there is no reason not to get NVME, but if you already have SATA use them until they die.
StereoVsn
Gold Member
SATA can make sense in some scenarios with older equipment. I have SATA SSDs in PS2, PS3, as external BC drives for PS5/XSX and in my retro computers where its easy to use an older SATA interface or IDE to SATA converter (PS2 needs that as well). For modern systems, yeah, there is almost no sense in going with SATA SSD vs NVME SSD.