This result was, IMO, to be expected - HDDs are still fine, but SSDs will load things in much quicker. Though to be honest, I wouldn't bother going along the HDD route with just a 320GB drive, unless I needed some extra storage space quickly and it was the only thing available. 256GB SSDs can be had at about £25 now (used) and 500GB SSDs can be had for under £50. The thing that hard drives do come in handy for, other than storing data: higher capacity devices. 2TB HDD's can be comfortably had for under £50, whereas a 2TB SSD will cost significantly more than £100.
For those needing tonnes of storage for some reason it's understandable. For me tho, today I wouldn't buy hdd of 2tb or less. Only if I need more than 4tb for something. Of course, those who can't afford a more expensive ssd also makes sense, but for me without wanting to spend a lot on my pc, I think the cost for ssd is justified. cheaper (still great) m.2 nvme ssd's dropped to as low as 160-170 for 2tb. Now they got a raise tho because of WD messing up their stock.
No shit lol This result is expected by everyone including RGIHD, But it was still cool to check back on. And yes, HDD is still the cheaper better way for mass storage - Even for games. Even though personally I have a 2TB SSD for my games and an MVMe SSD for boot.
Same. I have all my games stored on a 2 TB HDD that cost almost nothing, and I don't experience any serious issues with lag, load times, textures popping in, etc. With that being said, I do have a 500 GB SSD as my boot drive and for other miscellaneous files and a 1 TB NVMe drive that I got from a Newegg bundle when I bought my 3070 TI that I still haven't used because my 2 TB HDD is still only half full after 3 years of use.
@@JohnSmith-nj9qo you would never get lag/pop ins on a regular hdd 😂 you do understand all textures needed are loaded into RAM right? Nothing is running directly from the HDD.
As a HDD gamer, I would like to point out to my fellow gamers that my PC takes a minute to get into the password screen, then another minute to enter the windows home screen and just becomes unusable for a couple of minutes or so. And by far the gaming experience has been fine just like shown in this video, however textures often take a fair amount of time to load when you change in-game graphical settings.
In the internet there is a way shown to skip the password screen, like I do on my Windows 10. It's so much more relaxing to turn the pc on, do something and after return it's ready to go.
My corrupted HDD took about 5 to 6 minutes before being usable. Windows Update f***ed up my drive during a whole Windows system update ( lost 300Gb of files, including some local savegames ). Getting an SSD on my desktop was the best decision I could make. Definitely much faster and QoL improved drastically
That reduced variety reminds of me of how GTA 4 behaved. I'd imagine that the HDD mode fixes stutters that would be there on a 7200rpm drive but a 5400rpm is still too slow.
@I dont read notfications I have thousands people always talk about how poorly it runs but honestly I remember no frame rate issues with a GTX580 , 8GB of ram and a i7 2700k. I wonder if it just has issues with new hardware , Never tried running it on my 10900k RTX3070 pc because honestly why bother playing it.
@@Jasontvnd9 Ding ding ding! You see. That setup and gpu was most likely optimized at one point specifically for that game. New hardware not so much. I actually have no issues at all with it on a RX570 though. Buttery smooth 60fps locked. Might tickle 58-59 when im shooting RPGS blowing up cars but yeah. Runs fine. 4th gen Xeon(i7 4790 without integrated gfx) as well. 16 gb ram. I did play it on my SSD though and not my 3tb HDD.
@@Jasontvnd9 Yeah its unfortunate, old game engines seemingly don't go well with new hardware. I want to play some older games on my 3080ti and while the games obviously get high fps, there's always huge drops that ruin the gameplay.
hdds are fenomenal for storage, cheap and tons of space, also durability and reliability... but for windows no. ive used an HDD for many many years just recently changed to SSD ive noticed the dif but in games as u said is not impressive diff but once you taste SSD you dont wanna wait no more.
why would you buty 1tb of ssd for storage when u can buy 2tb of hdd storage for 45 or even more if u really need the storage u can buy 8TB of storage for 90.... ssds are not meant for storage at a good price. hdd deserve their place, and wont be removed from it ANY TIME SOON.
As a note, HDD mode partially works by effectively increasing vRAM requirements in CP2077 if I'm not mistaken. So the less variety is probably because it keeps yanking the same assets from vRAM so it doesn't have to go back out to disk. If you have a card with a small buffer, it might possible be worse or even more samey stuff will show up.
Gaming with an HDD today is just a taste of what my generation had to go through loading games like Elite from a cassette tape deck back in the early 80s. Not only were there 5-10 minute load times, there was always that moment just as the load was finishing when you held your breath waiting to see if the game's start screen would appear, or you were doomed to rewind and sit through another interminable game load. I upgraded my main laptop to SSD the moment the drives became affordable, and it breathed new life into it. I'd forgotten just how much better SSDs were until one crapped out on me and I had to switch back to a laptop HDD while I got it replaced under warranty. It was so slow I thought something was seriously wrong with my Windows installation, but in the end I had to concede the HDD was just that slow. Crazy how quickly we forget how much faster everything is these days.
I played through Doom (2016) on a (wait for it) 320gb IDE (yes, not sata) hard drive, because my most capable motherboard at the time (the only one supporting quad cores) didn't work with any sata drives (hdd or ssd). Just like shown here, after the loading was done, it wasn't bad at all, mostly stable 60 fps and even the loading times were all under one minute, so it was actually doable, if not that great.
I feel like more and more developers are not even testing their games on older hardware but for some reason I feel like doom was built to run on anything. I'm sure a few tweaks to games code here and there could make hard drives still usable and not ewaste.
In my personal experience its really noticable in Kingdom come deliverence betwen ssd and hdd. From texture streaming in game and cutsene, also in cutsene loading and when talking to npc because its an rpg game (for context if you use slow hardisk its always dark screen for a split second)
i’ve used many of these laptop hdd as supplemental storage in sff builds some as small as 160gb from over a decade ago and they work great usually consume less power than their desktop hdd counterparts are lighter and easier to mount in many different ways and cases in fact just zip tied one to a bracket meant for a full size drive in a slimline case today glad to see someone thoroughly test and cover the topic in an approach that anyone with spare parts might actually question when they find one of these little gems in a drawer or something great job
Getting content out is a hard thing to do and making use of anything you have on hand to tell a story about is the way forward, well done RGHD keep up the hard work. :)
The fact that 'Far Cry 6' even gave up trying to load, although that's probably just like a fail-safe so that it doesn't get stuck, really shows that HDDs are phasing out of the norm. I wonder how "AC: Valhalla" would do, though, cause even on an NVMe I found that it takes quite a while to load into the game, depending on the area you're loading into. - Though, I have to say that I think loading-times improved somewhat when they did that file-optimization some months ago. - It doesn't do the same thing that it stops loading, though. At least that I know of.
as someone who used to have an HDD as main boot drive/storage, using my computer was like driving an old car, you had to let it "warm up" to fully use it, like a solid 5 minutes. my mind was blown away when i bought a SATA SSD for a main boot drive. Sooner or later, i'll make the leap to a M.2 SATA or an NVME if i can afford them
Still playing on my old 7200 rpm Barracuda, With the OS running on NVMe and video games on the HDD I noticed only occasional stuttering especially in Control. The overall experience isn't bad but may change in future. ;)
No you want a bigger hdd than a 1tb since the price per TB is way less when you buy a 4-12tb hdd. Hell I'm about to buy a 12tb hdd from Amazon for $160 for movies and games.
@Maroedes it sounds like your old laptop HDD won't load because it probably has bad sectors. Also if your games are stored on your hdd after it was already full it will be slower since the hdd writes its data from the outside of the disk to the inside. So since when a disk is spinning the outer edge spins faster than the center So the reading speed will be higher.
I use an 8TB WD HDD for most of my larger games and I can't tell the difference between that and either of my SSDs. My 2012 Barracuda isn't much worse. I guess once a hard drive is in the 150-220MB/s range, most games are software bottlenecked. It'd be interesting to try this with the few games that recommend or outright require SSDs now. Also, this is conjecture, but if you had all of the games installed at once, you might have seen more issues in the last games you installed because they were written closer to the center of the drive's platters.
@@randybobandy9828 Before 2009 perhaps. but when games are streaming assets from the drive into RAM during gameplay, (very slow) drive speed can cause pop-in or other issues. Besides, I was mainly referring to load times.
This video came out just the right time. I recently purchased a 2TB 5400 WD Blue HDD for my laptop (there were no 7200 ones in this size), and I'm quite happy with it. In most of the games loading times are fine, often you can't even say it's slow, and read/write speeds of big files are over 100MB/s. Compared to my old Dual Core G551, my 6-core G531 has basically no loading issues ingame with the HDD, in contrast to my old laptop with the SSD. Though FH5 is on the SSD, FH4 is running happily maxed out without a hiccup and any streaming issues, which I experienced a lot with my old PC (w/ SSD!) in these games. And there are games like SnowRunner which loads surprisingly fast (10-15s) even if you have it on an HDD.
