Could be an issue but I've only seen benchmarking being done on an SSD, mainly NVMe storage devices. I get that spinning rust is still popular but really SSD storage has gotten pretty darn cheap. What would be interesting is to see if the game performance actually changes, if at all depending on the type and interface speed of said storage. So like here is a SATA SSD running on Gen1/Gen2/Gen3 speeds and then NVMe storage, again running on slower to faster speeds.
I suppose that has something to do with SSD's being so damn cheap, now. Hell, I got a Silicon Power brand sitting in my future 1080p build on PC Part Picker, and that sucker is only $39 for 1 TB. I mean... it's really not sensible to be spending time testing out other storage devices when you take those facts into consideration.
*Load performance, not game performance. It's just poor implementation of rendering programming. They basically have a bubble of reality traveling around the character in an online multi-player game and when that bubble hits other bubbles it lags and has to load both bubbles on both instances. Really piss poor programing route to take.
It's ignored, because people used SSD in PC for over 10 years, and it were also impossible to even buy a new PC without SSD for years. SSD were standard on PC for many years. HDD is nice for backup and small games.
I can attest to this. I have a cheap WD Blue SATA drive which barely pulls 300MB/s which is half of SATA6 bandwidth. Pathetic really. Compare that to my Toshiba 6TB X300 which can do between 150 > 160MB/s.
i beg to differ pals, i have a kingston a400 ssd, worst thing ever. sometimes windows froze, because it couldnt launch everything. i oftern saw really high disk usage. also, if you transfer big files, this drive pulls back to 25mbyte per sec. which is 50% slower than my old ide drive. just get a decent ssd, be sata whatever
My computer isn't anything crazy (i7-9700f, GTX 1080, 16gb RAM) I was struggling bad on HHD, as soon as I moved it to SSD it worked amazingly. Absolute day and night difference.
That's good, I have a 1650 but unfortunately I could only get 24 fps on average even with the SSD and it badly dropped and wasn't stable... I had to cave and buy the game on my Xbox lol
I have a similar team red build that I had to upgrade for starfield. found a good deal on something to replace the first gen ryzen 5 I've been using up until a couple months ago as well as my first m.2 in my gaming build and it's been great so far. starfield has a lot of loading screens but my longest load time has been 7 seconds.
@@ReddRubblewdym?? The 1080 came out a while before SSDs became the mainstream standard. At least for games, rather than boot drives. I mean id agree you should have an SSD by now but itd make sense with the age of his components if say he only had a small ssd for the os.
@@shadows1987 In the past 2 years, SATA and M.2 SSDs have had such good prices that it'd be silly not to add at least 512GB as faster storage for games. 1TB and even 2TB are now affordable. For gaming, having any new game on an HDD is just foolish, and especially any game that's currently being played. To have done this for the past 8 years is just ridiculous, so the comment is valid.
Thanks for this 'brave' experiment! Seriously thought about installing it to my storage drive because of the size. Guess I'm in need of upgrading my SSD to something bigger.
Just wanting to chime in here. I initially played Starfield on a 7200rpm Toshiba X300 HDD and I can confirm that I experienced every single thing you experienced in this video. Moving to an SSD solved all these issues. If it helps, I run it on a Samsung 870 Evo 2TB which I got for a nice price during black friday.
No problem at all! I'm hoping Bethesda sees these issues and actually adds a HDD mode in the video options much like what Larian did for Baldur's Gate 3
@@CryptoxicWoW why or how would they solve it? The system requirements clearly say that you need an SSD. If your system is so old that it doesn't have an SSD, then it probably wouldn't be able to run Starfield even if it did have one.
@@chubbysumo2230Green got such a bad rep, they changed them all to Blue! Still Greens were/are fine for bulk storage. Blue 7200rpm were the system drive for the budget minded at the time.
