I’m currently storing most of my game collection on an HDD since I have enough space there. My main SSD only fits one big game along with other files. Is it okay to keep playing games directly off the HDD, or should I move them to my SSD when I want to play? I’m curious about how HDDs hold up nowadays for gaming, especially with newer titles.
3 Answers
Price per gigabyte is way better on HDDs, so I get why people still use them for storing tons of games they don’t play all the time. It’s handy to have a big library ready to copy over to your SSD whenever you want to play something. Plus, relying only on cloud storage isn’t always practical, so HDDs still have their place.
HDDs are fine for gaming if your games aren’t massive, like under 40GB. I keep Resident Evil and other smaller games on my HDD and load times are acceptable—maybe 20 seconds instead of 10, which I don’t mind for single-player games. But for big titles like Call of Duty where load times can exceed a minute, definitely keep those on your SSD. I also wouldn’t recommend running your OS on an HDD along with games; it’s better to use HDD as a standalone drive mainly for storage or light tasks.
Since your SSD space is limited (sounds like around 128GB?), HDDs are okay but keep in mind they can slow things down when loading textures or open-world environments in games. If you can, upgrade to a bigger SSD later on, since it’ll give much smoother performance. If you’re stuck with your current setup, just keep smaller or older games on the HDD and move big, demanding games to the SSD if possible.
Thanks! My laptop’s SSDs can’t be upgraded, so I’ve mostly been using an external HDD for games, and it’s worked okay at 1080p medium settings. Haven’t tested many newer games yet, though.