I still use my 6 years old 7200rpm HDD and I'm pretty satisfied with it tbh since here where I live, for the price of 1 SSD you can buy like 2 or sometimes 3 HDDs, so for a torrent user like me, storage size really makes all the difference, the more the better....
@@alincioaba 256GB is better value ATM, but yeah run OS on SS for the biggest benefit, and with a 256GB you can still a game or two on the drive if you want speed.
@@darthwiizius I don't know the prices in his country. In my country, Romania, 240 is the sweet spot but there were times when a good 120gb SSD was about 15 dollars and the 240gb 35$+
Where I'm at the cheapest HDD comes out to $13.50 per TB and the cheapest SSD comes to $90 per TB...that's a massive price difference and it's why I still use HDD for mass storage and SSD for my OS and main games and programs.
i use my hdd 3 years and 4 month, in some games i started to get stutters that earlier i didnt get, doesnt matter which settings in gta 5 i get similar fps, tried to install new system, previous drivers and newer. programs shows that hdd;s health is 100%, but tbh i dont belive it
I use a 4TB WD Blue HDD 5400 RPM as 2nd Drive in my Gaming PC, i harvest this one from an external HDD and it works perfect. In this case with Cyperpunk, u can run this Game from an USB Stick, i test this last year, ya there are longer loading times, but other than this it work
HDD would be fine for a lot of games, but competitive games where load times are super important is when it makes the biggest difference. With how much cheaper SSDs are compared to a few years ago it’s totally worth it.. I didn’t upgrade to an SSD for awhile, but when I did my PC felt brand new. I keep all my games on an SSD and use my 4TB HDD for gameplay recordings, music and stuff like that
I used a 5400 RPM drive as recording drive for years. Let's not forget that 65 MB/s is about 520 mbps, which is way more bandwith than any reasonable recording. And my games and stuff are still on a couple 7200 RPM drives and so far there wasn't anything that made me feel I had to change that.
Just a few years ago when a 250gb SSD was $99usd, people were storing their games on a standard HDD. But back in the day, which was 10 years ago or more, we used to buy a 2nd or 3rd drive and run those in RAID 0. A lot of people bought those WD Velcioraptor 10k RPM drives, but those had a small capacity and they were expensive. I always went with the 1tb Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, and I still have a few of them running in my systems.
I think a lot of hype is around NVME drives load times … but compared to a SSDs they’re not blazingly faster for the majority of daily tasks and gaming needs by the majority. For the semi-pro/pro users doing video encoding etc, NVME is a massive time saver. Even the new DirectDriveDirectStorage (it goes by a few names) imo, won’t make a huge difference compared to SSDs for any gaming overall in soon to come titles …. But maybe in 5+ years time, this may change.
What's probably going to change more in five years is the increasing inconvenience of mounting 2.5" (and 3.5") drives in new case designs. The price premium NVMe once had has largely evaporated. 80mm bare sticks are almost certainly cheaper to manufacture than basically the same thing but with a shell around it. OEMs are probably making more of a profit from NVMe compared to 2.5" SATA drives even at the same price so they'll want to sell more of those. It's going to be more of a push upgrade like new generations of PCIe and DDR memory than based on consumer pressure.
I use an HDD as my main gaming drive and yes loading is longer, and sometimes I do notice a blatant data streaming stutter in open world games, but other than that it's perfectly fine for gaming in 2022 IMO. Edit- Also that HDD used in this video was on the poopy side of HDD's lol
Data streaming errors have I never experienced. I own a more expensive WD Black 7200RPM 6TB drive with 128MB cache, double the normal amount. It is slower, but not as much as "normal" HDD's. I get sequential reads and writes of over 200MB/s, over 50MB/s faster than my other WD Red drive with around 140MB/s. I most definitely notice the jump to the Black drive. 🤔🤔
I still wouldn't invest in one If you're gaming. For storage they're fine, but yeah for gaming they're pretty terrible. Especially if you're the last one loading on a multiplayer title making others wait.
@@chase7974 If games continue to get larger and larger without the developers learning how to compress game files like Hitman 3 developer IO Interactive you would need a pretty big budget going over 1TB SSD capacity. 🤔🤔
@@sondrel2 I don't see that being an issue. A 2tb SSD is only around $150 which is more than enough for most people. You really should be using an SSD anyways as this point in time. They're better in everyway.
@@chase7974 Even though I run the operating system on a PCIe SSD, considering I get a 4TB HDD brand new for 91.27 USD I am not changing my game drives for now. 😅😅
I use a 500gb 5400rpm drive as my second drive for bigger games. Honestly it’s not that bad for online games as once the map is loaded all good and money is tight now Also them Asseno SSDs are brilliant value for the money
Have a 1TB WD Blue 7200RPM drive as a secondary drive, under $50AUD new. Good enough to run most games directly but I mainly use it for storage of large game files and shift games between SSD and HDD depending on what I'm currently playing, both Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC let you easily swap files between drives.
FYI : Long loading screen sometimes could be beneficial. You know, sometime Dev's put some useful tips, tricks, and any other gameplay related suggestions that won't be noticeable if your game load too fast.
I've got 4 diffenent drive types in my PC. My boot drive is a 1TB M.2 NVME drive and is rather awesome, I've also got a 480GB SATA SSD, a 2TB SSHD "hybrid harddrive", and a 6TB HDD. I happily run most games off the harddrives as there is barely any noticable difference for most games. Some of the newer games are worth moving onto an SSD for a quicker loading experience and when I've finished playing them, I can move it back to the HDD for storage and occasional use.
I like how in the first couple seconds of the video he makes a generalisation that's actually wrong on a case by case basis, even without consideration to factors like cost or data/information density
HDD's run fighting games really well, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 play really well. Best with games that have small levels or stages that can be fully loaded into the RAM. Loading times are longer, but once the level is loaded it runs ass well as on a SSD.
I still have a large capacity HDD for "older" (2017 and older) and less demanding games as they weren't made with SSD in mind, and you can store so damn much on them.
My 8 year old Toshiba laptop took like 5 minutes to boot up Windows 10. After replacing the HDD with a Crucial MX500 SSD the wait was down to around 20 seconds. The difference really is noticeable!
when it comes to dealing with hard drives, the part that really sucks with high GB games is the daily defragmenting and cleaning required to optimize load times.
I remember installing Far Cry 5 in my old 1TB 5400 WD drive (could've installed in my M.2 but I wanted the loading screens in that game to last longer, funnily enough). One time the grass wouldn't load as I was driving and I thought either the drive or my GPU was dying. It never happened again after that.
I use a 15 year old 2.5 inch 300gb hard drive that has 40mbs per second read/write. I loaded Red dead 2 on it, runs fine graphically but I do notice some weird artefacts in the sound. I love it
I just bought a $67 4TB WD RED PLUS CMR as a Media PC game secondary storage drive. I also have a 1tb ADATA SX8200 NVMe drive for primary games. I just want to be able to install any game. The hdd is fine for the purpose of big secondary games. It’s a nice cheap way to be able to install any game you want. Modern software like steam and origin make it easy to move games around from fast primary storage to slow secondary storage. So if you find you are playing a old game a bunch just simply select it to move over to your fast drive if you want. I also have a similar setup on my main system but with a 2tb XPG s70 blade NVMe 4.0 and a 4tb 7200rpm hdd secondary game storage. Pairing a modern big hdd with a ssd/NVMe for game storage frees you up to blanket install any game you want.
After tasting the speeds of SSDs, I can only recommend hard drives in the case of building a retro Win 95/98 PC or cases where SSDs aren't a viable option. Not that there's too many people out there who will use such outdated OSes but you never know, do you? 1 TB or lower capacity SSDs are no longer as expensive as they used to be anyway and will help to boot your PC faster and make feel it more responsive in general. Edit: two other points to consider are that SSDs produce less heath and noise than mechanical hard drives and are less prone to damage from falls, shocks, hits and impacts.
Even on the vintage PC front there are other options like CF to IDE which are more viable and easier to work with. I believe a few IDE SSDs exist too. But up to about Windows XP I’d say even the hard drive still feels pretty smooth anyway, since the OS was much simpler then.
I'd like to say that HDD's basically work like a vinyl record in that a needle is used to read grooves in a disk. Basically, the faster the disk is spinning the faster the needle can read those grooves and a disk with more area, or storage, will take longer for the needle to fully read. I.E. More storage on a slower spinning disk increases read times exponentially. I would highly recommend only using a 5400rpm drive if you have less than maybe 750gb but anything more and you basically need a 7200rpm drive for it to be acceptable in daily, average performance like booting your pc and running a web browser.
