SSD and HHD

[Garrow]

I recently built my first computer and notcied my ssd was taking a fat hit to storage, it was all from steam (258 gb), i looked in the files and it did add up to the games i had downloaded. Im just curious, if i move games from my ssd to my hhd, will it affect preformance? Does it matter which games i move?

[BloodShed]

Depends on the harddrive and in some cases the game.

[Supafly]

Depend on drive, some faster than others. for example 5,400RPM is slower than 7,200RPM drives. some 7,200RPM drives and faster than other 7,200RPM drives too.

Game wise a game may load a little slower. So if game will be loading maps frequently it'll benefit more from the SSD.

Just move games you are not currently playing on to the HDD and keep the games you'll actually be playing on the SSD

[DevaVictrix]

Just keep away from those 2.5” hdd. They are noticeably slower regardless of rpm.

[Supafly]

Publicado originalmente por Garrow:

hhd is 7200RPM with 2 TB
2.5 SSD doesn't say, but they're both SATA 6.0 Gb/s

SSD won't sayu RPM because it's not a disk that spins. Only mentioned it when comparing HDD to HDD.

7,200RPM is the faster HDD. As I said HDD will have slower loading times compared to SSD. More noticeable in different games. Other than that you won't any difference. Just the games you're currently playing on SSD or you'll be testing games to see which loads a few seconds faster. Prob take longer to move games between drives just to check that.

[nullable]

Will it affect performance? Yes. SSDs have much better performance and anything that depends on or benefits from good disk performance will typically run better on a SSD than an HDD.

But which programs and how much, and how much you will care from program to program is hard to say. The short answer is if you move something and it's fine, then for you the difference doesn't matter. And anything you move that runs slower than you like, it may matter to you.

Ideally you replace the HDD with a SSD and with nothing but high performance storage you can go wild. Understandably that may not appeal to your budget, but at the same time if you elect to go with a small SSD + large HDD you'll have to spend the time and energy managing your high performance space and your low performance space and shuffling things around to meet your needs.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

7200rpm sata 2 or 3 hdd then it should be fine.

It is a good idea to download the whole game to ssd and then when it done, use the steam move option to move it to your Steam library folder on hdd. This way it downloads faster to ssd and still be able to multitask while it's downloading.

Keep general apps on ssd, but games can easily be moved to hdd and still run fine. This helps too because the system can also multitask more smoothly this way when gaming cause OS + game client on the ssd while the game files are on hdd. Down the road maybe get a 1 or 2 TB ssd and then clone the hdd with all your games over to the now secondary ssd.

If you download a lot of loose files via web browser and you have a bunch of stuff in Documents or Downloads folder, you can, as needed move those loose files over to their own folders on the hdd to further free up space on C Drive

[nullable]

Publicado originalmente por Garrow:

For the loose stuff outside steam, would i just copy paste the files into the hhd then delete the previous in the ssd?

Well what do you mean "loose stuff" just data files? Docs, pics, movies, music? Or are you referring to software?

If we're just talking data, it's just a disk, you've presumably moved files around different drives before? Used a thumb drive? Nothing is different with a SSD involved, no magic, no special processes.

If you're talking about dragging random applications around and asking will they work? It kinda depends on the application. Plenty of standalone applications without registry settings or disk location configurations that can be moved. If it was something you just popped out of a zip file and could run it immediately, can typically be moved without fuss.

But many things with an installer where you selected an install location can have some dependencies on the installed location and you'd have to uninstall and install to the new location in many cases there.

[UserNotFound]

Moving games from SSD to HDD won't affect anything other than load times, obviously HDDs are a fair bit slower than SSDs (NVMe, or even SATA SSDs). The point is to allocate games that you tend to favor playing into faster drives, and games that you play from time to time into slower drives.

I built my rig back in 2019, and within 6 months of completing the build, I had populated it with 4TB + 2TB + 2x 1TB SATA SSDs, and a 6TB WD Black for games that I don't play as often. I'd also added a 2TB HDD for downloads, media consumption usage and such. Games that I play often (Serious Sam series, Metro series, Call of Duty series, etc), I want them to load faster, hence they go to my SSDs, not too favored games like Star Wars Battlefront II, Godfall, Chernobylite and such go to my HDD.

[Agent]

Publicado originalmente por UserNotFound:

Moving games from SSD to HDD won't affect anything other than load times, obviously HDDs are a fair bit slower than SSDs (NVMe, or even SATA SSDs). The point is to allocate games that you tend to favor playing into faster drives, and games that you play from time to time into slower drives.

I built my rig back in 2019, and within 6 months of completing the build, I had populated it with 4TB + 2TB + 2x 1TB SATA SSDs, and a 6TB WD Black for games that I don't play as often. I'd also added a 2TB HDD for downloads, media consumption usage and such. Games that I play often (Serious Sam series, Metro series, Call of Duty series, etc), I want them to load faster, hence they go to my SSDs, not too favored games like Star Wars Battlefront II, Godfall, Chernobylite and such go to my HDD.

Nah, some games do see a performance improvement as well.

For instance Mount & Blade Bannerlord uses asset streaming. So if you have thousands of units on screen the hard drive can't keep up resulting in game stutter. I'm sure there will be more examples of this in the future, but Bannerlord is probably the biggest name game I can think of that benefits directly from SSD's.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Many games from the last decade can easily see better in-game performance overall, not just load times. As there is a very long list of games where, if they run off a slower drive, it is awful because of the texture pop-in delays you experience in the game and such. This generally wont happen when the OS + Game is run off of an SSD.

What people look at though is FPS and then when they don't see something helps the FPS, they turn around and knock it as if it is not worth putting games on SSDs. FPS can't magically increase based on the drive the game is on. FPS is not always affected by texture and model pop-in delays. However what is affected is the visual experience and the user experience. It's kind of hard to really enjoy a visually stunning game when you are seeing delays in the textures or the texture lod quality having delays to output to the screen fast enough. Also makes it a pain to take screenshots if the textures and models aren't loading fast enough.

[Overseer]

I've just recently moved The Evil Within 2 from HDD to SSD and it mitigated many micro stutters because the game keeps loading small KB junks of data all the time. It really comes down to the games and how they load data. Many are not affected at all either because they load data during times where you don't pay attention to the FPS (loading screens can take massive hits to FPS), or they just do it in competent ways HDDs can handle (larger container data streaming).

[Heretic]

Like others have stated it all depends on the game. If the game loads all the data (level) then a HDD will be fine, but will add a few seconds to load times (not a biggy). In more demanding open-world games that uses a lot of I/O from drive to memory you may experience some stutters on a HDD. However, a SSD only hides the issue and not always completely.

The good thing about Steam is that it's very easy to transfer games to different Steam libraries on different drives. Research the game to find out how it works.

[Jamebonds1]

Yes, it could affect speed performance in between SSD and hard drive, but worth it. I use SSD for online, and I use HDD for rarely play or non-online.

[nullable]

Publicado originalmente por Garrow:

do yall think fast paced competitive games would make use of a ssd outside loading screens? Like fps, league of legends, and for honor

How much a game depends on disk performance really depends on the game.

Large open world games would tend to utilize the disk more to stream data from adjacent areas rather than try to contain the entire world in RAM.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Publicado originalmente por Garrow:

do yall think fast paced competitive games would make use of a ssd outside loading screens? Like fps, league of legends, and for honor

If the game has a ton of HD textures and models, sure. As many games do not pre-load the entire game world at a loading screen; but load the essentials, then once in the game world, the textures and models load in based on distance and such.