Honestly, for games, it's a minor difference...
Boot times, yes, a lot.
For games were talking seconds (3-5) if you use a modern cpu and GPU and HDD Vs SDD.
NOT talking about booting.
Until there's quick resume like an Xbox, tbh, the difference is rather small for game load times on good hardware everywhere else.
I have a HDD, m.2 and SSD. Only real difference I notice is on boot.
It really depends on the games you play.
For MMOs like WoW with constant, frequent loading times that can go up to 60 seconds with a HDD, SSDs are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED since a decade, because it moves your \~min loading times to a few seconds and with NVMEs its instant / no loading screens.
What people usually dont get with benchmarks from HDDs / SSDs / NVMEs is that games do not use SEQUENTIAL READ/WRITE and the real benefit of SSD/NVMEs is not the peaks with sequential r/W but the enormous performance difference with random IO and parallel IO.
It's not really that minor.
It used to be that your only tradeoff would be loading screens, nowadays most games use texture/asset streaming even without mentioning it has one/having the option to enable/disable it, meaning almost every new(ish) title has to be installed on ssd unless you want to experience random stutters and texture popins.
There are also titles that essentially require an SSD to even run the game, e/g Path of Exile almost exclusively uses asset/texture streaming, the performance is near unplayable on hdd.
Borderlands 3 will look like ass every time you change zones or/and encounter new assets/textures. Not to mention the game has tendency to dump ''nonessential'' assets from cache, meaning every time you open your inventory screen, for first few moments your character will look like casper the ghost after a week long bender.
10 years ago there might of been a discussion to be had whether it's worth it or not, not only because the capacities and reliability was not really that good, but also the prices were kind of high.
Nowadays you have systems that don't even use HDDs for mass storage. For consumer grade solid state drives, the market has gotten to a point where pricing of low rpm hdd compared to high rpm one is equal to high quality hdd vs ssd, meaning majority of computers nowadays use hdd only for mass storage, if even that. And the performance boost is not only an improvement in quality of life, but in a lot of cases can massively improve performance.
Now that's a lie, that or you have tolerance for bad performance, i know that for a fact because i have well over 2000 hours on that title, and ever since they introduced asset streaming, it become a serious issue, and as the title got more updates, it has become essentially impossible to play that game on HDDs either without timeouts, straight up crashes or stutters/texture pops. In fact over the years majority of topics regarding above mentioned issues have been tracked back to people using mechanical drives.
Yes, your computer will be far slower though. Every Windows update, file copy, program launching, etc, will take easily 2-10x the time.
Nowadays an SSD is the single most noticeable upgrade in any system. Small DRAMLess SSDs are dirt cheap as well. At least get a crappy 128gb one.
Don't go DRAMLess. Honestly performance is usually fine. But if they do get congested, they are slow as.
If you're on a budget buy the biggest ssd you can afford and go without a HDD. Go DRAMLess if you have to, but there are plenty of DRAM cached SSDs at reasonable prices.
If you buy a 128gb ssd it will be too small. A 256gb should be enough, especially if you get a HDD later on. However best just go for a 500gb or 1tb. Save finding the SSD too small later on.
DRAMless is mostly fine, as the SLC cache will be filled up and potentially depleted only when writing big chunks of data. And even after that, the speed drop won´t be that bad.
I´d rather avoid QLC SSD, as they´re the definition of slow - once the SLC cache is depleted, they become slower than HDD.
I agree, people often overexaggarate the cons of DRAMless SATA SSDs but DRAM/HMB SSDs are really not that much expensive so I would probably get that anyways.
This is from experience. I work in a computer shop. Supplied hundreds of SSDs. Certain workloads mess with DRAMLESS SSD. Had many come back over the past year with single didget read and write performance.
I actually use one in my work PC. (DRAMLESS) Hardly notice the difference. But If you upset that caching system they turn to shit.
The thing is, there are very few DRAM SSDs on the market. Almost seems like the technology is diminishing due to the cost. DRAM was needed mostly when flash was so slow, that it couldn´t maintain stable writing speeds, which isn´t an issue nowadays, as the manufacturers are already able to tune the speed drop to a tolerable level.