Are you sure about that speed vs area/storage ? I think it goes the other way around. The thing is, having the assets in the "first" (that is, outer) portions of the HDD vs the "last" (that is, inner) portions of the disk. The revolutions per minute is the same, but the inner part has less data/surface/area than the outer one, so things that are on the outer area are faster to load. That's why a full HDD will go slower and slower. That alone, is, I'd say, a very good reason to NOT bother with small storage HDDs, since if you keep them full, you might slow them even more. Also, having plenty of space allows for easy defragmentation. Also, having higher capacity drives means that data is either more compact, so having the same speed allows reading more per second and/or also have more platters, which is kind of having multiple hdds in raid 0. So, again, having a higher capacity drive would actually help with speed to.
@@Winnetou17 Well, higher density platters means faster data transfer, but current HDDs are not designed to read from multiple platters simultaneously(read/write arm has multiple heads for each side of each platter, but only reads/writes on one head at a time). Some company(Seagate?) has been working on drives with two read/write arms(so double the number of heads) that can in fact read/write simultaneously(so doubling max sustained read/write from around 200 MB/s to over 400MB/s) which gets them close to slower SATA 3 SSDs in sustained reads/writes but still abysmally slow when comparing random reads/writes. I wish HDDs would be set up so they could write an entire byte(both sides of 4 platters) or two bytes(both sides of 8 platters) simultaneously(double that for drives with dual arm array tech) at which point you exceed SATA 3 bandwidth capacity by quite a bit(how to connect to system?) but random reads and writes are still a lot slower than even SATA SSDs due to random seek times( a few milliseconds each) vs SSD IOPS( high tens of thousands per second on SATA SSDs, hundreds of thousands on NVMe SSDs or even millions when you have a number of them in a RAID 0 array). Edit: A lot of stuff(OS, games, other programs) don't load sequentially. They are still faster on SSD. Pictures, video, and music(which do load sequentially) are fine on HDD. I personally have a system with with a large NVMe SSD(OS, programs, and a some games) and several larger HDDs with my game libraries and other files. Older, smaller games run fine of HDD and when I want to play a newer larger game one of those types of games out of the SSD and swap the big game a do want to play into the SSD in the previously occupied space. The SSD in question is an Intel 660p 2TB(a QLC drive). I'm thinking around 500GB for OS and programs, 1TB for games and 500GB free to work as SLC cache(so around 125GB, actually 128GB since the drive actually has almost 2.2 trillion bytes of usable space so 512GB OS/programs, 1024GB for games and 512GB(128GB SLC) for cache. Any more full of actual data and the drive could slow down a lot. Steam library on a 10TB external USB 3.0 HDD, other libraries(Epic, GOG, Origin and Ubisoft) on a 4TB HDD. Another 4TB HDD for additional file space. 20TB total storage(for now).
@@jtenorj Yeah, you're right, it's multiple platters, but still only one read. I remember seeing the head, and it's still basically one head that can reach all the platters. So, as it is now it would work only if the data needed would be on the same area but in a different platter. I guess something like that can be made, but it sounds like it would work in 3% of the cases and be a massive headache in the rest of 97%. Speaking of games, aren't OSes now a bit more clever with putting the data, especially if it gets statistics of its usage ? Also, speaking of where the files are, I remember, the first time I've learned about this, when I was a kid and I saw that Quake 2 and Quake 3 had basically just one big file of 700 MB (which was quite big at that time). It was exactly for this reason, so there's maximum chances of it being in the same spot and able to be read with sequencial speeds. Lastly, are there controllers or software that you can use to have x GB of QLC behave like x/4 SLC (similarly with TLC and MLC I guess) ? That sounds like a pretty nice idea, when you need it.
Glad you made this video! There might still be a use for these old hdds. I have one in my R11 that was gathering dust. Here’s to Direct Storage coming to PC!
And it still requires the games to actually implement it. Which means around 99.9% of all the games I will own within the next 3-8 years won't even have it.
Hi @randomgaminginhd, I really love your content and it inspired me in the last years to build budget rigs for family and friends. I discovered that the 10100F and 12100F are really the masters of budget CPUs, but always cosidered to build an Xeon 5650/5670 PC. But what is the more budget efficient option? I thought this question is worthy of a RGIH-video. Kind greetings from Germany, keep up the good work!
Worth it to save up for an a more modern SSD. Nowadays even Gen4 M.2s are relatively affordable and the improvement in read/writes over an HDD is astronomical. This video is with a SATA SSD which is on average 1/4 the speed of Gen 3 M.2. Gen 4 is on average 6-8 times faster than the SSD that’s being used for testing here.
Honestly Laptop Hardrives where the best way for me to start PC Gaming. They were quiet and had my standard of optimal speed. Nothing extraordinary but it got the job done.
as someone who lived on a 5400rpm hard drive for the longest time until I SSD'd my old desktop, it was tolerable but not pleasant. Windows would take ages to become "usable" after punching the password in, although games did run a-okay once past the loading screen. Heck, even now I still have some games on a spare 5400rpm drive.
I had a normal WD 1TB 7200RPM drive for a good 3 to 4 years and it was fairly decent I must say. It loaded games reasonably well. Though the SSD does show a difference, I still wouldn't have much issue if I had to stick with a decent HDD
Time to swap my nvme for a 54k drive, I’m so sick of my game loading so quick that I can’t even make coffee or enjoy a small jog. Thanks for the video going to circuit city now.
My old 2011 Gateway laptop (that I still use today!) had that exact same WD Scorpio Blue hard drive in it! I have since upgraded to a 250GB WD SSD but I remember the hard drive being quite awful. It was brutally slow booting into Windows 10 and annoyingly, it would park the heads every few seconds which would cause the laptop to freeze for a couple seconds multiple times a minute. I eventually moved the drive into my PS3 but it has since crashed.
I made do with a 7200RPM HDD well into 2016 when SSDs were finally at an acceptable price point (but found SanDisk drive to be highly unreliable while the local brand, Inland, is still working to this day). I had also had a 10,000RPM WD Raptor drive for an OS drive as it was only 150GB but it was very quick for a hard drive. I still have these HDDs lying around and other period correct HDDs in Win 98 and Win XP builds.
I still use a 7200rpm hard drive. It literally takes 5-10 minutes untill Windows boots up and the PC becomes usable because once it loads the desktop it takes a few more minutes until it loads everything else and becomes usable. After that it isn't too bad except for some more modern games but I am using a GTX 1050 so a lot of games don't work good enough in the first place.
Do you guys remember a few years ago a new HDD came out for enterprise only and it had dual headers so it had read speeds close to a SATA SSD. I guess it never worked out because it was never released for consumers.
I remember more than once I've reinstalled Windows on a physical hard drive because it loaded so slow that I thought Windows was broken.. Yay for SSDs..
When I built my PC a couple of years ago, I put in a M.2 boot drive and 500GB SSD for games. I filled that up quickly and I dug out an old 1TB laptop drive pretty much the same as shown here. I put my primary games on the SSD and “Archive” ones I’m not playing on the HDD. The loading times are comparable to what’s shown in the video. I don’t have the patience to do that with everything. I recently grabbed a 4TB Seagate Barracuda because I was running out of room again. TLDR: HDD slow, SSD faster, duh.
I don't even have the space on my ssd for the majority of my games. So even if I were to shuffle stuff around it wouldn't fit. But then so far I haven't noticed any issues with disc access
My 8tb wd black 7200rpm is still very quick, HDD’s still have some hope left especially for mass storage. Loads forza H5 in about 45 seconds, however I’m running a 12600k so maybe that helps over the i3
It will be interesting to see this test, if and when, directstorage takes off. Obviously older, and current titles won't be affected, but would be extremely interesting to see how HDD's would perform in thoose games. If at all.
Yeah ive had this be a big problem recently on my 5400 rpm and Low Platter count hdds with streaming issues and long load times. Im moving a lot of games to ssds now and keeping non game files on hdds
Newer HDD's perform much better than this I have an Exos X18 in my rig atm with 100's of games installed with no texture popin & quick load times, read & writes are great 278mb+ the drive is a bit noisy though!
I went boot drive SSD back in 2008/9 and all SSD in 2014. Nowadays, whenever I use mechanical drives for anything other than large file storage I just get frustrated. The last time I tried to to play modded Skyrim on HDD, I gave up. The delays encountered simply entering and exiting an Inn were ridiculous. I do hope that one day NVME drives start to make a difference in load times over bog standard SSD's.
God my laptop doesn't even have a SATA connector or even space for a 2.5" drive. It's not super high end either but HP got smart and put 2 NVME connections inside of it. Yeah a tad more expensive but it came with 1TB and I added a 512TB to the other slot. Getting 3500/600 on the reads/writes, Q8T1 and 2200/400 on Q1T1. Being someone old enough to remember the ancient times (MFM and IDE) we used to be blown away by ATA100 and ATA133 speeds. Things have come a long, long way.
