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.
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.
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?
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.
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’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”
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 for newish games, OS, and programs, HDD for videos, photos, music, and old games.
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.)
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.
Oh no, does that mean I have to replace my Radio Shack CTR-41 cassette drive?
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.
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.
Too true. Upgrading to NVMe was the most noticeable speed boost I’ve experienced all at once in my history of building my own rigs. It’s was like black magic. Wouldn’t shut up about it to all my friends for a month.
I probably also need at least a dual core CPU.
Same with GPU…
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?
Don’t fucking dare me! My fucking magnetic tape drive does the job just fine!
this is nothing new… fuck game journalism
Are you telling me I should stop gaming using a raid10 set made from 8x500GB HDDs?
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.
PS5 supremacy. 😊
It has room for Call of Duty and Tetris