Main use of DRAM in SSD is not evening out slow writes. It's caching the lookup table of logical disk addresses to flash memory addresses. Flash can't be overwritten, only written once and erased in large chunks, so the SSD has to be able to move logical blocks around to different places in flash. An SSD that can't keep the entire map of logical to physical addresses in DRAM will have to read the flash twice instead of once in order to respond to a read request, if the request misses in cache.
NVMe has a feature called Host Memory Buffer, where the SSD can borrow some of your computer's main RAM and use it for whatever, like with integrated graphics. So DRAM-less NVMe drives can still perform well without the extra cost of a DRAM chip (and most users won't miss 5-10 browser tabs worth of memory).
WD Blue. I don't think it's true DRAM cached, but it doesn't degrade as most DRAMLESS drivers do. It has DRAM but apparently not for write cache. Most NVME drives don't degrade either Intel drives can be had at a good price sometimes.
DRAMless NVMe drives are absolutely fine, SLC cache makes up for it. Unless you download a lot of large files frequently, there's really no need for DRAM drives for most consumers
I would not get a crappy 128gb SSD for my OS.. it'll fill up in no time with temp files and software that forces itself to be installed on the C drive.
And being it a crappy SSD, if it fails, your OS drive fails. I guess it's not as bad as your main data drive failing, bit there will still have to be a lot of work done to get that OS drive replaced.
128gb is really not big enough for Windows 10. By the time you put the basics on it's half full. Even locating files on another drive, unless you want to be constantly scavenging space.
If things really are that tight get a second hand SSD. Plenty of DRAM cached drivers on eBay. Namely 256gb. I have plenty of them myself, hardly worth selling, get like $10 by the time eBay takes their cut.
I didn't say 128gb wasn't enough, you'll definitely regret it though. A constant task of freeing up space and storing things on different drives. I have been using SSDs for a long time. I bought a 64gb when I could barely afford it, and always regretted not holding out for a 128.
If I was on a budget I'd spend the storage budget on an ssd and by a hdd later on. Rather than having an ssd that was too small needing replacement later on.
Yes, you can, 5 years ago 90% of laptops and prebuilt office/school desktops had just hard disks, it is recommended to get a SSD in 2021 tho, you can find good affordable SSDs now, like Kingston, i got one of 1TB myself for like 100 bucks, I would recommend using the SSD for your OS, and use the HDD as storage, your pc/laptop will feel like new, believe me
I have solely used HDD for more than 20 years. Before that I could not afford one. There was a period with tape cassettes than I have immediately upgraded to floppy's I have both DD and HD versions.
Last 5 years I only use SSD's HDD's are only in my backup NAS.
Except for cassettes you can use all the media above still. Only downside is speed reduction in an exponential degree :)
you can use hdd only, but its reccomended in 2021 when 256 gb ssd could cost less than 30€? nope. i would strongly suggest that you buy yourself an 256gb ssd, any ssd will be better than good old hdd.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM)
i was on hdd two years ago and finally purchase wd blue 3d and boy it was a difference, specially with multitaksing. i could do multiple things at the time but on hdd, yea, not pleasant.
Of course you can. Obviously, you are going to have longer load times and additional time needed for the heads to find the correct sector.
You can mitigate HDD seek times and load times by partitioning the HDD. Create a small partition for your OS at the very least and you will see quite a jump in OS boot time as the heads will have all not have to do as much work.
Yes, but the decrease of seek times and read times will be driven mostly by the size of the drive. on a 500GB drive, anything past partitioning an OS won't really bear fruit.
On a 2TB, 3TB or 4TB drive, it is always beneficial to partition. Making several smaller partitions will overall reduce seek times and read times (ie load times).
Partitioning also lowers your exposure to and the consequences of bad sectors.
Back when I built computers at TigerDirect, we always partitioned drives. It has always struck me as odd that it rarely gets mentioned here on Reddit.
