Question secondary hard drive for games? SSD OR HDD for a budget system

[robertfixit]

old computer guy (think 90s) but new to the latest gaming. I noticed that many people have an SSD for boot and large HDD for gaming storage.
My system has SSD for boot and a larger faster SSD for storage, which I thought was ideal. I do have a few low mile 1TB HDD drives laying around. Is there any noticeable difference between SSD and HDD for game use storing the large files? Is it just a matter of load time when the game starts that would be affected or is any part of gameplay affected.
If I could move my faster SSD to the boot drive and use a TB storage HDD it would be cost effective.

 

[USAFRet]

Load time is the factor.
But it can be significant when comparing HDD vs any SSD.

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4YoRKQy-UO4

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DKLA7w9eeA

View: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GQ9LyNXpsOo

 

[DRagor]

Is it just a matter of load time when the game starts that would be affected or is any part of gameplay affected.

Depends on type of game. Game like Civilization loads everything at start and then basically does not touch the drive so having it on HDD impacts just loading time. But in some big FPS games this could affect in-game performance as well (there are games that are above 100GB in size, no way to load all of it into RAM at once).

 

[markmans]

old computer guy (think 90s) but new to the latest gaming. I noticed that many people have an SSD for boot and large HDD for gaming storage.
My system has SSD for boot and a larger faster SSD for storage, which I thought was ideal. I do have a few low mile 1TB HDD drives laying around. Is there any noticeable difference between SSD and HDD for game use storing the large files? Is it just a matter of load time when the game starts that would be affected or is any part of gameplay affected.
If I could move my faster SSD to the boot drive and use a TB storage HDD it would be cost effective.

Modern TLC and QLC SSDs are quite affordable. (Toshiba, GTech Memory, Adata ...)

 

[Moonstick2]

I wouldn't worry about the type of SSD/NMVe drive as the differences aren't tangible without benchmarking, but HDD vs SSD is really no contest.

SSD is far faster and silent. I haven't bought an internal HDD in over a decade.

Look at one of the videos above for example: Assassin's Creed Odyssey has a 30 second savegame load time on SSD. On HDD you're waiting an extra 20-odd seconds. (Amusingly, I've bought older games and found that levels load so quickly I don't have time to read the tips and advice being shown waiting for the load, when I actually want to!)

You're in bit of a different position since you've got these drives sitting around, but the simple answer is it won't affect in-game play, but it makes a definite difference when loading games, saves, and levels.

 

[geofelt]

The ONLY real advantage of a HDD over a SSD is the cost per gb.
A SSD is faster, more reliable, takes less energy, runs cooler... you name it.

You might want to repurpose those HDD's as backup devices.

 

[Nighthawk117]

old computer guy (think 90s) but new to the latest gaming. I noticed that many people have an SSD for boot and large HDD for gaming storage.
My system has SSD for boot and a larger faster SSD for storage, which I thought was ideal. I do have a few low mile 1TB HDD drives laying around. Is there any noticeable difference between SSD and HDD for game use storing the large files? Is it just a matter of load time when the game starts that would be affected or is any part of gameplay affected.
If I could move my faster SSD to the boot drive and use a TB storage HDD it would be cost effective.

It's not worth running games on hard drives anymore given the price of SSD's. New games are best run on SSD's, especially big open world games like Assassins Creed. The latter is prone to texture popping on a hard drive. For the moment though it makes no difference what SSD you have, the faster drives offer no perceivable benefit. That will change when Microsoft Direct Storage reaches mass adoption, but that is likely years away. I myself run most of my games off budget SATA SSD's.

 

[scout_03]

you could use the hdd you have on hand now and look around to find a decent sdd for the game and buy when you be ready for myself i still use a wd black hdd for game .