[SOLVED] Platter drives still worth having ?

[rwh531]

In the process of building a new rig rog strix z690-a with the i5-12600k. I've been told I don't need a nvme as they dont offer any real benefit unless you're transferring huge amounts of data so outside of data backup they are a waste of money and looking for confirmation that as a gamer and avid movie watching couch potato that the speed difference will go unnoticed. As I could potentially get a larger benefit using the money saved to get a 8tb platter drive to replace the 1tb thus future proofing my storage capabilities.

 

[USAFRet]

"NVMe" may not be needed, but solid state is.

There is a HUGE difference between spinning hard drives and SATA III SSD.
Between the various flavors of solid state, not so much.

All my house systems are SSD only.
SATA III and NVMe.
I absolutely would not go back to HDD, at least for the OS/application drive.

The 80TB in my NAS however....11/12 of the drives are spinning.

 

[Eximo]

Not sure who mentioned that, a bit outdated.

SATAIII tops out around 550MB/s in practice. NVMe drives can top 7000MB/s with PCIe 4.0. Of greater importance is the practice of direct storage access from NVMe to GPU. This will become a common thing in games (Playstation already uses it, MS has added the capability to Windows 10 and up, and presumably the X Box) It will allow your graphics card to directly load assets from storage, bypassing the CPU.

The cost difference between a PCIe 3.0 and SATA drive are almost nothing, so no point in getting SATA drives unless you run out of M.2 slots. Hard drives are still useful for bulk storage. I would not plan ahead with 8TB unless you know you are going to store that much. A 2 or 4TB drive is plenty for backups and lesser used programs.

 

[USAFRet]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM

 

[kerberos_20]

i still use hdd, its good for sleeper data...movies or music...to not waste space on gaming drives

 

[Eximo]

i still use hdd, its good for sleeper data...movies or music...to not waste space on gaming drives

What remains of my digital movie library is kept on hard drives. Streaming services have mostly replaced that for me though. I mostly use my hard drives to back up my SSD based systems.

I keep a 1TB to back up my laptop, and a 3TB to back up my two active desktops.

 

[mdd1963]

If your storage needs are larger than what is available for reasonable prices on SSDs (have you seen prices on 4 and 8 TB SSDs?), and you are ok with relatively slow access/read/write speeds, then spinners are still the ticket! (If 4 TB and/or 8 TB SATA SSDs were inexpensive, I'd be using them, but, the $780 price for an 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO is hardly a 'must buy' just yet, at least not for me!)

With 2 TB SSDs at such moderate prices (2 TB MX500 for $165, 970 EVO Plus at $199!), I have little need for buying spinners smaller than that, but, I confess I do still have and use several that have been leftovers from laptop upgrades, which I play with as a Storage Spaces mirror, or as dedicated drives to tinker with some distro in Hyper-V, etc...

 

[PiranhaTech]

What are you using it for? Magnetic drives actually have decent read speeds... for large files. Videos and music especially work well with magnetic. Editing is another issue. I would say consider using SSD for editing, but for long-term storage, magnetic works.

Photos feel better off an SSD though since they are small files. I also put old games on Magnetic, or put no-so-played games on the magnetic drive.

I actually have M.2 SSD, SATA SSD, and Magnetic on the desktop. Most-played on M.2 / moderately-played on SATA / very old and hardly played on magnetic.

It also depends on how organized you are. If you have a bunch of files in a single directory, it can make Windows take a while to load on magnetic

I agree with what others are saying. If you need less than 3 TB or so, SSD might be better.

 

[alceryes]

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM

I I would like for a review site to do an updated version of this with the full monty of in-game statistics. Gone are the days where games ONLY load data on the loading screen.
If an NVMe SSD drive will save me an extra few micro stutters (over a SATA III SSD drive) than it may be worth it. I don't think any definitive research has been published on the matter though.

 

[Math Geek]

when i went from a spinning drive to an ssd for my OS and applications, it was a huge noticeable difference. when i bought an nvme drive (970 evo plus) i did not notice any difference between it and the sata ssd.

i still use spinning disks for data and music/video storage. if it sits there most of the time collecting dust, then it's on a platter driver. at this point i have the nvme with windows and applications, then the sata ssd for my vm's which do load much faster vs hdd. then good ol bulk spinners for the rest of the data.

but as others have noted, if i was working with the data regularly it would be on at least a sata ssd.

 

[hotaru.hino]

To add to the topic, hard drives are still worth it if you need vast amounts of space for the cost and the data is something you don't access frequently or is data that doesn't have high bandwidth requirements. For instance, there's no point in putting music, pictures, or movies on an SSD if performance is your goal since their bandwidth requirements are laughably small compared to what a high capacity HDD can achieve. Even in the case of movies, the whole thing isn't loaded into RAM and the file is likely contiguous or mostly contiguous, so seeking through it isn't much of a problem.

Heck, even for smaller applications like say emulators of consoles from the 90s or prior or system utilities, keeping them on a hard drive won't be too bad either.

I I would like for a review site to do an updated version of this with the full monty of in-game statistics. Gone are the days where games ONLY load data on the loading screen.
If an NVMe SSD drive will save me an extra few micro stutters (over a SATA III SSD drive) than it may be worth it. I don't think any definitive research has been published on the matter though.

I believe most game engines use progressive or asynchronous loading these days to minimize any stuttering. Basically, the game loads some minimum and once you're in game, continue to load assets on the side that pop-in. Not only will this shorten load/initialization times, but if for some reason there is a hiccup with storage when loading some asset, the game won't freeze. It still has enough to keep going. Using GTA V as an example, if you're heading to Downtown Los Santos and the game hasn't loaded in any of the background buildings yet, it's not going to stop and wait for them to load. It'll keep going until it loads in.

I remember doing a test for craps and laughs to see if I could run the game from a NAS over Wi-Fi. It worked fine at 802.11ac, but not 802.11n 150 Mbps. Even then, despite chunks of the game world not visible, the game still ran and all of the collision for the world was still there, indicating that the game's physics knew about the world, but the graphics didn't, which is more important from a reliability perspective.

 

[Karadjgne]

If your storage needs are larger than what is available for reasonable prices on SSDs (have you seen prices on 4 and 8 TB SSDs?), and you are ok with relatively slow access/read/write speeds, then spinners are still the ticket! (If 4 TB and/or 8 TB SATA SSDs were inexpensive, I'd be using them, but, the $780 price for an 8 TB Samsung 870 QVO is hardly a 'must buy' just yet, at least not for me!)

That says everything. It's all a matter of size vs budget. If you have Linus available budget, go ahead and make a 1+ Petabyte or even a Exabyte server full of NVMe/Sata SSD's, but for most ppl that's Unaffordium and more storage than they could ever possibly have use for.

So mass storage above 2-4Tb is still best on HDD.