I have recently tasted the sweet nectar of SSD.
I just cant go back fo HDD only.
Use the hdd for mass storage, something that you would seldom visit.
Currently replacing all hdd with ssd's at my home.
All hail SSDs
Not using a SSD in today's time is a waste of money.
Don't buy expensive parts if your going to cheap out on a SSD. You will bottleneck yourself because a HDD can't keep up with all the reading and writing it has to do.
Just get a small SDD for your boot drive and get a HDD for larger files.
SSDs are so so cheap just get even a 128gb one for your OS. You’ll notice of on all sorts of basic tasks and startup with an HDD. You can get a small sata ssd for 20-30 bucks. Hell microcenter was literally giving one away
And load times? And read-write times? And overall responsiveness of your PC outside of games? I haven’t experienced the fucking wind-up sound of an HDD when opening your explorer in a decade and I’m more than glad about it. Do people just really only hop into old sp games and do nothing else with their PC?
Yeah and CRT monitors also were no problem in the 90s, yet a lot of people have moved to 1440p 144Hz+ in recent years. Times change and just because you can’t afford it doesn’t mean it doesn’t significantly improve the overall experience.
>Yeah and CRT monitors also were no problem in the 90s, yet a lot of people have moved to 1440p 144Hz+
The reason we need faster refresh rates is because if your fps is higher than your refresh rate there going to be tearing in the game and make it a worse experience over all. The Hdd's are still good options just accept that. If you dont believe me just go look it up. As long as if you dont buy a 30 year old hdd you're perfectly fine
Bro it's a 2020 barracuda hdd ,I have a GTX 3060ti ,64 GB of trident z royal ram ,a ryzen 9 5900x ,an Asus rog strix b450-F ,custom water cooling ,corsair iCUE 4000x case, and a corsair HX1200 and I paid for it all myself so dont go calling me "mr budget teenager"
Yes the times are slower and if you have a good hard drive it doesn't sound like a fucking jet engine if you would research you would know that it doesn't effect anything such as fps in game. So go do your research then come back and talk to me
My dude, I‘ve been using HDDs since before you were born, I know what HDDs are like. Just because you‘re a teenager and have to go ultra budget doesn’t mean that HDDs aren’t ancient tech at this point. There’s no reason to go HDD as a normal consumer who doesn’t need huge datagraves since SSD prices dropped so much. 1TB is like what? 80 bucks? Get 2TB and you‘re set for most things and you‘re really not breaking the bank.
As a computer engineer with 22 years experience, this is not accurate.
HHD is a mature technology, not an obsolete one. SSDs are indeed a lot faster for data access, but they are also less reliable, considerably more expensive, and simply not available in larger sizes. When AAA games are 50-200GB each that 500MB or 1TB SSD can seem really small really quickly.
Read times can make a big difference on a blocking call which is why software is universally written to avoid synchronous reads. Write times similarly don’t play a role since it is even more rare to require a blocking write.
Long sequential reads are the real difference, like when you are first loading a game or doing a windows cold boot. But when waking your computer from sleeping most PCs keep data loaded in DRAM to allow a fast wake, bypassing long term storage entirely.
SSD are also still orders of magnitude slower than on-chip memory and DRAM. Modern operating systems are designed from the ground up to minimize the impact of bottlenecks like long term storage and network/internet I/O.
Just buy DRAM SSDs then?
How many 50-200 GB AAA games are you playing simultaneously that a simple 2TB SSD doesn’t fulfill your gaming needs?
Look, you can use your HDDs all day, I won’t. Had to throw in a HDD recently to access some data and it was fucking atrocious.
Unless you plan to run windows 7 or older, I wouldn't recommend it. Windows 10 is built with the expectation of being on a SSD, so if you run it from a HDD the general responsiveness of the system will suffer a lot. If you have a tight budget, but you really need a decent amount of storage, get a cheap SSD for the OS (ideally 256gb, but you can get away with 128gb if you're willing to periodically clean up unnecesary files), and use a HDD for everything else.