@@peterpan408western digital in general is just a great company to trust your bulk storage to with hard drives - first drive was a 1tb black like in this video but back when I bought it, you betcha I was eyeballin up some greens/blues for extra bulk/reliable storage on the cheap! edit: come to think of it, I think I still have my 1tb black laying around somewhere and it would fire right up just like in this video without fail - also put the 1TB blues/blacks in a bunch of friends pc builds I built back in the days before SSDs - none of them ever complained about the storage; speaks 'volumes'! ;)
When I first installed the game I was close to giving it back because of massive performance issues... until I found out that SSD bit. Now it works marvelous. Have never seen such a heavy performance impact of SSD vs HDD before. Some audio file being played causing a 2 or 3 second freeze of the game. Quite amazing to behold ;)
HDDs aren't really good enough for today's gaming standards. They're fine for holding some random files you want to keep, if you have an old HDD, but they're not even worth buying right now with how low is the price NVME SSDs. Also please read game spec requirements, in most cases they aren't there just for show
@@Weyland_Punani I'm happy to board the Bethesda hate-train basically any day of the week, but this just flat out isn't true. Now that consoles have SSDs, developers expect PC gamers to as well. Hard drives for gaming are on their way out, it's just how it is.
The newer Ratchet and Clank game is another example of SSD vs HDD with its instant loading of worlds when going through portals (even slower SSDs end up with the game hitching for a few seconds)
This remembers me of when GTA 5 launched on PC and I tried playing it on my 3rd gen i3 laptop and waiting several minutes for the game to load on the laptop's HDD
Well, to be honest, that was rockstars fault. A fan found a fix for loading times years later, which got implemented into the game itself, and the dude got awarded 10k for it.
When i started playing i initially installed it on my hdd… load times were long and the frame drops/stutter was massive… the thing is i didnt even mean to put it on my hard drive but xbox did so at least transferring it to my ssd didnt take super long! Edit: The gameplay footage in the video such as the speaking with mouth closed and stuff was my exact experience and this was on a hdd bought last year… shows how much you need that ssd
WHY BUY FANCY TILES FOR CRAB PC ??🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮🤮 i posted my Crysis content back in the days, unable to run it in 1080p on new hardware, everyone hates these crab.....
PUBG used to suffer these same issues and so have tons of other games, if you turn off shader caching for the GPU those stutters go away, shader caching on a HDD is er not exactly a good idea for games like these, would be nice for you todo a quick benchmark test with shader cache off to see how much of these stutters stop.
You always make me second guess myself. A long time ago I had an i5 2500 with a 1050ti and it was doing the exact same thing. It also had a little laptop hard drive in it but I just blamed it on CPU bottleneck. The system was CPU bottlenecked but that just meant 50 frames instead of 58 and I was content with that 'catastrophic' loss of performance. The freezes, that was not fun. The thing was, it worked fine when the game I was playing launched. It wasn't until they added a bunch of DLC's and no I never did the defrag thing. I needed an upgrade anyway and the 2500 is still running. Gave it to a 74 year old man who watches old TV shows from the 1940's with it, on youtube.
It could've been something else than the hard drive. Sometimes games stutter for no clear reason, and when you checked task manager, the hard drive is doing nothing at that moment. There are thousands of causes for stuttering, and the game waiting for the hard drive to load something, is just one possible cause.
@@janickpauwels3792When it comes to laptops some of the biggest upgrades you can do are changing an HDD to a SSD or upgrading/adding more ram (at least in the machines where its not soldered on)
I remember when Battlefield Bad Company 2 first came out, most of us were still on HDD, I got my very first SSD (80GB Intel) and loaded BFBC2 and when playing online matches, it was very noticeable, loading into a match was roughly ~2 mins on a HDD, but ~10 seconds on the SSD, the match timer didn't start until everyone was in so I was free to run around for nearly 2 whole minutes, it was so mind blowing.
@@hadifelani This is partially incorrect. Not all WD Blue drives have 5400 RPM speeds. For example the WD5000AAKX has a speed of 7200 RPM. Been using mine since 2012 and it still runs like it did when it was new. Plus pretty much all of the newer WD Blue drives that are still sold today come with 7200 RPM as a minimum speed.
@@TheTrueMissingLink of course, but the 7.2K version ain't really marketed properly because of WD Black's existence. Not to mention that it's hard to find on my country, which is a developing one. Might be easier to get on developed ones.
maybe backthen. nowadays are the seagate hard drive disks the fastest. a friend of mine has a seagate firecuda HDD and he plays totally fine, no popups whatsoever or freezes in the game, only the initial loading (aka when you go from title screen into the game) needs about 40 seconds. vs my SSD which is within 3~10 seconds there depending on how busy my pc is.
