Can’t really expect developers to account for 100× slower file loads with maps and assets streaming in, so it makes sense. SSDs aren’t really less available either. The only issue is that games these days are enormous in terms of disk space requirements.
Who the hell is still running an HDD as their main drive in 2023?
Cyberpunk 2077 will not stop working on hard drives, but the company will stop active support and testing of the game on the HDD. Ultimately, players may encounter performance issues or bugs.
so not an actual hard requirement, but more like an indication that it won’t work as intended.
We’re at the point now where SSDs are mostly cheap enough that you should already prefer them over HDDs for most tasks.
Star Citizen set that benchmark a few years ago.
By the time Star Citizen releases SSDs will be obsolete
I imagine you could still run it off an HDD, it’d just take forever to load. In game everything is in RAM though, so unless you have less than the recommended RAM or have a bunch of apps in the background, it’ll be be just as playable (if you don’t care about long load times)
Problem being, many games are starting to use more streaming-type continuous loading for seamless open world games, and those are definitely going to be affected by the lack of an SSD.
True
Do people still have hdds in their personal systems?
I do. I mean, they’re still significantly cheaper than SSDs. SSDs provide fantastic random-access time, but you don’t need that for everything. I have an SSD for several of the drives in my system, sure, but use a rotational drive to store movies. No real benefit to random access if you’re watching a movie.
Yes, I use them for archiving stuff.
Of course. Storage space is cheaper on 7200rpm drives, and has, historically, for years. SSD is rapidly dropping in price, but it’s not on the same level, yet. Western Digital Gold 4TB is $150 USD. Crucial MX500 4TB SSD is $200.
EDIT: SSD is also not available for large drives, 8-20TB.
6TB WD Black (7200RPM spinning rust) is ~$130 https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B09NCMMSQX/ whereas a 4TB SSD is ~$150: https://www.amazon.com/Silicon-Power-Performance-Internal-SP004TBSS3A55S25/dp/B0BVLRFFWQ/
So you get slightly better bang for your buck with spinning rust but not much.
The mechanical drive is 70% cheaper per TB than the solid one. Thats more than “slightly better” in my book.
6TB drive really isn’t a fair example, as hard drive sizes increase smaller drives aren’t produced as much if at all. That has an effect of raising the price of the remaining small drives as your customer base becomes people who need that drive like if you have a drive go bad in a raid array and want a matching drive.
So while yes a 6TB 7200 RPM drive is $130, a 12TB 7200RPM drive is also $130.
https://www.amazon.com/Seagate-Exos-Internal-Drive-Enterprise/dp/B07YYKKJVZ/That Seagate drive you linked to is used. Might as well throw your data away, LOL!
I didn’t notice that, that’s a very valid point. Still 6tb drives aren’t the sweet spot price wise, but my example was bad.