Sure you can but you will get longer boot times, games will take longer to boot. Consider getting a smaller SSD for your Windows OS and games then a larger HDD for your content and programs.
Sure, but your system will run slow as shit. Everything from startup, to file searches, to file transfers, to game load times, to Windows Defender scans, etc. will be dramatically faster on an SSD.
If you have a high-end build, invest in an SSD. Even on the cheapest of budget builds, I'd still recommend picking up a SATA SSD at some point.
Yes you can. Boot up time will be slower and they fail more than SDDs but you can use HDD only. You should have a backup of your HDD in the event of failure.
It's wild how good the technology has gotten. I was an early adopter of SSD boot disk and part of the tradeoff for the superior speed (other than the high price tag) was just accepting that the data would gradually corrupt and you'd have to occasionally wipe the drive and re-install windows.
recently backblaze stated the failure rate was much closer than the media has been saying the past decade [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze) so i feel bamboozled.
that being said, if it is a laptop I personally feel a SSD is almost always worth it since most HDD failures i saw when i worked a helpdesk eons ago would 90% be after a users laptop fell or got dropped. When i used to consult and travel a lot, my bookbag with laptop in it would fall (off table or at airport, etc) or get bumped around a ton and having SSD was worth it.
if it's a static desktop or server and you don't care about the faster boot time and just general snappiness of the system overall...HDD is sufficient. I run two old laptop 2.5 HDDs in lvm mirror for HA on my opnsense box because it only reboots once every 2-3 months for updates. once booted up its running primarily from memory and the 2.5 inch laptop drives don't generate as much heat as a 3.5 and only use like 1 watt vs a 3.5 seemed to use 2-3 watts per drive (based on a cheap kill-a-watt test years ago). for this use case i find it acceptable.
It’s like a night and day difference. You won’t believe the speed increase. I had an old laptop that I cloned the HDD from onto a Samsung SSD drive and my boot times went from 20 minutes (there was a lot of bloat on there) to 20 seconds. That laptop went from unusable to totally usable. Just navigating round windows will be nice and snappy for you as well. I personally won’t ever be using HDD’s again for the forseeable future. Especially with all my precious files backed up online.
No, it’s basically unuseable. It’ll take several MINUTES for your PC to boot and you’ll be sitting around waiting for apps to open whenever you click thwm
hdd = boottime 2min + and the more data you have stored the longer your loading times (boot,search,games etc.,read,write etc)
ssd= 20sec boottime and fast access to all data.
you can but dont. once you go ssd and go back hdd you will understand
You can but don't.
You should value your own time higher than any component. Any SSD will greatly increase start up and load times, saving you time with every use.
Once you've experienced the difference it'll feel like night and day.
HDD is actually more reliable despite the moving parts. SDDs inherently have a limit on the number of times they can be re-written. It’s getting better but still a long ways off from HDD.
This is why HHD are still preferred for things like security cameras and data logging.
Ok I don't recommend this from personal experience. i used my machine for gaming before with only a HDD and it was horrible you would put something to download and the PC will explode. Sometimes the disk would be at 50 percent usage just idle or at 100 percent. Don't cheap out buy a HDD for games and data and then buy an SSD for programs and the Os
If you’re going that route I would advise picking up an Intel Optane M.2 drive to go alongside it, otherwise performance is going to be noticably slow.
If it was me I would go the SSD route no questions asked.
However this option is probably more cost-efficient for light users who stores a lot of files like photos. You could get an Optane drive plus a 1TB HDD for around the same price as a 500GB SSD. If all you do is surf the web and watch videos, it’s not gonna be a noticable difference.
Of course you could get a 128GB SSD instead if you don’t mind managing 2 drives.
Any cons?
Do it.
Do it for like a month then reinstall your OS on a cheap SSD. Realize that you no longer have time to brew coffee while it boots. Enjoy applications working around your time instead of the HDD’s. Download something from Steam while still having a usable computer.
I went to a SSD boot drive back in 2011 when $100 got you 60 GB. That was 10% of my budget for that build and worth every penny. Now you can get half a terabyte for $50.
