I hope I dont need to upgrade my Sound Blaster audio card!
Still rocking my SoundBlaster X-fi Titanium Fatal1ty edition. It’s not necessary, but I have it and it still works, so I may as well use it.
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Wow, that’s gotta be like, 15 years old by now? Creative stopped using the Fatal1ty branding around 2010, I think!
If I still had the receipt I’d look at the purchase date, but even I’m not that much of a hoarder. I’m pretty sure I bought it for the first PC I ever built myself, which had a Phenom II 965 Black Edition CPU, so it was definitely a while ago…
that would be awesome.
The AWE32 was the best sound card ever change my mind.
2 words: no pci
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?
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.
The PS4 has an HDD, and only partway through its life upgraded from SATA2 to SATA3 even.
And has load times measured in minutes on many games.
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.
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.
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.)
You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100.
More like $150-200 if you want a good one.
If you’ve got the specs for new games, there’s no excuse.
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.
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)_/¯
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.
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 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.
In 2023/4 you should not be running a hdd in your gaming machine anyway, SSDs are so affordable now
What a privileged thing to say.
Playing modern games as soon as they come out is privileged too.
SSD’s have massively decreased in price over the last couple of years. I’m confused by your comment?
A basic GPU will cost you $150-$250 dollars. A 1tb SSD will cost you $50, or the same price for a half terabyte nvme.
You can’t even realistically get a proper HDD below $40, they just don’t sell. You’d be best served at the $80 price point, getting either
- 1tb nvme
- 2tb SSD
- 4tb HDD
I’d suggest the nvme in this situation.
A cheap SSD is less money than a cheap HDD at this point.
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I actually had a TRS-80 III with a tape drive back in the day. Not a great way to store data.
Properly stored, that tape will last forever.
It wasn’t even good brand new. I had a lunar lander program that took like 10-15 minutes to load and half the time it wouldn’t even work, I’d have to rewind and start over. I don’t miss it at all.
I probably also need at least a dual core CPU.
So what? I accidentally installed Baldur’s Gate 3 on a hard disk and it was unplayable, because the assets took ages to load. Transferred everything over to an NVMe drive and it’s butter smooth. Just don’t put anything that requires interaction on a hard disk and get with the times and plop in an SSD. Best bang for your buck in terms of an upgrade with a massively noticable effect.
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ITT: people bragging about the 32 GB they paid $700 for so Oblivion would load faster.
If you dropped five grand on a PC a decade ago, yeah, of course you’ve used SSDs exclusively. Each gigabyte only cost two bucks! Meanwhile, on hard disks: ten cents.
If you built a PC three years ago, SSDs were finally approaching that ten-cent figure… while HDDs were pushing two cents per gigabyte.
The gap is closing. The low end for SSDs is trivially affordable, now. Key word: now. There’s no reason not to have your OS on SSD, now. And the capacity of spinning plates can only be pushed so far within a 3.5" module. There will be a point where there’s no reason to buy new disks. But if I want another dozen terabytes for network storage, like hell I’m gonna pony up for neon-spangled M.2 drives. $200 versus $600… how badly do I need those milliseconds?
this is nothing new… fuck game journalism
I haven’t had an HDD since around 2004, maybe 2002. Sure I cant keep tons of big games installed, but decent internet makes that not really an issue.
What were you storing your stuff on?
The first reasonable sized consumer ssds I remember were the original ocz line. What was it like onyx or agility? And that wasnt until almost 2010 ish.
2002 seems suuuuper early.
Probably floppy disks
I haven’t had an FDD since around 1950, maybe 1970. Sure I cant keep tons of short songs installed, but decent radio makes that not really an issue.
That’s super early to have adopted SSDs solely, no?
Yeah it is, and Windows didn’t get TRIM support for SSDs until Windows 7 in 2009.
The MacBook Air didn’t even get SSDs until 2008, and I believe it was the first mass-produced consumer computer with an SSD. Linux also got support around that time.
I’m skeptical unless OP’s dad worked somewhere that had enterprise drives to discard… and allowed drives to disappear.
The oldest receipt I can locate was from 2009. I think that was my second. The first ssd being from before my son was born. He’s about to graduate high school. I remember when trim came out it was a big deal and I remember vaguely having issues with getting it to work on that first drive.
All that said, you’re probably right that 2002 was way too early of a guesstimate. Say 2006 or even 2010. What have people been doing all these years. Just waiting to boot up? There is a whole generation that should never have had to deal with hdd’s for anything but data hoarding.
That sounds more reasonable lol.
Yeah ~2008 is kind of the timeframe I have for people getting SSDs in consumer devices. I mean… maybe you could count compact flash?