Buffer, health of headers (check reallocated sectors and seeking error rates in SMART stats) and motherboard limits are critical to avoid stuttering from HDD. I am running GTA V without virtual memory since i upgraded to 12GB of RAM (2GB used by Radeon R7) and problems are few. Problems comes from disk cache used by DXVK, typical from any Vulkan usage.
My storage setup is a 500GB M.2 drive for the system and a few critical games that "require" it (like FS2020) and 2 2TB HDDs (7200 rpm) because HDDs are so cheap compared to SSDs. In fact I watched this video while playing Forza Horizon 5, which is installed on an HDD. Loading times are slow, as expected, and sometimes world rendering doesn't keep up (reducing graphic settings from Ultra to High fixes most of it with nearly indistinguishable differences) but if I have to put money somewhere, it's in the CPU and GPU instead of storage, so that's what I did.
Everyone gaming with high-capacity SSDs nowadays while I'm still using a 5400rpm 1tb laptop hard drive that I salvaged from my dead laptop 5 years ago as my game drive.
I know of one game where an SSD is pretty much the minimum requirement. I played Borderlands 3 on my old 7200 rpm drive and it ran like absolute crap, the rest of my system was fairly modern and it should have handled it quite easily, but the HDD was just so slow. Stuttering was the norm and upon switching to a SSD I haven't come across this issue anymore.
I currently have 32TB's of storage on my main pc.. will most likely be adding more at some point 3TB of nvme, 12TB of ssd (with 8TB of that in raid 0) , the rest is hdd for archive / media use
I have a 1/2TB 2.5 inch WD black 7200 drive in my PC which I use for games with file sizes up to 4GB, there's nothing wrong with using slower drives if you temper expectations and use them appropriately.
G'day Random, Down here in Australa for Low Budget Builds while 240GB SSDs are now matching 120GB SSDs under $50AUD 1TB is still really expensive at about $150AUD compared to $45AUD for a 1TB 7200RPM HDD. As you said during Gameplay there is not much difference unless you intentionally look but that $100AUD can make a much bigger performance difference as an upgrade to what you spend on a Used GPU or even if you are buying new from a RTX3050 to a RX6600
TL;DR if you have a decent modern hard drive, performance is a lot better than on older drives, in my experience. I still load all my games on HDD, when you can get an 8TB HDD for the price of a 1TB SSD, it's a complete no-brainer if you have a lot of stuff, and *I have a lot of stuff.* On my current HDD, which is actually an external Seagate Game Drive, 8tb just as I mentioned, I actually don't notice that much of a difference in loading times compared to my NVMe, even though it's not just an HDD, but connected over USB3 and not SATA3. I have also installed windows on this drive, boot times don't even suffer that much. I can't say the same for a lot of the older drives in my collection though, so I've chalked it up to improvements both in hardware and software over the years. I played through the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077 on a hard drive a few months after it launched, at the time I was using a 2TB Seagate Barracuda internal 2.5" drive that was about two years old, and never had any of the sort of issues you experienced in this video, it actually loaded in on par with the SSD times you listed, though Cyberpunk's loading behavior may be different on the latest version compared to back then so it's not entirely comparable.
I can’t go back to an HDD from an SSD for modern games, I’d argue it’s just as important as the GPU. Older titles though seem just fine generally, most don’t take more than a few seconds to load, and if they did load faster on an ssd the gains are much smaller.
Games today are too large for this too work BUT an old trick is if you are stuck using a slow spinning rust drive and have lots of ram then create a ram disk disk and run portable apps from it. It's faster.
Yeah I have 3 and half TB of SSD storage in my PC, I do use HDD's for my back ups, and I use some old 500GB 5400 rpm drives for a nas box just because, which are fine for network transfers over a 1gb connection.
the current main rig is all SSD and NVME.. but i have my old PC loaded with ALL my old HDDs. laptop, desktop, etc dating back to 2006.. not a single one has failed and because of this i have MULTIPLE backups of everything important on multiple drives.. and i also have external drives in a gun safe for safe keeping.... as for gaming? they were fine. but yea.. speed is addictive.
pro tip, hdds are still just fine for most games 4 years old or more so long as you can tolerate the load times and have plenty of system and graphics memory. Especially if you have a bigger faster hdd. Much of my steam library is on a 3tb full sized platter right now, and it's a comfortable way to store everything from half life, to half life two, to fallout new vegas, all the bioshocks, dishonored, tf2, and even some better optimized recent issues like doom eternal (and 2016) and the latest borderlands (as well as all the priors). These drives are pretty cheap used, often taken from older server arrays, and definitely still have a place in user desktops for games that dont need absurd storage.
Raid arrays can run even newer games nearly as good as SSD, I got 8x 7200 rpm drives in raid 6 with perc h710, the ram caching on the controller also helps
I still have my HDD but it's a WD Black. It's not as fast as my SSDs, but it's still pretty fast. I never had any weird dips during games that were well optimized. I do have hiccups on some DX12 games because they're optimized pretty poorly, but overall it's a great experience. HDDs are great for gaming if : 1. It doesn't have an OS on it and 2. if it's 7200 RPM with high read and write speeds. I play Cyberpunk off my HDD and the game never stuttered for me.
This could've been a good April fools video where you loop the loading animation til one second before the video ends and be like woah, that was fast. Could've even said it was m.3 the version of nvme so fast it's slow
Most of the games nowdays come with big file chunks that are fast to load even from slow hdd, and they depend more on cpu which is decompressing them but once they are loaded in to ram (if there is enough of it) it shouldn't really make any difference. But with direct storage that is coming to new games soon there might be a bigger difference in loading times for slow drives because files will be packaged in smaller chunks and not compressed so they can be quickly copied to vram and ram. Time will show..
Attempting to use a 2010/2011 Samsung 1TB 5400RPM HDD was pretty much impossible. One drive that has been a significant outlier is the 60GB PATA HDD I pulled from my Grandmother's old Asus A3H (its got a 160GB drive now). Even with its mediocre specs it felt as fast as far newer 7200rpm laptop drives under XP.
FH5 did have issues with my 5400 rpm drive from 2013 (hts545050A7E380) in combination with my 2014 cpu (i7-4790), which showed the slow loading warning during gameplay
This result was, IMO, to be expected - HDDs are still fine, but SSDs will load things in much quicker.
Though to be honest, I wouldn't bother going along the HDD route with just a 320GB drive, unless I needed some extra storage space quickly and it was the only thing available. 256GB SSDs can be had at about £25 now (used) and 500GB SSDs can be had for under £50.
The thing that hard drives do come in handy for, other than storing data: higher capacity devices. 2TB HDD's can be comfortably had for under £50, whereas a 2TB SSD will cost significantly more than £100.
For those needing tonnes of storage for some reason it's understandable.
For me tho, today I wouldn't buy hdd of 2tb or less. Only if I need more than 4tb for something.
Of course, those who can't afford a more expensive ssd also makes sense, but for me without wanting to spend a lot on my pc, I think the cost for ssd is justified.
cheaper (still great) m.2 nvme ssd's dropped to as low as 160-170 for 2tb. Now they got a raise tho because of WD messing up their stock.
No shit lol This result is expected by everyone including RGIHD, But it was still cool to check back on. And yes, HDD is still the cheaper better way for mass storage - Even for games. Even though personally I have a 2TB SSD for my games and an MVMe SSD for boot.
Same. I have all my games stored on a 2 TB HDD that cost almost nothing, and I don't experience any serious issues with lag, load times, textures popping in, etc. With that being said, I do have a 500 GB SSD as my boot drive and for other miscellaneous files and a 1 TB NVMe drive that I got from a Newegg bundle when I bought my 3070 TI that I still haven't used because my 2 TB HDD is still only half full after 3 years of use.
You can buy HDD space for as low as $15 per TB when you buy 8-12tb drives. Hdd storage is dirt cheap.
@@JohnSmith-nj9qo you would never get lag/pop ins on a regular hdd 😂 you do understand all textures needed are loaded into RAM right? Nothing is running directly from the HDD.
As a HDD gamer, I would like to point out to my fellow gamers that my PC takes a minute to get into the password screen, then another minute to enter the windows home screen and just becomes unusable for a couple of minutes or so. And by far the gaming experience has been fine just like shown in this video, however textures often take a fair amount of time to load when you change in-game graphical settings.
In the internet there is a way shown to skip the password screen, like I do on my Windows 10. It's so much more relaxing to turn the pc on, do something and after return it's ready to go.
Can confirm. 15 minutes+ to boot Windows. Another 5 minutes for Firefox to load right after boot into desktop.
My corrupted HDD took about 5 to 6 minutes before being usable. Windows Update f***ed up my drive during a whole Windows system update ( lost 300Gb of files, including some local savegames ). Getting an SSD on my desktop was the best decision I could make. Definitely much faster and QoL improved drastically
Seems like hdd Is slowly failing
@@Innosos Something's off with your drive.