One of the most egregious parts of the hdd effects i think has to be that even opening the start menu takes 3-4 seconds every single time you need to use the inventory, map, etc. (which is very frequent since its a Bethesda game). Not required, but its the difference between playing a video game or an interactive slideshow lmao
Completely irrelevant but yesterday I just listened to skrillex recess album after 8 years to relive a childhood memory and next thing I see is you with the album as your PFP
I've put 30 hours into this game and have had exactly these issues the entire time. I had my suspicions but didn't bother to check the requirements before loading it up. I just figured it required a patch so I was just gonna wait. I'm glad I saw your video, thanks for the info!
@@thetekglow who cares? Gameplay over graphics any day. These days companies push too hard for graphics and visuals and even modern systems can't keep up.
@@dawoodwilliams3652 And yet in case of Bethesda making graphics that look 10 years old on the release day doesn't, in fact, result in neither superior gameplay, nor performance. How does that work, I wonder?
This is exactly what's happening when I am playing through my WD Blue Hard Drive. The game freezing and audio delay from the NPCs are all present exactly as you have mentioned.
Probably the first game I've seen that has issues on a HDD. I use a 2TB HDD for all my games and never had any issues with them. I'll be picking up a 1TB SSD for games like this in the future.
@@Fllemingodude mechanical drives suck. They can't really do asset streaming, which every major AAA title uses for the last 5 years. Besides, Sata SSDs are almost cheaper than HDDs
Lmao star citizen on a hdd is so painful it's funny, I upgraded to an ssd three years ago because of that game, got tired of falling through the ground 😂
i wonder if those SSD//HDD hybrids would do any better either way i remember a time when just 500 GBs of SSD space was unthinkable for most people we are so far from those dark ages
they would absolutely not fare better, and in fact would probably fare worse. I ran one of those for a number of years during the mid 2010s, and there's all sorts of issues with them as a concept. for one, they usually skimp on the speed of the HDD part to rely more heavily on the SSD cache and cut costs, so the raw performance of the drive is typically pretty bad even for a hard drive. on top of that, the cache for a 1TB drive will be 8GB, maybe 16GB, and you don't choose what goes on there, the firmware does. aside from the fact that the drive probably won't decide to put much of the game on there, it additionally can't even fit a small portion of it in there. the game definitely won't even take up all of that SSD space either, especially if you have any other frequently used files on it, such as an OS, or other games. SSHDs were a mistake and a ripoff, and in my experience were just the worst of both worlds.
better off using a decent sized SSD as a cache, you can do it on windows using storage spaces but you need to do it with the command line because the gui doesn't allow it unless you have an enterprise edition of windows
This is 100% accurate. Playing Starfield on a HDD as well and aside from the occasional lags (not game breaking yet) the delayed speech thing totally threw me off!
@@lucasrem Bruh. Imagine being disgusted by a storage twice the capacity and much longer life for comparable price, cause skyrim in space is lagging. Also MOST other games works absolutely fine on HDD.
Tonight I thought, I wonder what it would be like to play Starfield on an HDD rather than SSD. And sure enough, here someone made a video on that exact topic. I’m subscribing.
Now I understand why I'm experiencing stuttering while playing Starfield. I hope there will be optimizations, whether through patches or mods, to play on an HDD without stuttering.
Nah. Maybe a mod. But even that will not help really. HDDs are just slow for anything today. Bulk storage for photo/video/document/backup, sure. Everyday use? No. Gaming/production? Forget it. Guys, get an SSD. It's so f*ckin cheap. Even a 2.5" SATA will boost the *whole* pc!
Theres no real reason to be using a HDD in 2023 when you can get even SATA SSD's or M.2 drives for under $50 that will offer legit 20x the performance.
I'm so relieved that this may be the solution, because I have been experiencing all the issues you listed with my regular HDD. No other game had this issue, but now I can just get an ssd. Pheww
That explains the problems I've been having. I already play on a lower end PC with the lowest settings but it's good to see that it might be the hard drive that's causing all the stuttering and audio delay issues, considering the frame rate is relatively smooth when I'm playing. Not sure if the crashes are related though or if that's actually my PC lol
@@eqwalle4884 I agree now i didnt get more fps but im not getting the delayed audio aand choppy frames anymore.. at least its playable now I just got a Crucial 1Tb after hourss of installing and failing.. it finally worked I7700 Rtx 3060 16GB
Thank you for the video, I was playing starfield experiencing all these problems now I know i've just got to switch it over to the SDD and Im good to go.
