Will a SATA SSD be sufficient to run Starfield?

[Equilibrium]

As the title says, just before I order the Samsung Evo 870 1TB I wanted to confirm that it will definitely improve my gameplay experience? Unfortunately my NVMe SSD is full and I genuinely cannot get rid of anything else to make space for Starfields hefty 140gb disk space requirement. I have a 1tb HDD installed but obviously we all know its practically unplayable on a HDD.

[Duranu Lithdel]

Originally posted by Em:

The game will play fine on a Hard Drive or SSD. Dont buy the hype for SSD, I have both in my computer and I cant tell the difference.

Are you 80 years old or something? How can you not notice a 1:40 second difference in load times between HDD and SSD, get out of here with your nonsense, HDD vs SSD was one of the biggest improvements in PC history

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkBdUziBRl4

[Duaniac]

Originally posted by sgtkoolaid:

an average SATA III SSD read/write averages about 500-560 mb/s. where as a NVME even gen 3 hits 3500 mb/s where as most Gen 4's hit excess of 7000 mb/s

The issue is whether or not the game needs the faster transfer speeds to run. It does not seem to. HWMonitor shows my read rate on that SDD from startup to able to play is 426 MB/s. Would it being on an NVMe drive be noice? Sure. Some operations would be improved just due to the order of magnitude faster read/write. Is it absolutely necessary to run and enjoy the game? Not one bit.

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by Duranu Lithdel:

HDD vs SSD was one of the biggest improvements in PC history

dollar for value wise, certainly

[Zalzany]

Originally posted by Duaniac:

Originally posted by sgtkoolaid:

an average SATA III SSD read/write averages about 500-560 mb/s. where as a NVME even gen 3 hits 3500 mb/s where as most Gen 4's hit excess of 7000 mb/s

The issue is whether or not the game needs the faster transfer speeds to run. It does not seem to. HWMonitor shows my read rate on that SDD from startup to able to play is 426 MB/s. Would it being on an NVMe drive be noice? Sure. Some operations would be improved just due to the order of magnitude faster read/write. Is it absolutely necessary to run and enjoy the game? Not one bit.

You don't own the game so I get it this game has loading all over the place. It feels like nothing with my fancy SSD but if i Had to wait a minute 40 every loading scene it would take an extra hour almost just to get to the point you can ♥♥♥♥ off from main story line and go anywhere now. I mean they divided up a ton of the game into sections if you got a good SSD you don't even notice, but those with HDD are screaming at the load times.

Also the game is built for SSD and it causes lag on audio and other problems its no long er just load times like back in the day you would go "oh it takes me 10 minutes more to load up but then I can play for 2 hours straight fine." Not its like "it takes me 2 minutes to load up, and I got do that every 10-12 minutes..."

[Lamiosa]

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

I dont think video game engines are capable of taking advantage of the difference between SATA speeds and m.2 NVMe speeds on PC yet

But your storage will have nothing to do with your FPS. The data will be communicated via memory by the point in time you are rendering actual frames.

I have 2 m.2 nvme and 2 sata ssd which are quiet new. It makes really no difference, if I store a game on the m.2 nvme or the sata ssd for games. The huge difference is between SSD and HDD. The difference between m.2 and sata rather comes on other stuff you do like certain emulations, KI or renderings (while rendering rather uses RAM, but thats another topic). Also SATA is much cheaper if you look at the size. So short for gaming: Use an m.2 for your OS and you can use a SATA for your games.

[Dixon Sider]

Originally posted by Lamiosa:

Originally posted by Dixon Sider:

I dont think video game engines are capable of taking advantage of the difference between SATA speeds and m.2 NVMe speeds on PC yet

But your storage will have nothing to do with your FPS. The data will be communicated via memory by the point in time you are rendering actual frames.

I have 2 m.2 nvme and 2 sata ssd which are quiet new. It makes really no difference, if I store a game on the m.2 nvme or the sata ssd for games. The huge difference is between SSD and HDD. The difference between m.2 and sata rather comes on other stuff you do like certain emulations, KI or renderings (while rendering rather uses RAM, but thats another topic). Also SATA is much cheaper if you look at the size. So short for gaming: Use an m.2 for your OS and you can use a SATA for your games.

Yep, SATA is the way to go for now. I know if you do things like scp (linux) it will use the full force of the transfer rate though.

[GrandTickler]

Originally posted by Duranu Lithdel:

You can get a Crucial MX500 1tb[www.amazon.com] for ~$20 less than the 870 1TB if you have to go SSD and don't have room for another NVME drive

I have the MX500 4TB and I have no complaints with it (I use it for other games, I have starfield on my NVME), as far as speeds, HDD is ~160MB/s read speeds, SSD is 500-600MB/s read speeds, and NVME is 2500-3500MB/s read speeds (gen 3), Load time difference (at least in these videos) appears to be 3 seconds between NVME and SSD

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=201Aa3n6G9k
https://youtu.be/wWstXyjHMK8?si=rM_vaKRZNw7AmZ1E&t=19

nice video

[Dersh]

Originally posted by Duaniac:

I am running on an 8TB Samsung 870 QVO SSD for my Steam games and have not had any problems. My last benchmark shows 559 MB/s for reads. That should be sufficient for the game.

Thats only twice as fast as a HDD which has a max read of 260mb/s. My T700 Pro Series PCIe 5.0 x4 NVMe 2.0 M.2 is 12,400MB read - 11800mb write. 22x faster does make a difference in terms of loading and keeping microstutters and hangups to a minimum

[Draconas]

wish people would stop assuming they're going to get the max sequential reads and pay attention to the 4k reads, that's more your actual throughput if nothing else is the bottleneck

[Ellis_Cake]

HDD is a no go,
but there is no diff between having the game on my 500mb/s sata SSD,
or my 2600 mb/s nvme m.2 SSD.

just a proper sata 3-ssd is enough, the performance ingame is 'as good as it will be' already on sata-SSDs in this regard.

[Groogo]

I am playing the game on an HDD drive and it is operating OK but has a few issues. My new Crucial X8 2TB SSD will be here next Thursday.

[teg]

Thats only twice as fast as a HDD which has a max read of 260mb/s.

The problem with hard disks is latency. The time it takes to move the head from one section of the disk to another and wait for the data to be under the head. SSD's and NVME have virtually no latency. So reading data never incurs a stall from moving the head around the platters.

Even if the SSD/NVME and hard disk had exactly the same transfer speed, the SSD would still be superior because there's no mechanical stepper motor moving the head around and waiting for the platter to spin around to uncover the data you're trying to read.

[selfridgedaniel]

in regards to the asking why some gaming computers still have a conventional hard drive is that for some things it really doesn't matter.
when you have a game that is not constantly loading and or buffering large amounts of data constantly then it takes the game (app) more time to load up initially, and occasionally but its acceptable. the other advantage of conventional hard drives is they are cheaper mass storage. I was looking the other day and SSD's up to around 2-4 TB are pretty cheap but after that they get expensive FAST. if you are using a desktop you can get an ~18-20 TB 7200 rpm 3.5" conventional HD from newegg for under $400 that is a HUGE amount of storage for things like old games movies and similar that don't need the fastest access times