That reduced variety reminds of me of how GTA 4 behaved.
I'd imagine that the HDD mode fixes stutters that would be there on a 7200rpm drive but a 5400rpm is still too slow.
I fix gta4 by using vulkan mod
@I dont read notfications I have thousands people always talk about how poorly it runs but honestly I remember no frame rate issues with a GTX580 , 8GB of ram and a i7 2700k.
I wonder if it just has issues with new hardware , Never tried running it on my 10900k RTX3070 pc because honestly why bother playing it.
@@Jasontvnd9 Ding ding ding! You see. That setup and gpu was most likely optimized at one point specifically for that game. New hardware not so much. I actually have no issues at all with it on a RX570 though. Buttery smooth 60fps locked. Might tickle 58-59 when im shooting RPGS blowing up cars but yeah. Runs fine. 4th gen Xeon(i7 4790 without integrated gfx) as well. 16 gb ram. I did play it on my SSD though and not my 3tb HDD.
@@Jasontvnd9 when using Vulkan mod it will smooth frame than normal like modern game
@@Jasontvnd9 Yeah its unfortunate, old game engines seemingly don't go well with new hardware. I want to play some older games on my 3080ti and while the games obviously get high fps, there's always huge drops that ruin the gameplay.
hdds are fenomenal for storage, cheap and tons of space, also durability and reliability... but for windows no. ive used an HDD for many many years just recently changed to SSD ive noticed the dif but in games as u said is not impressive diff but once you taste SSD you dont wanna wait no more.
256gb SSDs are dirt cheap. OS + 2-3ish (AAA) most played games is the meta for those on a budget.
@@MandoMTL Even 1tb SSDs. WD SN850 1TB NVME drive for only $140 on eBay
@@Zhunter5000 got a 1TB Kingston A2000 NVMe SSD for $112
why would you buty 1tb of ssd for storage when u can buy 2tb of hdd storage for 45 or even more if u really need the storage u can buy 8TB of storage for 90.... ssds are not meant for storage at a good price. hdd deserve their place, and wont be removed from it ANY TIME SOON.
HDDs are far less reliable and even less durable than SSDs
As a note, HDD mode partially works by effectively increasing vRAM requirements in CP2077 if I'm not mistaken. So the less variety is probably because it keeps yanking the same assets from vRAM so it doesn't have to go back out to disk. If you have a card with a small buffer, it might possible be worse or even more samey stuff will show up.
Gaming with an HDD today is just a taste of what my generation had to go through loading games like Elite from a cassette tape deck back in the early 80s. Not only were there 5-10 minute load times, there was always that moment just as the load was finishing when you held your breath waiting to see if the game's start screen would appear, or you were doomed to rewind and sit through another interminable game load.
I upgraded my main laptop to SSD the moment the drives became affordable, and it breathed new life into it. I'd forgotten just how much better SSDs were until one crapped out on me and I had to switch back to a laptop HDD while I got it replaced under warranty. It was so slow I thought something was seriously wrong with my Windows installation, but in the end I had to concede the HDD was just that slow. Crazy how quickly we forget how much faster everything is these days.
Bppp bp bpp bpppp bppppp
tiddleidlidlidl
I played through Doom (2016) on a (wait for it) 320gb IDE (yes, not sata) hard drive, because my most capable motherboard at the time (the only one supporting quad cores) didn't work with any sata drives (hdd or ssd). Just like shown here, after the loading was done, it wasn't bad at all, mostly stable 60 fps and even the loading times were all under one minute, so it was actually doable, if not that great.
I feel like more and more developers are not even testing their games on older hardware but for some reason I feel like doom was built to run on anything.
I'm sure a few tweaks to games code here and there could make hard drives still usable and not ewaste.
In my personal experience its really noticable in Kingdom come deliverence betwen ssd and hdd. From texture streaming in game and cutsene, also in cutsene loading and when talking to npc because its an rpg game (for context if you use slow hardisk its always dark screen for a split second)
i’ve used many of these laptop hdd as supplemental storage in sff builds some as small as 160gb from over a decade ago and they work great usually consume less power than their desktop hdd counterparts are lighter and easier to mount in many different ways and cases in fact just zip tied one to a bracket meant for a full size drive in a slimline case today glad to see someone thoroughly test and cover the topic in an approach that anyone with spare parts might actually question when they find one of these little gems in a drawer or something great job
Getting content out is a hard thing to do and making use of anything you have on hand to tell a story about is the way forward, well done RGHD keep up the hard work. :)
The fact that 'Far Cry 6' even gave up trying to load, although that's probably just like a fail-safe so that it doesn't get stuck, really shows that HDDs are phasing out of the norm.
I wonder how "AC: Valhalla" would do, though, cause even on an NVMe I found that it takes quite a while to load into the game, depending on the area you're loading into. - Though, I have to say that I think loading-times improved somewhat when they did that file-optimization some months ago. - It doesn't do the same thing that it stops loading, though. At least that I know of.
as someone who used to have an HDD as main boot drive/storage, using my computer was like driving an old car, you had to let it "warm up" to fully use it, like a solid 5 minutes.
my mind was blown away when i bought a SATA SSD for a main boot drive.
Sooner or later, i'll make the leap to a M.2 SATA or an NVME if i can afford them
Still playing on my old 7200 rpm Barracuda, With the OS running on NVMe and video games on the HDD I noticed only occasional stuttering especially in Control. The overall experience isn't bad but may change in future.
;)
Try 15000 rom cheata
The "budget" way to go, is to get a 240GB SSD for OS and daily usage. And get a 1TB 7200rpm HDD for games.
No you want a bigger hdd than a 1tb since the price per TB is way less when you buy a 4-12tb hdd. Hell I'm about to buy a 12tb hdd from Amazon for $160 for movies and games.
@@konz2891 you want to deal with having a dozen ssds with cables going everywhere?
@Maroedes now explain to me why you think the game doesn't load textures with a 5400rpm drive... I'll wait.
@Maroedes it sounds like your old laptop HDD won't load because it probably has bad sectors. Also if your games are stored on your hdd after it was already full it will be slower since the hdd writes its data from the outside of the disk to the inside. So since when a disk is spinning the outer edge spins faster than the center So the reading speed will be higher.
@@konz2891 gotcha.
I use an 8TB WD HDD for most of my larger games and I can't tell the difference between that and either of my SSDs. My 2012 Barracuda isn't much worse. I guess once a hard drive is in the 150-220MB/s range, most games are software bottlenecked. It'd be interesting to try this with the few games that recommend or outright require SSDs now.
Also, this is conjecture, but if you had all of the games installed at once, you might have seen more issues in the last games you installed because they were written closer to the center of the drive's platters.
Are we forgetting that all textures and game assets are loaded into ram first?
@@randybobandy9828 why
Linear speeds aren't everything, a large role play seek times and random reads, in which even top-grade HDDs fall behind to any SSD.
@@randybobandy9828 Before 2009 perhaps. but when games are streaming assets from the drive into RAM during gameplay, (very slow) drive speed can cause pop-in or other issues.
Besides, I was mainly referring to load times.
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This video came out just the right time. I recently purchased a 2TB 5400 WD Blue HDD for my laptop (there were no 7200 ones in this size), and I'm quite happy with it. In most of the games loading times are fine, often you can't even say it's slow, and read/write speeds of big files are over 100MB/s. Compared to my old Dual Core G551, my 6-core G531 has basically no loading issues ingame with the HDD, in contrast to my old laptop with the SSD. Though FH5 is on the SSD, FH4 is running happily maxed out without a hiccup and any streaming issues, which I experienced a lot with my old PC (w/ SSD!) in these games. And there are games like SnowRunner which loads surprisingly fast (10-15s) even if you have it on an HDD.
Some games are optimized well. Especially in Indie Games.
I still use my 6 years old 7200rpm HDD and I'm pretty satisfied with it tbh since here where I live, for the price of 1 SSD you can buy like 2 or sometimes 3 HDDs, so for a torrent user like me, storage size really makes all the difference, the more the better....
Use a small capacity SSD, 120gb maybe, for Windows and large harddrives for data.
@@alincioaba
256GB is better value ATM, but yeah run OS on SS for the biggest benefit, and with a 256GB you can still a game or two on the drive if you want speed.
@@darthwiizius I don't know the prices in his country. In my country, Romania, 240 is the sweet spot but there were times when a good 120gb SSD was about 15 dollars and the 240gb 35$+
Where I'm at the cheapest HDD comes out to $13.50 per TB and the cheapest SSD comes to $90 per TB...that's a massive price difference and it's why I still use HDD for mass storage and SSD for my OS and main games and programs.
i use my hdd 3 years and 4 month, in some games i started to get stutters that earlier i didnt get, doesnt matter which settings in gta 5 i get similar fps, tried to install new system, previous drivers and newer. programs shows that hdd;s health is 100%, but tbh i dont belive it
You should try run games from a sdcard
I did a usb stick a few years ago haha
Should try a old IDE hard drive, I'm curious if they'd even run win10 😂
I tried running on a usb drive and a sd card via windows to go and it was terrible
@@rqbhop I’m sure you can if you use an IDE to SATA adapter.