It wont. They will rely on the artificial rendering software in new GPUs and leave all the true patching and optimisation to the modding community. Why the hell would they pay people to do what the consumer deserves when the consumer will just do it for you? (Like every other Bethesda game in existence).
The game was awful on my HDD too. Thankfully I recently bought an external SSD. That being said you may need to try all your USB ports (I recommend a free tool like USB flash benchmark), some of my USB-C ports were supposedly USB 3.1 but were only transferring like 30 MB/S.
Thank you soo much for this video I was having same issues with the game because i installed my game in hdd (massive audio delays etc just like you've shown) Now I'll move my game to Sdd Thanks guy
This is just what i needed. Got it installed on a HDD and i was wandering if my actual CPU can't handle anymore this kind of games (despite having good fps thanks to a 3070ti). Now this confirms what ACTUALLY is happening. I've got the same issues. Thanks a lot!
yeah most modern games really require an ssd. hard drives are best for just large data storage on a small business or personal level. ssd's arre faster and less prone to breaking, but hdd's are larger and cheaper
@@paths7969 No they do not. Current gen HDDs are fast and are perfectly fine. This game has piss poor optimization. It does not even use SSDs correctly and it also does not use RAM correctly either.
The loading times entering buildings etc is not that a dealbreaker. But these stutters and audio delays would be annoying. :D I wonder if there are some guys who bring a mod out for absolut potato pc's.
I have most of the steam library (around 2TB of games) on HDD and never had problems (modern or almost modern games). But as we all know for example GTA 5 and it's loating times are not that great so I made an exception and bought an SSD for it. It would be good if this game allowed for computers with above 32GB of RAM to cache most of the scenes directly to RAM. But I can understand that it is not that simple.
Held onto my 16 year old 488 GB hard drive up until this year because I'm a stickler to the "If it ain't broke don't replace it" rule my dad instilled into me from a young age, still in descent shape at 60'000+ hours and I could most certainly get a few more years out of it but DAMN my new SSD in this custom rig I ordered loads everything instantly to the point I was wondering what took me so long to finally switch! I'm still flabbergasted my Windows boots up in just a matter of seconds!
I have an old WD velociraptor 10k rmp hdd that beats the disappointing multi years newer hybrid drive I got. But I use it for storage and old games that don't load much (if your entire game is less than 1gb, then ssd's aren't going to improve loading times much). That said, I've run ssd's as the primary boot drive since shortly after they came out, for professional reasons: as a draftsman, it was frustrating to get a customer call and take too long to boot up and answer their questions. I'd end up playing phone tag. Switching the old dell precision laptop to an ssd made a 2min+ startup into a 36second startup.
I'm definitely a big proponent of that sentiment too, but if I find out about something that greatly increases quality of life, that in my opinion is a good reason to upgrade. A small example is the difference between manually levelling a 3d printer or spending 25 bucks on an auto leveler. Sure I _can_ manually level the bed each time and it works, but the auto level is so much faster and infinitely more accurate than I am.
Most using high capacity HDDs for gaming have a fast NVMe drive as cache in front of it (PrimoCache in Windows, lvmcache in Linux); even with a small NVMe, most if not all the game data would be cached.
I was recently playing Fallout 4 on HDD and the game was sometimes having stutters when walking into a new area or mid combat and textures taking a while to load, and then i upgraded to M.2 last week and i totally didn't expected to actually fix the stutters and the textures load.
the guy above is capping. I had hardline on a crappy external hdd that transfers at like 10mb per second and the game was a laggy mess but once i put it on my ssd it's smooth as hell.
@@BAZFANSHOTHITSClassicTunes Why? Did you try SSD and still had stutters? If that is the case, it's possible that something else was causing stutters as well. HDDs are not the only cause for stutters. Slow CPUs can cause stutters. Slow RAM can cause stutters. Low VRAM can cause stutters.
Btw my setup is an 5700X with 16GB of ram paired and a RX 580 8GB, i thought my card was going bad because i was experiencing long textures load with stutters.
