Choose between HDD and SSD based on your needs.
Choose between HDD and SSD based on your needs.
In a longer form, it actually isn't that bad. Right now I'm using modern warfare on an SSD and it still starts quickly before most others. The only game I've encountered with major issues on an SSD is black desert online, which most people haven't played. Switching from HDD to SSD improves performance by about 150% to 200%. The only game I've tried that had problems is not worth the extra cost—something like a 1TB SSD or a 3TB HDD would let you play more games.
For the time being, there's no performance penalty in gaming from an HDD. Things will just take longer to load, but once your in, it's all the same. However, that's mostly the case because games are designed to load assets into RAM precisely because storage was typically slow. Even SATA SSDs with ~600MB/s transfer speeds aren't fast enough to just pull assets from storage as needed. PCIe 4.0 NVMe is pretty close, though, which is why the new console generation is leveraging that now. As more games come out for the next gen consoles, and especially games that are for both PC and console, I'd expect devs to start leveraging fast storage on PC as well. We're still a ways off from that, though.