@@eternalgamers10 for sure, I can't imagine trying to do anything on a system from that era :)
I use a 4TB WD Blue HDD 5400 RPM as 2nd Drive in my Gaming PC, i harvest this one from an external HDD and it works perfect. In this case with Cyperpunk, u can run this Game from an USB Stick, i test this last year, ya there are longer loading times, but other than this it work
4 tb hybred drive do exust
Being that games are usually 100gb or more now I will gladly go for the big HDDs and just wait a little longer especially for the $.
if game works fine i can wait few min on hdd, but first chance i get, i will prob buy 500 gb or 1tb ssd for system+ games that could benefit from it
Chef gids fir 10000 rom or 15000 rom hdd
HDD would be fine for a lot of games, but competitive games where load times are super important is when it makes the biggest difference. With how much cheaper SSDs are compared to a few years ago it’s totally worth it.. I didn’t upgrade to an SSD for awhile, but when I did my PC felt brand new. I keep all my games on an SSD and use my 4TB HDD for gameplay recordings, music and stuff like that
I used a 5400 RPM drive as recording drive for years. Let's not forget that 65 MB/s is about 520 mbps, which is way more bandwith than any reasonable recording.
And my games and stuff are still on a couple 7200 RPM drives and so far there wasn't anything that made me feel I had to change that.
Just a few years ago when a 250gb SSD was $99usd, people were storing their games on a standard HDD.
But back in the day, which was 10 years ago or more, we used to buy a 2nd or 3rd drive and run those in RAID 0. A lot of people bought those WD Velcioraptor 10k RPM drives, but those had a small capacity and they were expensive. I always went with the 1tb Samsung Spinpoint F3 drives, and I still have a few of them running in my systems.
Byy 3 1.2 tb velocity raptor 3.6 terabyte 3 1.2 terabyte 10000 rpm hdd
I think a lot of hype is around NVME drives load times … but compared to a SSDs they’re not blazingly faster for the majority of daily tasks and gaming needs by the majority. For the semi-pro/pro users doing video encoding etc, NVME is a massive time saver. Even the new DirectDriveDirectStorage (it goes by a few names) imo, won’t make a huge difference compared to SSDs for any gaming overall in soon to come titles …. But maybe in 5+ years time, this may change.
What's probably going to change more in five years is the increasing inconvenience of mounting 2.5" (and 3.5") drives in new case designs. The price premium NVMe once had has largely evaporated. 80mm bare sticks are almost certainly cheaper to manufacture than basically the same thing but with a shell around it. OEMs are probably making more of a profit from NVMe compared to 2.5" SATA drives even at the same price so they'll want to sell more of those. It's going to be more of a push upgrade like new generations of PCIe and DDR memory than based on consumer pressure.
I use an HDD as my main gaming drive and yes loading is longer, and sometimes I do notice a blatant data streaming stutter in open world games, but other than that it's perfectly fine for gaming in 2022 IMO.
Edit- Also that HDD used in this video was on the poopy side of HDD's lol
Data streaming errors have I never experienced. I own a more expensive WD Black 7200RPM 6TB drive with 128MB cache, double the normal amount. It is slower, but not as much as "normal" HDD's. I get sequential reads and writes of over 200MB/s, over 50MB/s faster than my other WD Red drive with around 140MB/s. I most definitely notice the jump to the Black drive. 🤔🤔
I still wouldn't invest in one If you're gaming. For storage they're fine, but yeah for gaming they're pretty terrible. Especially if you're the last one loading on a multiplayer title making others wait.
@@chase7974 If games continue to get larger and larger without the developers learning how to compress game files like Hitman 3 developer IO Interactive you would need a pretty big budget going over 1TB SSD capacity. 🤔🤔
@@sondrel2 I don't see that being an issue. A 2tb SSD is only around $150 which is more than enough for most people. You really should be using an SSD anyways as this point in time. They're better in everyway.
@@chase7974 Even though I run the operating system on a PCIe SSD, considering I get a 4TB HDD brand new for 91.27 USD I am not changing my game drives for now. 😅😅
I use a 500gb 5400rpm drive as my second drive for bigger games. Honestly it’s not that bad for online games as once the map is loaded all good and money is tight now
Also them Asseno SSDs are brilliant value for the money
kinda fun concept for video...Shower thoughts. Glad to see no FPS differences.
Have a 1TB WD Blue 7200RPM drive as a secondary drive, under $50AUD new. Good enough to run most games directly but I mainly use it for storage of large game files and shift games between SSD and HDD depending on what I'm currently playing, both Steam and Xbox Game Pass for PC let you easily swap files between drives.
Good drive
FYI : Long loading screen sometimes could be beneficial.
You know, sometime Dev's put some useful tips, tricks, and any other gameplay related suggestions that won't be noticeable if your game load too fast.
I have so many of these WD drives laying around. I shove them in laptops I refurbish!
;)
Check out wd volicitraptors 10000 rpms
I've got 4 diffenent drive types in my PC. My boot drive is a 1TB M.2 NVME drive and is rather awesome, I've also got a 480GB SATA SSD, a 2TB SSHD "hybrid harddrive", and a 6TB HDD. I happily run most games off the harddrives as there is barely any noticable difference for most games. Some of the newer games are worth moving onto an SSD for a quicker loading experience and when I've finished playing them, I can move it back to the HDD for storage and occasional use.
Thanks for this Video! I already where thinking of an upgrade to a SSD or even a nvme SSD.
I like how in the first couple seconds of the video he makes a generalisation that's actually wrong on a case by case basis, even without consideration to factors like cost or data/information density
HDD's run fighting games really well, Tekken 7, Mortal Kombat 11 play really well. Best with games that have small levels or stages that can be fully loaded into the RAM. Loading times are longer, but once the level is loaded it runs ass well as on a SSD.
I still have a large capacity HDD for "older" (2017 and older) and less demanding games as they weren't made with SSD in mind, and you can store so damn much on them.
Those yellow vans made me laugh, would have been funnier if they were yellow reliant robins ...
If there's one thing that I can gather from all your videos lately it is "far cry 6 likes to think it's way harder to run than it really is."
My 8 year old Toshiba laptop took like 5 minutes to boot up Windows 10. After replacing the HDD with a Crucial MX500 SSD the wait was down to around 20 seconds.
The difference really is noticeable!
when it comes to dealing with hard drives, the part that really sucks with high GB games is the daily defragmenting and cleaning required to optimize load times.
Love the Assassins insignia mate
I remember installing Far Cry 5 in my old 1TB 5400 WD drive (could've installed in my M.2 but I wanted the loading screens in that game to last longer, funnily enough). One time the grass wouldn't load as I was driving and I thought either the drive or my GPU was dying. It never happened again after that.
Shame that few consumer mobos have sas controllers
1 gb wd drive? do you mean 1 tb? far cry 5 is about 60 gigs so it would be impossible to fit on a 1 gig storage device
@@dabmasterars Yes, I don't know how I didn't see that. I've edited it.
I use a 15 year old 2.5 inch 300gb hard drive that has 40mbs per second read/write. I loaded Red dead 2 on it, runs fine graphically but I do notice some weird artefacts in the sound.
I love it
What was the load times for Warzone? I don't think I saw it.
I just bought a $67 4TB WD RED PLUS CMR as a Media PC game secondary storage drive. I also have a 1tb ADATA SX8200 NVMe drive for primary games. I just want to be able to install any game. The hdd is fine for the purpose of big secondary games. It’s a nice cheap way to be able to install any game you want. Modern software like steam and origin make it easy to move games around from fast primary storage to slow secondary storage. So if you find you are playing a old game a bunch just simply select it to move over to your fast drive if you want. I also have a similar setup on my main system but with a 2tb XPG s70 blade NVMe 4.0 and a 4tb 7200rpm hdd secondary game storage. Pairing a modern big hdd with a ssd/NVMe for game storage frees you up to blanket install any game you want.
Best hdd on market
I'm still using 5400s from old laptops.
It still works great and still playing GTA V, SOTTR, Crysis and other AAA.
After tasting the speeds of SSDs, I can only recommend hard drives in the case of building a retro Win 95/98 PC or cases where SSDs aren't a viable option. Not that there's too many people out there who will use such outdated OSes but you never know, do you? 1 TB or lower capacity SSDs are no longer as expensive as they used to be anyway and will help to boot your PC faster and make feel it more responsive in general.