I still have a 2TB hdd in my system, though it is mostly used to store videos now, I still store a few older games as well as Hogwarts Legacy on it. HL ran just fine with it if you're wondering.
Some people don't have the issue at all, it seems. That being said if reddit and the steam comments are any indication a not insignificant percentage of hdd users are affected, and this is still going to be a massive issue for a lot of people on release.
hdd is still my primary drive and hogwarts legacy played fine but some loading times, man 2 to 3 minutes of loading. Switching to a recently acquired nvme, around 5-10s
HHD is handy in PC , because when ssd will breake you loose all data , and hhd is just safe place to store files , I play world of warships , I use 240gb for win , 480gb for game , and 1tb for storage , like wows replayes .
I've got two 14TB HDD's in my system to supplement my 512GB NVME drive where my OS is installed and I don't intend to switch to SSD's for running my increasingly storage-intensive games any time soon.
Nice one! Funny story I very nearly did install it on my HDD, I had just RMA’d my NVME I got it back the same day of release when I told them I had nowhere to store my game. This was Kingston too
@@snoogans20 you mean back when everything was expected to run from a mechanical drive? lol judging from the things shown in this video, it looks like there is only an issue with npcs probably related to loading audio files...
@@jibodagrey6500 it also has other minor issues, for ex. when you look at a item, it can freeze for a moment, loading it's description... I played from SSD as a test and it ran perfectly, but most of my experience was on HDD since I use SSD for work - and I can't manage to find 110GB to fit Starfield -, I plan on buying another one later to go back to the game tho
@solocamo3654 Yes modest that's below entry level to me if you still have a 1660 or worse you desperately need an upgrade edit: RX 6600 is the lowest end GPU I'd put in a friend or a siblings system never mind my own
1660ti AMD 3750h 525gb SSD laptop. The main settings are high like textures, grass, and 1080p. The rest are low. I get 17-30 fps in cities and planets, 30-40 in interiors and space. Up to 55 in some interiors. It gets quite hot but not too hot. I've debated buying an Xbox Series X just for this game but I think I should just wait, save up, and buy a desktop one day. Starfield has been promising so far, but its not a system seller for me.
Desktop is probably the best move, you can build a decent midrange rig for about $700-800 and the advantage over consoles is you can swap out CPU and GPU in a few years when requirements get to be too much.
Thanks for the information, had no idea. I dont own the game yet, waiting for the price to drop a bit but now i will have free space on the SSD for it when time comes.
Interesting! I have yet to play Starfield, but remember the same SSD requirement was stated for BG3. Due to my current situation, the only drive I had to install BG3 on was my 5400 HDD from 2013. It actually doesn’t play too bad, as long as I don’t open too many windows at once. There is some stuttering when entering a new area, but it only lasts a second or two. With that said, I would hate to try Starfield on my HDD!
there are SSD drives that can plug direct into your USB and cheap also. Im running with a Samsung to play D4 the first game i got that needed a SSD to play
One thing I did notice, when it came to BG3, is that it would take an extra second or two for dialogue to initiate when you clicked on an NPC. Not too bad, but hardly noticeable. Also noticeable in certain cinematic cut scenes where animations and objects weren't loading nearly as fast. Beyond that, playable still on HDD, but you'll definitely notice the difference switching to SSD.
I play BG3 on my HDD 0 problems. I don't know much about my HDD specs, but I know its an older HDD, pretty sure MD blue if I remember correctly. Max settings, with a 970 graphics card 0 issues at all.
I can't believe that this is why my game doesn't run on my pc. I was trying for hours to get it playable and nothing online ever brought this up thanks so much.
If anyone sees this, I have two different SSDs, one is my system drive in the nvme m.2 format the other on SATA3. The SATA drive runs about 560MB/s while the M.2 at 3,500MB/s it doesn't seem to make a difference between them for loading times, saves, startup or FPS.
