rmation about games suitable for a 5400 RPM hard drive is available.
rmation about games suitable for a 5400 RPM hard drive is available.
I think this will be my first (real) post on the forum, but I couldn't think of a community that would have a better answer for this.
Please don't tease me
Most threads I've seen on this subject are approaching this question from a "what should I buy" point of view, which has the obvious answer of a 7200 RPM drive with a large cache, but since I'm already in the situation of having a massive, slow hard drive, I'd like to approach it from the other angle. Worst case scenario, I'll move the 5400 drive to a NAS/HTPC project and buy a new 7200 drive.
The question I want to answer is:
What games won't be affected much by a 5400 RPM drive and the consequently slow loading times?
Which I think translates into the question of: which games do dynamic loading of textures or other assets from disk? Or, which games rely on data streaming in from the hard drive to maintain FPS. I couldn't find a good answer anywhere for a large number of games. Even most games on "can I run it" only lists the amount of storage required, not the speed of the storage.
If this thread gets enough responses, I'd be willing and able to compile and maintain a list for the benefit of us shmucks who bought a 5400 RPM drive or can't afford something better.
If you want my personal story, I bought the biggest and cheapest 4TB drive on memory express during a sale they had in 2017. I made sure it was SATA III and had enough cache for my needs and all that, but then didn't notice that it was only a 5400 RPM drive. I guess I figured those had stopped existing. Now I'm getting the red bar on my 1TB 7200RPM drive so I'd like to distribute my games according to the reliance on the hard drive. I've already split my games with ultra-long load times onto my SSD (Total War, GTAV, Fallout 4), but I was wondering what could go in the other direction. As many of you probably know, coming back to an old game and finding out you've lost your 100+ hour save file because you decided to save some space for a 12 hour fling with the latest 80 GB download kinda sucks.
Here
's a link to the list of games I currently have stored on my 1TB 7200 RPM drive for those of you who are curious.
Edited
May 19, 2019
by Pringlulz
Several games that don't require huge data downloads in a short time work well. Source engine titles (Valve games, mainly) tend to run smoothly on a 5400rpm drive, and many older games should perform just fine.
It's worth mentioning that hdds have improved in speed over time and larger hdds tend to perform better too, so your 4tb 5400rpm drive should likely outpace your 1tb 7200rpm drive, especially since the latter is nearly full.
Just moved games to the bigger drive, and performance should remain similar.
I included a link to a Google Sheets file listing the games on the 1TB drive and their disk sizes. I thought the bigger the game, the more likely it would need moving, but also the higher the chance of streaming large files from disk. I didn't think about this before and was a bit nervous trying it. A solid choice to test would be Rising Storm 2, known for its long load times. If my assumption is right, the load time should be similar to the 5400 RPM drive when moving it over. I plan to try it this weekend. Also, "almost full" still means about 100 GB free space, which isn't bad.
Games that load quickly won't be impacted.
Open world titles might experience issues.
When a drive isn't working well in an open world game, you might notice stuttering.
Many assume the problem lies with your GPU or CPU.
I stopped using 7200 RPM drives back in 2007 because they often cause stutter, particularly in modded games like Oblivion and Skyrim.
Now I even play modded versions that stutter unless they're on a M.2 drive such as the 970 EVO.
Current testing focuses mainly on SATA SSDs, so using lower speeds increases performance risk.
I also came across an article from 2016 discussing how different storage media impact game performance, including frame times. This could help determine suitable HDD options with minimal performance impact.
The article offers some fascinating insights, quite surprising given my own experience with Fallout 4, where issues like stuttering and jittering were persistent. It's also frustrating to see Bethesda pre-download 50 GB of mods for their store. Generally, it seems wise to place larger, open-world games on faster drives while keeping level-based content on slower ones. I think I can safely move smaller files under 10 GB to the 5400 drive without any problems. I plan to try this tomorrow and report back if anything changes.
Right now, I don't think it's worth investing in an HDD for gaming. The costs for 1Tb SSDs are reasonable, and even 500Gb provides sufficient performance for active games.
It also relies on the number of files the game needs to load. If you modify a game heavily, loading gets even worse because it requires many individual file requests instead of just a few to one file. The greater the number of files accessed, the higher the overhead.