Edit: two other points to consider are that SSDs produce less heath and noise than mechanical hard drives and are less prone to damage from falls, shocks, hits and impacts.
Even on the vintage PC front there are other options like CF to IDE which are more viable and easier to work with. I believe a few IDE SSDs exist too. But up to about Windows XP I’d say even the hard drive still feels pretty smooth anyway, since the OS was much simpler then.
I'd like to say that HDD's basically work like a vinyl record in that a needle is used to read grooves in a disk. Basically, the faster the disk is spinning the faster the needle can read those grooves and a disk with more area, or storage, will take longer for the needle to fully read. I.E. More storage on a slower spinning disk increases read times exponentially. I would highly recommend only using a 5400rpm drive if you have less than maybe 750gb but anything more and you basically need a 7200rpm drive for it to be acceptable in daily, average performance like booting your pc and running a web browser.
Are you sure about that speed vs area/storage ? I think it goes the other way around. The thing is, having the assets in the "first" (that is, outer) portions of the HDD vs the "last" (that is, inner) portions of the disk. The revolutions per minute is the same, but the inner part has less data/surface/area than the outer one, so things that are on the outer area are faster to load. That's why a full HDD will go slower and slower.
That alone, is, I'd say, a very good reason to NOT bother with small storage HDDs, since if you keep them full, you might slow them even more. Also, having plenty of space allows for easy defragmentation.
Also, having higher capacity drives means that data is either more compact, so having the same speed allows reading more per second and/or also have more platters, which is kind of having multiple hdds in raid 0. So, again, having a higher capacity drive would actually help with speed to.
@@Winnetou17 Well, higher density platters means faster data transfer, but current HDDs are not designed to read from multiple platters simultaneously(read/write arm has multiple heads for each side of each platter, but only reads/writes on one head at a time). Some company(Seagate?) has been working on drives with two read/write arms(so double the number of heads) that can in fact read/write simultaneously(so doubling max sustained read/write from around 200 MB/s to over 400MB/s) which gets them close to slower SATA 3 SSDs in sustained reads/writes but still abysmally slow when comparing random reads/writes. I wish HDDs would be set up so they could write an entire byte(both sides of 4 platters) or two bytes(both sides of 8 platters) simultaneously(double that for drives with dual arm array tech) at which point you exceed SATA 3 bandwidth capacity by quite a bit(how to connect to system?) but random reads and writes are still a lot slower than even SATA SSDs due to random seek times( a few milliseconds each) vs SSD IOPS( high tens of thousands per second on SATA SSDs, hundreds of thousands on NVMe SSDs or even millions when you have a number of them in a RAID 0 array).
Edit: A lot of stuff(OS, games, other programs) don't load sequentially. They are still faster on SSD. Pictures, video, and music(which do load sequentially) are fine on HDD. I personally have a system with with a large NVMe SSD(OS, programs, and a some games) and several larger HDDs with my game libraries and other files. Older, smaller games run fine of HDD and when I want to play a newer larger game one of those types of games out of the SSD and swap the big game a do want to play into the SSD in the previously occupied space. The SSD in question is an Intel 660p 2TB(a QLC drive). I'm thinking around 500GB for OS and programs, 1TB for games and 500GB free to work as SLC cache(so around 125GB, actually 128GB since the drive actually has almost 2.2 trillion bytes of usable space so 512GB OS/programs, 1024GB for games and 512GB(128GB SLC) for cache. Any more full of actual data and the drive could slow down a lot.
Steam library on a 10TB external USB 3.0 HDD, other libraries(Epic, GOG, Origin and Ubisoft) on a 4TB HDD. Another 4TB HDD for additional file space. 20TB total storage(for now).
@@jtenorj Yeah, you're right, it's multiple platters, but still only one read. I remember seeing the head, and it's still basically one head that can reach all the platters. So, as it is now it would work only if the data needed would be on the same area but in a different platter.
I guess something like that can be made, but it sounds like it would work in 3% of the cases and be a massive headache in the rest of 97%.
Speaking of games, aren't OSes now a bit more clever with putting the data, especially if it gets statistics of its usage ? Also, speaking of where the files are, I remember, the first time I've learned about this, when I was a kid and I saw that Quake 2 and Quake 3 had basically just one big file of 700 MB (which was quite big at that time). It was exactly for this reason, so there's maximum chances of it being in the same spot and able to be read with sequencial speeds.
Lastly, are there controllers or software that you can use to have x GB of QLC behave like x/4 SLC (similarly with TLC and MLC I guess) ? That sounds like a pretty nice idea, when you need it.
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Glad you made this video! There might still be a use for these old hdds. I have one in my R11 that was gathering dust. Here’s to Direct Storage coming to PC!
And it still requires the games to actually implement it. Which means around 99.9% of all the games I will own within the next 3-8 years won't even have it.
Everyone calls Atrioc "Glizzy Hands" but we all know it's truly RandomGaming
Hi @randomgaminginhd,
I really love your content and it inspired me in the last years to build budget rigs for family and friends. I discovered that the 10100F and 12100F are really the masters of budget CPUs, but always cosidered to build an Xeon 5650/5670 PC. But what is the more budget efficient option? I thought this question is worthy of a RGIH-video. Kind greetings from Germany, keep up the good work!
Worth it to save up for an a more modern SSD. Nowadays even Gen4 M.2s are relatively affordable and the improvement in read/writes over an HDD is astronomical. This video is with a SATA SSD which is on average 1/4 the speed of Gen 3 M.2. Gen 4 is on average 6-8 times faster than the SSD that’s being used for testing here.
Honestly Laptop Hardrives where the best way for me to start PC Gaming. They were quiet and had my standard of optimal speed. Nothing extraordinary but it got the job done.
as someone who lived on a 5400rpm hard drive for the longest time until I SSD'd my old desktop, it was tolerable but not pleasant. Windows would take ages to become "usable" after punching the password in, although games did run a-okay once past the loading screen. Heck, even now I still have some games on a spare 5400rpm drive.
HDD's are still very useful, as they give you a budget option of making a clone of your SSD.
My favourite moments of HDDs was that one time where dbd took so long to load, that I got kicked before the game loaded
I had a normal WD 1TB 7200RPM drive for a good 3 to 4 years and it was fairly decent I must say. It loaded games reasonably well. Though the SSD does show a difference, I still wouldn't have much issue if I had to stick with a decent HDD
Thank you, that was quite helpful :)
Time to swap my nvme for a 54k drive, I’m so sick of my game loading so quick that I can’t even make coffee or enjoy a small jog. Thanks for the video going to circuit city now.
I bought that exact SSD to refurb my brothers old laptop. Savage value!
My old 2011 Gateway laptop (that I still use today!) had that exact same WD Scorpio Blue hard drive in it! I have since upgraded to a 250GB WD SSD but I remember the hard drive being quite awful. It was brutally slow booting into Windows 10 and annoyingly, it would park the heads every few seconds which would cause the laptop to freeze for a couple seconds multiple times a minute. I eventually moved the drive into my PS3 but it has since crashed.
We need to go deeper. I know some of those old PCs you find have an IDE port. We need Cyberpunk running off an ATA/33 drive.
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I made do with a 7200RPM HDD well into 2016 when SSDs were finally at an acceptable price point (but found SanDisk drive to be highly unreliable while the local brand, Inland, is still working to this day). I had also had a 10,000RPM WD Raptor drive for an OS drive as it was only 150GB but it was very quick for a hard drive. I still have these HDDs lying around and other period correct HDDs in Win 98 and Win XP builds.
All I need is this video. I m into going for building budget gaming ssd+hdd PCs and 5400 rpm drives are everywhere and they are cheap
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I still use a 7200rpm hard drive. It literally takes 5-10 minutes untill Windows boots up and the PC becomes usable because once it loads the desktop it takes a few more minutes until it loads everything else and becomes usable. After that it isn't too bad except for some more modern games but I am using a GTX 1050 so a lot of games don't work good enough in the first place.
Do you guys remember a few years ago a new HDD came out for enterprise only and it had dual headers so it had read speeds close to a SATA SSD. I guess it never worked out because it was never released for consumers.
I remember more than once I've reinstalled Windows on a physical hard drive because it loaded so slow that I thought Windows was broken.. Yay for SSDs..
When I built my PC a couple of years ago, I put in a M.2 boot drive and 500GB SSD for games. I filled that up quickly and I dug out an old 1TB laptop drive pretty much the same as shown here.
I put my primary games on the SSD and “Archive” ones I’m not playing on the HDD. The loading times are comparable to what’s shown in the video. I don’t have the patience to do that with everything.
I recently grabbed a 4TB Seagate Barracuda because I was running out of room again.
TLDR: HDD slow, SSD faster, duh.