This saved me, was playing for around an hour and realised i installed it on my hard drive rather than ssd since it was soooooo laggy, thank god i came across this
Always used to include a 1TB HDD along with a 256GB SSD in my budget customer builds but as of Christmas this year SSD have gotten so cheap I just can’t recommend anyone ever using a HDD again really. I’m picking up 1TB M.2 NVMe drives for £27 on Amazon at the moment ❤
tbh reasonable if it was a gaming setup, but on budget builds AAA gaming became so much of an hassle to play so you dont tend to fill it up with games but in my case my old build its fine withs going full HDDs for the old games I play
Yep, a HDD is definitely useless for gaming, although I use a 4TB external HDD as a backup for old photographs from my phone and camera, game ROMs for some emulators, along with duplicates of the files over some thumb drives and SD cards. Not exactly the '3 copies over 3 different mediums' but fairly cost effective with some safety nets. The emulated games really don't make a difference in gaming performance when on a HDD, considering the individual files themselves are tiny compared to most modern games. Just in case, the emulators themselves are saved to the SSD.
Tried to run the game via game pass on my system with an i7 8700 a 3070Ti on an HDD and it was unplayable during combat. Almost every shot from me or an npc did make the game freeze for a few seconds. Can also confirm the decent exploration and the dialogue freezing and lip sync issue here too. Got myself an SSD M.2 NVMe now. Hoping its playable then. Thanks for this video! Very informative.
As a former portable officeshitter with 8gb, dont, really dont. Ok maybe in some games it can be sufficient, but with all the new games, it really isnt, use 16 gigs min, and if you want to be fancy, double that. 3.2 ghz is a good spot though.
weird that new "SSD required" games just decide to don't give any kind of loading indicator and freeze entirely, R&C: RA did a bit better - it just keeps your character between rifts until other area is loaded audio delays might be caused because they stream it? idk. also, i remember that it's possible to show disk read/write speeds and activity with MSI Afterburner
I’ve got one of those old wd blacks from around 2007, and while it still is really good for a lot of things, big open world titles like this tend to be a lot heavier on the texture streaming and don’t give a good experience. I usually put my older games or games that aren’t as heavy on texture streaming on that drive.
The load times for going in and out of buildings with your hhd isn't that bad compared to your ssd, however the 1min 30secs loading time, for every time you boot up the game will send me nuts lol. I honestly can't remember the last time I've waited that long for a game to load in, that's how much SSD has spoiled me.
@@ghostly6175 that's because you have a higher tolerance than me. I'm not kidding when I said I'm spoiled by SSDs. I haven't interacted with a system that has a hdd in 5 years, so seeing a game that took more than a minute to boot up reminds me of my shitty dell laptop I had for school lol.
@@RandomGaminginHD me andd my friend literally have this exact argument some hours ago lol. tho its not particularly about starfield but glad it got answered
Thank you. You've answered my issue for me. I suspected the freezes were due to me installing it onto my 4Tb mechanical drive. Hmmm - now, how do I MOVE it onto one of my SSDs?
I feel like those periodic dips should be considered a fail at optimization; even more so because it's not like you're running this game with a minimal amount of memory. I would be interested in knowing how it would perform on a type 0 raid of HDDs.
It's worth noting that if you don't have an nvme slot and have an extra pcie slot you can get an adapter for an nvme. You won't be able to boot from it but you can make a steam drive on it. They cost like 15 dollars.
You can definitely boot from an NVME drive installed on a PCIe card. You just have to change the boot order in the BIOS. My system is set up that way, so I can attest that it works!
You can boot from them. I was using a build with an i7-4770 for like 10 years. Had no nvme slots, but I was able to boot from one using a pcie adapter.
@@EnglishMikeno you cant boot from it on some motherboards. Why? Because some motherboard can’t recognize it until windows(OS) comes into picture. Nvme is not only physical connection its protocol. Thats why you can store things in it, not boot from it.
i know this is like 2 weeks late but fun fact the thing that freezes you so much on a HDD is the dialogue itself, whether its the animations or loading the voiceovers idk, but thats why walking thru new atlantis freezes you so often, the random npcs around you will randomly speak from time to time and that dialogue causes the freeze
It's cool to see this tested but I assume Starfield isn't at all optimised for HDD use and might have performed better on a HDD had that been a priority. (not that in this day and age it needs to be a priority giving the low cost of solid state storage)
@@white_mage I mean, good for you, but you should have atleast 1 ssd in your pc either way, games can't optimise for old tech forever. HDDS are, for gaming, completly obsolete by now.
