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You’re going to need an SSD in order to play Final Fantasy 16 on PC
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this post was submitted on 11 Dec 2023
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I'm a bit baffled that some people still use HDDs considering how cheap SSDs have gotten. You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100. If you've got the specs for new games, there's no excuse.
I'm baffled that some people update their hardware before it stops working.
But then I just keep playing old games that run on my system, so I'm probably not the target demographic.
I mean I play pretty much exclusively old and 2D games. If you asked me to give up my SSD or my GPU, the GPU would be the first to go.
I've seen too many people spend more money keeping a system alive than they would have spent upgrading to modern hardware and I refuse to be like them.
Well what do you mean by "stops working?" Like, literally the hardware no longer functions, or would you also consider hardware that just doesn't run the newest stuff as well as older stuff?
More the former than the latter, because I have the same attitude towards the software, too. I don't need to be able to run the newest stuff because the oldest stuff works just fine. I'm not doing CPU or GPU intensive stuff, and I try to run lightweight software that doesn't bog down my computer.
I can absolutely see how that would be different if I were gaming, video editing, or doing any sort of data modeling.
I tend to see others in gaming upgrading all the time and I'm fine with most mid-range stuff for anywhere between 6 and 10 years, depending on advanced in tech. I'm currently behind because of raytracing and DLSS becoming a thing only like a year or two after building my current rig; but I don't need that stuff (it's not even mind meltingly good anyway; I've compared stuff side by side with RT on and off between mine and another machine and couldn't really see a difference unless it was with full RT reflections) and most new things still run acceptable for me.
RT isn't worth it unless you're already upgrading IMO
Then why're you even commenting in an area that you don't partake in? This is like saying "I don't get why people buy sports cars" in a forum of racing enthusiasts. Or saying "I don't see the need for cast iron woks" when you're happy to have boiled pasta every day.
I can get a 10TB HDD for under 250€, and there are some technical advantages. For example, if you have an ssd lying around unpowered, it will lose data much quicker than magnetic storage
You run programs or operating systems off that 10 TB HDD?
I have a 6TB one and yes mostly for single player games since loading screens typically aren't that big of a deal. OS always goes on your best drive and you know you can have multiple drives in a singular pc since you are sort of implying you can only have 1 drive.
Well good on you for not caring about load times, but for FF16 that 6TB won't cut it. Moving forward platter drives will only be useful for storage, hell I'd argue that's how it is now.
I mean games that finally make use of SSD speeds sure but most people have games before SSDs were standardized. Hell most people's libraries are filled with those. Hell you don't even need NVME drives since most games never make use of them. Until games start actually using direct storage the difference between sata and NVME are very minor for games at least.
The PS4 has an HDD, and only partway through its life upgraded from SATA2 to SATA3 even.
Personally, I've got my boot drive, plus a 2TB SATA3 SSD for games that benefit from it's plus a 12TB HDD for the vast majority of games that don't need it (or to temporarily store games- it's faster to move them between drives than re-doenload them). So if I was planning on playing this games hearing this from the devs would let me know I need to free up some SSD space.
And has load times measured in minutes on many games.
Some games do load quite fast on the HDD, I keep those there. Most games do go to the SSD first.
HDD as data storage is fine, but neither will you need 10 TB of storage for games nor will it lie around for 10 years or so.
Games keep getting bigger and bigger. This game is expected to be about 100GB, and that's not uncommon for modern AAA games. The CoD games have been over 200GB for a while now. Previous FF games have been similar size. RDR2 was 120GB.
I would expect most people playing FF16 on PC to have a small SSD drive with their OS, key programs, and maybe a couple of games, then a HDD for bulk storage.
I'm not interested in the FF series, but if I was this message from the devs means "clear up some space on your SSD". Which can sometimes be an inconvenience.
It’s because the upgrade for this console generation was an SSD
It is an inconvenience. AAA games will alway try to push hardware, and SSDs just happen to be one of the things that can do that.
i don't play 'new' games, i don't have the hardware for them. most my gear is older salvaged stuff that didn't cost me anything to get. between constant rent increases and the cost of groceries these days, i simply can't afford to upgrade unless i get lucky and salvage something useful.
You're not the target market for FF16 then.
SSD's with more than a 500gb-1tb start to get way more expensive than hard drives
SSD for newish games, OS, and programs, HDD for videos, photos, music, and old games.
This. My HDD also holds local copies of games in case I want to move them to the SSD.
My PC was built in 2015, the case, PSU, 2xHDDs, 2xSSDs, and fans are all original. No reason to change what isn't broken. If I ever move on to a new case, I'll just turn these into a server farm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I don't know why you got some downvotes. Buying an SSD to store the latest games is much more cheaper than buying a GPU. If one already has a powerful GPU, I don't know why they consider an SSD "not affordable"
If you’re just buying a terabyte or two of storage there’s absolutely no reason to buy spinning rust at this point. If you want many terabytes of storage 12tb+ hard drives are going to be a fair bit cheaper than SSDs currently. SSDs have been rapidly dropping in price and increasing in capacity, though, so hopefully it just gets more and more cost effective to have a bunch of storage with SSDs.
If you needed one terabyte, SSDs have been affordable for a while.
If you needed ten, nope. Not until recently.
If you need a hundred, to-day, still no.
Man, even 100TB of HDDs won't come cheap.
100 TB of HDDs is negotiable. $2000, maybe. You could blow more on a GPU. There are people who will buy that much hard disk storage, on this website, on any given day. Data hoarders could nitpick the dollar figure I just named, without double-checking.
100 TB of SSDs would cost at least three times as much. Nobody should buy 100 TB of SSDs in 2023. Most likely, nobody should buy 100 TB of SSDs in 2024. Gavin Free of the Slo Mo Guys has a ridiculous RAID cluster... suitcase... for downloading and editing obscenely large video files, and it's still only 48 TB, and he got it for free to advertise the company that sells such ridiculous objects. If money means anything to you, or "time is money" is not as literal as it is for a slow motion photographer, I cannot recommend buying one.
It's simple: My SSD can only fit so many 100-300 GB games, while I already have hard drives with plenty of free space.
(Also, running Linux means that an SSD doesn't help game performance much anyway, outside of initial loading time.)
More like $150-200 if you want a good one.
What a very privileged perspective. I don't have much money, but most new games are playable on my existing hardware if I tune the graphics settings. I would rather spend what money have on things like food and heat. (Or if the basics are covered, then maybe a newish game.)
Just to share my recent experience: I found that games of that size compress quite well. So if you're using a filesystem like btrfs that supports transparent compression, you can fit much more onto your disks, at the cost of slightly slower reads and writes (M.2 ssd). With my HDD, compression actually increased write speed!
Compression can increase read and write speeds to storage because you’re sending over fewer bits. The tradeoff is that you need CPU resources to do the compression (and decompression).
I haven’t found games to compress that well. On my steam folder 809GB compressed down to 724GB, so I save maybe 10%. That’s certainly not nothing, but it’s not game changing either. That said I don’t install a lot of hundred gig plus games.