HDD Drives

[Bad Aim]

I have a couple of old HDD drives that are still active in my PC. I do have four NVMe drives.

The HDD's that I have are Western Digital Black drives and in very good condition.

What games should I put on those? Maybe games made before 2020? Or 2010?

Opinions please.

[Phénomènes Mystiques]

I use those, they are great for every type of game but I would not use them for competitive PvP (but I used the drive once for it recently and seemed fine); although, Co-Op was better in most instances, just had longer loading times then the rest of the team - I play some newer games on them and such - they are still viable (RDR2, WWE 2K24, RoboCop).

[Bad 💀 Motha]

Just convert them into external drives. You could always use for loose file backups/downloads

[A&A]

This ^

Also some games will be fine and talking about year releases is not a good indicator. Something like GTA4 from 2008 you have to wait a minute to load everything you need to start the game, but with an SSD it's night and day. Meanwhile if you take Hitman 3 from 2021 then the difference is not that majour around 10 vs 20 seconds, so it's more accurate to say it depends on the game.

[Obsessive Power]

Game back ups, photo's video files and documents.

I have collection of Retro gaming magazines as PDF's and over 400GB of emulator game roms. Pointless putting them on an SSD. Many older games will still work fine on HDD's

There's still a use for spinning hard discs yet. Modern games are best left on SSD's.

[smokerob79]

anything older then 2010 would run fine on them but you will have long load times....would love to know the CPU that supports 4 M.2's without cutting lanes from the GPU.....

[Bad Aim]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von smokerob79:

anything older then 2010 would run fine on them but you will have long load times....would love to know the CPU that supports 4 M.2's without cutting lanes from the GPU.....

Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
Asus ROG Strix Z890-E motherboard.

The motherboard actually has 7 NVMe slots, three of which are PCIe 5.0 x4 compatible.

[Midnight Aurais]

its on a game basis open world or ssd requirement then off course they go on the ssd due to more i/o reads even older games

while open world games stick to the ssd even in older titles the rest is often fine on a hdd a thing people forget is that old games are optimized to run on hdd the claims people give that old games also run better on ssd's is due to them having very slow hard drives so they get a uplift but only as fast as a fast hdd

the optimizations do not turn off just because you have a ssd you might have encountered it before a loading screen that loads nothing because the ssd has already loaded the game you are still sitting out the timer which was done so people do not see the loading done by the hdd even if you see a loading bar go up its fake

majority of indie games even today run fine from a hard drive aswel because there still games released with hard drives in mind just because a ssd is faster does not always mean its the fastest solution to a completing a task

[Bad Aim]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Midnight Aurais:

its on a game basis open world or ssd requirement then off course they go on the ssd due to more i/o reads even older games

while open world games stick to the ssd even in older titles the rest is often fine on a hdd a thing people forget is that old games are optimized to run on hdd the claims people give that old games also run better on ssd's is due to them having very slow hard drives so they get a uplift but only as fast as a fast hdd

the optimizations do not turn off just because you have a ssd you might have encountered it before a loading screen that loads nothing because the ssd has already loaded the game you are still sitting out the timer which was done so people do not see the loading done by the hdd even if you see a loading bar go up its fake

majority of indie games even today run fine from a hard drive aswel because there still games released with hard drives in mind just because a ssd is faster does not always mean its the fastest solution to a completing a task

Well said. I would hazard a guess that you are right. Thinking back on this question, game developers are, mostly, not just assuming every PC has a SSD, they are going to assume that most people have a HDD. Thus, really any game should work on a HDD unless specifically stated on the system requirements.

So some of my older games, such as Star Wars: Galaxies, Star Wars: The Old Republic, Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, Transformers: Fall of Cybertron, Star Wars: Forces of Corruption, should work fine on a HDD with little to no noticeable performance issues.

Can I assume that if I wanted to play any of the Dynasty Warriors or Total War games, even the older ones, it would be best to use the NVMe drives? Also, when NVMe 5.0 drives become more and more common, is there going to be a major bump in performance? I know the read/write speeds are insane. But does that mean better performance on games?

[smokerob79]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Bad Aim:

Ursprünglich geschrieben von smokerob79:

anything older then 2010 would run fine on them but you will have long load times....would love to know the CPU that supports 4 M.2's without cutting lanes from the GPU.....

Intel Core Ultra 7 265K
Asus ROG Strix Z890-E motherboard.

The motherboard actually has 7 NVMe slots, three of which are PCIe 5.0 x4 compatible.

yeah looked it up.....you have 24 lanes max....meaning you only have 8 PCI lanes for the GPU.....man i wish they would do a real 32 lanes on the CPU's.....people are going to need it in the coming years as everything moves to M.2's

[Rumpelcrutchskin]

I use it mostly for visual novels, adventure games, puzzlers, light strategy games etc. Stuff that doesn`t load much resources and wont really need to be on SSD.

[HypersleepyNaputunia]

2019 or before could be general cutoff.

Also can copy games to ssd when you play them alot compared to the games that just sit most of time

[Talby]

all my spinning rust are strictly backups these days, ssd prices just keep dropping. 1Tb now under $50 for sata[www.amazon.com] and M2[www.amazon.com], have a few of those with varying capacity and so far so good!

[Viking2121]

I got my entire library downloaded, 240 games, plus all the other games from other launchers, I do have 3 2tb SSD's, I keep the ones I play or more likely to play or plan to play on them.

I got a 12TB I keep the others on in my NAS, its mapped as a drive and I only got a 1gbps network, I played Need For Speed Unbound this way recently, worked fine, longer load times of course, but no problems otherwise.

Idk why people are giving dates, Dates don't mean anything, most games even today will have no issues running on a HDD, some will have issues and pop ins and other strange issues especially on 5400rpm drives, but how a game caches or loads things is not the same as other games, so to me its silly saying oh anything from 2019 blah blah should be on a SSD, it just don't work like that.

Of course SSD's are cheap, why I got 3 2tb m.2's, but if you got a smaller SSD and are out of room, use the HDD in the mean time if you got it, Definitely would look for a deal on a SSD though.

[Bad Aim]

Ursprünglich geschrieben von Viking2121:

I got my entire library downloaded, 240 games, plus all the other games from other launchers, I do have 3 2tb SSD's, I keep the ones I play or more likely to play or plan to play on them.

I got a 12TB I keep the others on in my NAS, its mapped as a drive and I only got a 1gbps network, I played Need For Speed Unbound this way recently, worked fine, longer load times of course, but no problems otherwise.

Idk why people are giving dates, Dates don't mean anything, most games even today will have no issues running on a HDD, some will have issues and pop ins and other strange issues especially on 5400rpm drives, but how a game caches or loads things is not the same as other games, so to me its silly saying oh anything from 2019 blah blah should be on a SSD, it just don't work like that.

Of course SSD's are cheap, why I got 3 2tb m.2's, but if you got a smaller SSD and are out of room, use the HDD in the mean time if you got it, Definitely would look for a deal on a SSD though.

C Drive: WD Black SN850X 4TB NVMe
E Drive: WD Black 2TB HDD
F Drive: WD Black SN850X 2TB NVMe
G Drive: WD Black SN770 2TB NVMe

Unused Drives: WD Black 1TB HDD x2, WD Black 2TB HDD, WG Gold 10TB HDD x4, WD Black 500GB NVMe

My MB can handle 4 SATA connections and 7 NVMe M.2 drives. Three of those drives are 5.0 x4 compatible.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

When you can get a 4TB ssd now for under $200 where is it an issue where you need to have games on a HDD