As you say, I think an SSD is a requirement for any build today. Even just for a normal browsing machine, Windows no longer 'feels' as though it takes into account the seek and read times of HDDs - UIs hang in Explorer, etc.
Personally as a linux user I use Bcache with 2 HDD"s in RAID 0 and a 128GB SSD that's used to cache the small random reads that really grind harddisks down to 1-2 Mbyte/sec. The other day I removed the SSD for a bit so that I could use the M.2 slot for another drive, and realized how slow HDD's are really. As I have slow internet (25 Mbit) I have a lot of games installed, so I prefer cheap large amounts of storage over very fast expensive storage, and for now I have a nice mix between the two, but I hope SSD prices go down a bit more for future upgrades.
What are you talking about with the prices? NVMe prices are insanely low right now. In my country you can buy cheap 1TB NVMe SSD for the same price as cheap 1TB HDD. And even if it's a bit different in your country I won't believe that NVMes are that much more expensive, because market oversaturation in this case is a global thing.
@@M4jkelson ok, I just went into a price comparison tool. The cheapest 4TB 7200RPM drive goes for around 60 euro's, and average seems to be around 80. The cheapest 4 TB NVME drive is 173,90. My personal setups (the drives anyway) are about 5 and 8 yrs old, so back then the difference was even bigger. My setup isn't 1x 4 TB though, but 2x2TB with striping, so that would be about 85 euro's worth of drives these days, and a 15 euro cheap aliexpress nvme drive, so even with 2 drives + cache ssd it's still significantly cheaper these days
I've often found smaller hard drives to be somewhat faster. I built my dads PC with a 250GB SATA III 6Gb/s Western Digital Blue hard drive in 2011 and it's still going now with Windows 7 and it's still surprisingly snappy for what it is in conjunction with an A4 FM1 APU and 4GB Dual Channel RAM 😂 ... I've tried to convince him to upgrade it but he says it does all he needs it to perfectly fine.
@@sasukeuchihaanbucapt Doesn't matter what you prefer, we all prefer Win7 but you simply cannot go online with it anymore unless you want your shit to get hacked.
Thanks for this information ;D I from get go used M.2 for the game, so I get up to few sec loads, or even sometimes have no load times instantly I Fast travel to area, planet and so on ;) So game is hard depended on what kind of storage you use.
Ratchet and Clank Rift Apart also showed the same stutters and loading when playing in HDD, especially when going through different locations and stuck in place for a few seconds to load the new scene. Using the SSD solved this issue
Upgraded from a 1TB HDD to a 2TB NVMe SSD just a few months ago for my system drive. The main improvements are in boot/load times, mass file management, and, yknow, space. I could have otherwise easily stuck with the HDD honestly. Windows really gimps HDD performance, I didn't have that issue on Linux 😎
yea, Linux offer multiple type of I/O scheduler that we can choose (for each drive) to improve/fix our setup, even for SSD. Windows don't have these option. Android also offer these options (for rooted/unlocked devices).
im wondering: isnt this what RAM is for? surely with your 32 GB you had alot of free RAM unless you had hundreds of chrome tabs open in the background. so for example when you are getting closer to the NPC's isnt it obvious that at some point the LOD changes the textures for the NPC's to higher quality? so why dont they get preloaded into the RAM to then be available to load fast if needed? RAM is so fast it would completely solve the issue, even old DDR4 2400 has over 19 GB/s bandwidth (double in dual channel). so unless your CPU is at 100% or you have no free RAM i dont see a reason why it wouldnt preload stuff. ofc it cant predict you fast traveling to some random map but theres alot of stuff it can easily predict like moving around in towns and loading NPC textures. if someone could explain i would really like to know
Kind of, ram and vram both load the current texture that are on screen, but lets say you enter a room, it now has to pull off new textures and assets from your HDD which will take a lot longer as they are not only limited by the sata connection, but also because they are a spinning disk that can only read and write up to a certain amount with a lot of inconsistenties
@@SlyStarling ty but lets use your example and say you are in an area where a door is, the game should know theres a big probability that you will enter this door. so the question is why wouldnt it preload the textures from the area behind the door into the ram? and yes but vram is very limited compared to ram sizes, you can get 128GB ddr4 ram for less than a midrange gpu. so its like 128GB ram vs 8GB vram (so its 16 times the detail! :D). 128GB should be enough to load every texture in the game. im not saying the game SHOULD load every texture into the ram, but it feels like it doesnt preload anything and then makes a surprised pikachu face when you actually keep moving forward and getting close enough to the NPC so that the high textures need to get loaded and the game freezes for several seconds. like its impossible to see that coming
@starkly4751 The reason it may not preload texture before you enter it is because it would most likely cause a severe amount of lag, and depending on how many rooms there are in the game, every time you get within proximity it would freeze, now you could say "why doesn't the game load all the textures that are behind enterable rooms" well that would not only increase the loading times but it would severely impact fps and the requirements would go up to the point where even the 4090 probably could barely run it, we probably will get there at some point where games can have everything loaded in at once to an extent where there would be no loading screens for entering building or certain rooms, but many people cannot afford a computer that could do that, nor do we have the technology to be able to run games like that, it all comes down to optimization for other people who are running lower end hardware.
