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Are there any on TPU that still only use a hdd for modern games?

What storage do you use for your games you play?

  • I only use ssd for games

    Votes: 49 60.5%

  • I only use hdd for games

    Votes: 3 3.7%

  • I use both hdd and ssd for games.

    Votes: 29 35.8%

  • Other types of storage like external hdd/ssd/usb devices and cloud storages.

    Votes: 0 0.0%
  • Total voters
    81
I only use HDD these days for NAS and backups or as USB devices if I don't have a flash stick handy.
 
I have used SSDs since Intel's X25 series that I paired with a Phenom II. At first, I used them for the OS, but then I started using them for all games when they became large enough (1 TB). Since 2015, I haven't used any HDDs in my computers. Even with an old Phenom II, the SSD was a very noticeable upgrade over any HDD.
 
I use hybrid hard drives... no vote box for something betwixt a hard drive and solid state drive.
 
I switched to full SSD for my games about 3 years, since I have a lot of them.
Luckily prices are better than ever :)
 
Steam library's still on a spinner. I don't usually play AAA until they're pretty old, though, if at all. Three titles I play ATM have notable load times, mostly on startup.
 
My steam library is on 2 SSHDs, Striped in Windows Disk Managment rather than RAID 0 to keep the AHCI.
This dynamic disk is then cached with file aware caching software...

That means I can exclude Files, file types (like movies), directories, etc.
I can also tell the software that I want to cache a specific game or app and click 'Build Cache Now' to have the game/app immediately cached, but with less time and effort than moving a game from HDD to SSD.

The most used files are then cached on a 58GB Optane 800p. (PCIe 3, x2)
The caching software will then read from the cache and striped HDDs simultaneously in a kind of RAID 0. It also concentrates on caching the random I/O Optane is so fast at, leaving the large sequential I/O the SSHDs are better at to the SSHDs. (~360MB/s IIRC)

FF cache testing run 1 S.jpg

Final Fantasy Shadowbringers takes 36 seconds to load from the striped SSHDs.
(1st run)


FF cache testing 2 S with specifying.jpg

Final Fantasy Shadowbringers takes 7.8 seconds to load from the striped SSHDs and the cache on the Optane.
This is after specifying the game and rebuilding the cache, which happens so fast I hardly had time to open Task Manager and glimpse the graphs.

From what I have seen that's not far off of NVMe SSD speed?
 
Last edited:
Until very recently I used both, HDD for games I didn't play frequently and just my most played stuff on the main drive, but now I upgraded my NVME drives so now my HDDs are purely for backups and media library.
 
Logic said:
My steam library is on 2 SSHDs, Striped in Windows Disk Managment rather than RAID 0 to keep the AHCI.
This dynamic disk is then cached with file aware caching software...

That means I can exclude Files, file types (like movies), directories, etc.
I can also tell the software that I want to cache a specific game or app and click 'Build Cache Now' to have the game/app immediately cached, but with less time and effort than moving a game from HDD to SSD.

The most used files are then cached on a 58GB Optane 800p. (PCIe 3, x2)
The caching software will then read from the cache and striped HDDs simultaneously in a kind of RAID 0. It also concentrates on caching the random I/O Optane is so fast at, leaving the large sequential I/O the SSHDs are better at to the SSHDs. (~360MB/s IIRC)

View attachment 308894
Final Fantasy Shadowbringers takes 36 seconds to load from the striped SSHDs.
(1st run)


View attachment 308895
Final Fantasy Shadowbringers takes 7.8 seconds to load from the striped SSHDs and the cache on the Optane.
This is after specifying the game and rebuilding the cache, which happens so fast I hardly had time to open Task Manager and glimpse the graphs.

From what I have seen that's not far off of NVMe SSD speed?
Click to expand...

Optane is less sequential read/write than newer generations of NVMe in particular, but should still be lower latency for random I/O or similar maybe in the case of Gen 5 though even that is probably a bit slower on random I/O relative to Optane that was low latency. Optane is a ideal low latency non-volatile device. I don't know if you can mix Optane and NVME with like rapid storage, but that would give a ideal mix between the two on low latency I/O and higher sequential performance.

Overall I think Optane is more ideal for GPU's with a more narrow memory bus that are more bottle-necked with streaming I/O performance of data into VRAM at least in titles that stream more data to VRAM rather than allocating and caching more of it first into VRAM.
 
Haven't used a mechanical drive for games since ~2017 when I got a 1TB SATA SSD.
That was my primary game drive until I got my current board and could NVMe all the things (storage aside).
 
Old games with very little assets and especially that dont utilise streaming I might load from a HDD if thats where its sitting and I cant be bothered to move them, I used to always play emulator games from HDD until I recently moved them to my P4600 2TB.

On consoles I might also occasionally load from HDD as well if I believe there to be no impact I care about or just quickly running a game for a short period.

I deliberately kept FF7 remake off NVME until I did my platform upgrade as I found the NVME to trigger an actual CPU bottleneck on my old platform (still kept on SATA SSD though).
 
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