I don't even have the space on my ssd for the majority of my games. So even if I were to shuffle stuff around it wouldn't fit. But then so far I haven't noticed any issues with disc access
I think the last time I saw a game take *four minutes* to load was when it was coming in from tape on my ZX Spectrum in the 80s!
My 8tb wd black 7200rpm is still very quick, HDD’s still have some hope left especially for mass storage. Loads forza H5 in about 45 seconds, however I’m running a 12600k so maybe that helps over the i3
It will be interesting to see this test, if and when, directstorage takes off. Obviously older, and current titles won't be affected, but would be extremely interesting to see how HDD's would perform in thoose games. If at all.
You should try using an oldschool performance hard drive like the WD Velociraptor and see how it holds up today.
i remember when i had forza horizon 3 on my 2,5" hdd, it took whopping 15 minutes to load this game
Yeah ive had this be a big problem recently on my 5400 rpm and Low Platter count hdds with streaming issues and long load times. Im moving a lot of games to ssds now and keeping non game files on hdds
Imo I don't mind paying more for SSD's because the experience is worth it. It feels great to have your OS and apps feel super responsive and snappy.
Newer HDD's perform much better than this I have an Exos X18 in my rig atm with 100's of games installed with no texture popin & quick load times, read & writes are great 278mb+ the drive is a bit noisy though!
I've used the same laptop hdd for over a decade without failure in my old i3 laptop, back then 320gb was more than enough for games
Still playt too day
I went boot drive SSD back in 2008/9 and all SSD in 2014. Nowadays, whenever I use mechanical drives for anything other than large file storage I just get frustrated.
The last time I tried to to play modded Skyrim on HDD, I gave up. The delays encountered simply entering and exiting an Inn were ridiculous.
I do hope that one day NVME drives start to make a difference in load times over bog standard SSD's.
God my laptop doesn't even have a SATA connector or even space for a 2.5" drive. It's not super high end either but HP got smart and put 2 NVME connections inside of it. Yeah a tad more expensive but it came with 1TB and I added a 512TB to the other slot. Getting 3500/600 on the reads/writes, Q8T1 and 2200/400 on Q1T1.
Being someone old enough to remember the ancient times (MFM and IDE) we used to be blown away by ATA100 and ATA133 speeds. Things have come a long, long way.
Buffer, health of headers (check reallocated sectors and seeking error rates in SMART stats) and motherboard limits are critical to avoid stuttering from HDD.
I am running GTA V without virtual memory since i upgraded to 12GB of RAM (2GB used by Radeon R7) and problems are few. Problems comes from disk cache used by DXVK, typical from any Vulkan usage.
My storage setup is a 500GB M.2 drive for the system and a few critical games that "require" it (like FS2020) and 2 2TB HDDs (7200 rpm) because HDDs are so cheap compared to SSDs. In fact I watched this video while playing Forza Horizon 5, which is installed on an HDD. Loading times are slow, as expected, and sometimes world rendering doesn't keep up (reducing graphic settings from Ultra to High fixes most of it with nearly indistinguishable differences) but if I have to put money somewhere, it's in the CPU and GPU instead of storage, so that's what I did.
Everyone gaming with high-capacity SSDs nowadays while I'm still using a 5400rpm 1tb laptop hard drive that I salvaged from my dead laptop 5 years ago as my game drive.
I stil game on hard drives. Only have the os on ssd
I drive my whole System from an USB hard drive, the loading times in games like bf1 are monstrous
consider using an ssd as a cache for a hard drive like with software like PrimoCache or Storemi
I know of one game where an SSD is pretty much the minimum requirement. I played Borderlands 3 on my old 7200 rpm drive and it ran like absolute crap, the rest of my system was fairly modern and it should have handled it quite easily, but the HDD was just so slow. Stuttering was the norm and upon switching to a SSD I haven't come across this issue anymore.
I currently have 32TB's of storage on my main pc.. will most likely be adding more at some point
3TB of nvme, 12TB of ssd (with 8TB of that in raid 0) , the rest is hdd for archive / media use
What do you do with all that?
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I have a 1/2TB 2.5 inch WD black 7200 drive in my PC which I use for games with file sizes up to 4GB, there's nothing wrong with using slower drives if you temper expectations and use them appropriately.
G'day Random,
Down here in Australa for Low Budget Builds while 240GB SSDs are now matching 120GB SSDs under $50AUD 1TB is still really expensive at about $150AUD compared to $45AUD for a 1TB 7200RPM HDD.
As you said during Gameplay there is not much difference unless you intentionally look but that $100AUD can make a much bigger performance difference as an upgrade to what you spend on a Used GPU or even if you are buying new from a RTX3050 to a RX6600
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TL;DR if you have a decent modern hard drive, performance is a lot better than on older drives, in my experience.
I still load all my games on HDD, when you can get an 8TB HDD for the price of a 1TB SSD, it's a complete no-brainer if you have a lot of stuff, and *I have a lot of stuff.*
On my current HDD, which is actually an external Seagate Game Drive, 8tb just as I mentioned, I actually don't notice that much of a difference in loading times compared to my NVMe, even though it's not just an HDD, but connected over USB3 and not SATA3. I have also installed windows on this drive, boot times don't even suffer that much. I can't say the same for a lot of the older drives in my collection though, so I've chalked it up to improvements both in hardware and software over the years.
I played through the entirety of Cyberpunk 2077 on a hard drive a few months after it launched, at the time I was using a 2TB Seagate Barracuda internal 2.5" drive that was about two years old, and never had any of the sort of issues you experienced in this video, it actually loaded in on par with the SSD times you listed, though Cyberpunk's loading behavior may be different on the latest version compared to back then so it's not entirely comparable.
I can’t go back to an HDD from an SSD for modern games, I’d argue it’s just as important as the GPU. Older titles though seem just fine generally, most don’t take more than a few seconds to load, and if they did load faster on an ssd the gains are much smaller.
Games today are too large for this too work BUT an old trick is if you are stuck using a slow spinning rust drive and have lots of ram then create a ram disk disk and run portable apps from it. It's faster.
Yeah I have 3 and half TB of SSD storage in my PC, I do use HDD's for my back ups, and I use some old 500GB 5400 rpm drives for a nas box just because, which are fine for network transfers over a 1gb connection.
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the current main rig is all SSD and NVME.. but i have my old PC loaded with ALL my old HDDs. laptop, desktop, etc dating back to 2006.. not a single one has failed and because of this i have MULTIPLE backups of everything important on multiple drives.. and i also have external drives in a gun safe for safe keeping.... as for gaming? they were fine. but yea.. speed is addictive.
pro tip, hdds are still just fine for most games 4 years old or more so long as you can tolerate the load times and have plenty of system and graphics memory. Especially if you have a bigger faster hdd. Much of my steam library is on a 3tb full sized platter right now, and it's a comfortable way to store everything from half life, to half life two, to fallout new vegas, all the bioshocks, dishonored, tf2, and even some better optimized recent issues like doom eternal (and 2016) and the latest borderlands (as well as all the priors). These drives are pretty cheap used, often taken from older server arrays, and definitely still have a place in user desktops for games that dont need absurd storage.
Raid arrays can run even newer games nearly as good as SSD, I got 8x 7200 rpm drives in raid 6 with perc h710, the ram caching on the controller also helps
@@virtualtools_3021 that's all true, but I'm poor. can afford neither a good enough CPU for software overhead nor a hardware card.
I still have my HDD but it's a WD Black. It's not as fast as my SSDs, but it's still pretty fast. I never had any weird dips during games that were well optimized. I do have hiccups on some DX12 games because they're optimized pretty poorly, but overall it's a great experience. HDDs are great for gaming if : 1. It doesn't have an OS on it and 2. if it's 7200 RPM with high read and write speeds. I play Cyberpunk off my HDD and the game never stuttered for me.
This could've been a good April fools video where you loop the loading animation til one second before the video ends and be like woah, that was fast. Could've even said it was m.3 the version of nvme so fast it's slow
someone explain this guy about page cache and program internal cache. Ofc playing the same level again won't give you "loading bugs".
Most of the games nowdays come with big file chunks that are fast to load even from slow hdd, and they depend more on cpu which is decompressing them but once they are loaded in to ram (if there is enough of it) it shouldn't really make any difference. But with direct storage that is coming to new games soon there might be a bigger difference in loading times for slow drives because files will be packaged in smaller chunks and not compressed so they can be quickly copied to vram and ram. Time will show..
Attempting to use a 2010/2011 Samsung 1TB 5400RPM HDD was pretty much impossible. One drive that has been a significant outlier is the 60GB PATA HDD I pulled from my Grandmother's old Asus A3H (its got a 160GB drive now). Even with its mediocre specs it felt as fast as far newer 7200rpm laptop drives under XP.
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FH5 did have issues with my 5400 rpm drive from 2013 (hts545050A7E380) in combination with my 2014 cpu (i7-4790), which showed the slow loading warning during gameplay