@@SlyStarling sure but like i said i dont want it to load all textures. just use some algorithm to decide what textures will be needed next based on probability. also like i said it should only preload when your CPU is not at 100% and you have free RAM available (to clarify: with preloading i mean while you are already playing, NOT in a loading screen, that would simply be loading). as long the CPU handles the preloads with a low priority there shouldnt be any lag at all. i think the current state is just due to rushed/bad programming and it could be integrated somewhat easily. but you know whats even easier? slapping a label on the game stating that an SSD is required
Also be super careful during the "freezes", as clicking too much during the freeze accidentally (personally myself during a firefight where I have a semi-automatic weapon) will cause the game to crash. Figured this out the hard way a couple times.
I have a good mid/high range pc but always used an hdd for most games. Earlier this year I bought a 970 evo 2TB m.2 and I think it's my best upgrade ever lol
@@MLWJ1993It actually doesn't make that much difference. Once you switch to an SDD, even a SATA SDD, the gains you can get by switching to a faster SSD are marginal at best.
@@EnglishMike It makes a difference when games are made to actually load assets from a NVME SSD. That however does mean the creation of an API specifically for that (Direct Storage). We may actually get to see games that will require NVME SSD in the near future.
3:12 this can happen in most games if you're having a high load on the storage device (not only on HDDs). Try playing a game installed on a SATA3 SSD while downloading a large file. I guess most games just start streaming the audio files and assume - since they're small - that it'll be all ready to play more or less in sync with the character animation.
fascinating, my last office laptop in 2022 had a hard drive and it took 15 minutes to start up in the morning and log into the office system, I bought an SSD and did a volume copy and it started up in less than a minute. I have been using SSDs on my new gaming box since 2020 and was surprised to read that the current Windows 10 won’t run very well if it is installed on a HDD as a boot disk because of all the disk reads.
So I need to figure out how to move my game from my hd to my ssd. I've never had a problem with previous games but this one is so poorly optimized that every conversation takes place with the person just standing there and hearing the sound but no facial animations. The stuttering and freezing is horrible. Google here I come. The problem I have is ssd's don't come with terabytes of space. I usually have at least 20 games I play. Edit: So......I moved the game via steam and it was way easier than I expected it would be. It's now on my ssd. Loaded it up ....presto. Runs so smoothly now it's like a different game. I had read before that it had to be on ssd but I didn't think it would be such a huge difference. Thanks for the vid. Subbed.
As someone who is gaming on a decade old 5400rpm I can relate to this😂 I don't see drops in fps like that.. but loadings are a break time for me to pour some tea or take WC break
What are your thoughts on using striped volumes to store games? It sounds like you can get more storage and faster speeds for less money with them, but I have not seen any benchmarks.
Crazy how cheap NVME SSD's are now, saw a 512GB one for like £30 the other day, I remember when they were £120+! Same goes for RAM, I remember DDR4 32GB being £100+, saw a set for like £60! PC parts are starting to become more and more affordable
@@flanfrfx even those are now becoming affordable, new 7800XT and 7700XT retailing for 400-450 is insane considering their power. 2nd hand market is very strong too!
@@Arthur-jx8bm in the US yeah, but where i live in canada even after conversion everythings still an extra $100-$200 unfortunately. you guys are lucky lol