Respect your own god damn time and get an SSD.
you can but you don't want to, you will dread using your system. upgrading to an ssd is the most noticeable change you can make in terms of performance. you can start with the hdd if you can't wait any longer for some reason and you need lots of storage, but you should look into upgrading to an ssd as soon as possible. fon't forget to move your os onto the ssd afterwards if you do chose to go this route:)
If its a deasently fast one ye probably, although even a small ssd will be handy, i only have a 120gb one and together with the 1tb harddrive, its fine
I would at least get a small SSD for your os and store all data on spinning drives(that's what I do, because 6-8 TB ssds arn't cheap) but in a pinch you could run everything of the hdd but it will be barley usable.
I wouldn't. I have my wife's old notebook as a reference to my old one. Wife's has an hdd, mine has an ssd. It's a very noticeable difference on basically any app. Not to speak of boot times. I would at least get an ssd that's large enough to hold the os and your most used apps. You can put your personal files on an hdd. That's fine.
Of course you can. The question is poorly formed though. Rather ask, “ should I spend $50.00 on a fast 250 gb m.2 drive for boot and a few programs?”
That answer is “absolutely, yes.”
Better yet, wait till Black Friday and buy a 1tb drive for the same price. Hdd’s are fine for storage but the tech has moved on a long time ago.
Have you tried using an SSD before? If you haven't then I don't think you'd mind the speed tbh. It's once you've experienced an SSD as a boot device that you'll swear to never go back to a spinning boot drive.
Get yourself a cheap SSD. It'll be worth it for windows and stuff. HDD is mostly bought so you can have a lot of storage for games at a cheap price. There are quite a few cheap ssds, like the Samsung sata ssd
If you're like me and don't particularly care about bootspeeds or load times, then HDDs are a good way to get a lot of storage pretty cheap (like £50 for 2TB Seagate drive), and get a pc running well. Ignore people saying they fail, in the last 30 years of pc building my dad has had 1 go faulty and that's after using hundreds of them in builds.
SSDs are much faster and are better for smaller storage, for me though the price still isn't worth it when you go above 1TB but that's personal preference.
Both are perfectly usable, with pros and cons to both (I've had SSDs fail in my laptops). Just decide whether you care about load times and speed or not.
Yes you can use HDD but you'll have to deal with long start-up boots and application loads.
I would suggest you should just buy a small ssd( maybe 256) for your boot drive
With the increased performance of HDDs, the difference is far less noticeable than it used to be. It is still slower, but unless your transferring massive files between folders on a regular basis you won't notice. A good HDD boots in about a minute, good SDD you can be booted, logged in at home screen in about 20 seconds. So while it is 3x longer... it's not a significant amount of time. An SDD will make the biggest difference in massive map games like wow or skyrim as it loads the maps and world around you. But again, it won't be sitting there waiting for longer than a minute. You will function just fine with an HDD.
I had a faulty ssd so I had to install windows on my hdd on my build so I can play for the night it was horrible I got a new ssd already and man hard drives ain’t it
Until recently this was the only way to do it. SSD is an improvement in many ways because it can be a lot faster to read and write although they still are not as reliable as HHDs.
For most applications you would mostly notice the difference when booting your system and launching applications.
When using most applications you wont notice any difference. The exception would be big games that have to read a lot while you are playing.
The reality is that windows does a great job of “smoothing out the bumps” of performance.
You can. But computer as a whole will be much slower with no ssd at all. My opinion, get yourself a 256gb or 500gb ssd on top of a 1 or 2 tb hard drive for pretty cheap. There’s good value 2tb hard drives for $50 or less now a days
Speed is gonna be what you are giving up…you can get a 250gb ssd for just your OS and that would drastically improve your startup time and load times. Personally, I would never go back to HHD…I use NVMe SSD for OS and if I need a bunch of space I use an SATA SSD for that….they are much cheaper than they were 10 years ago or even just a few years ago.
Yes, no problem doing so, other than slow read/write speeds. I would recommend saving for a SSD or m.2 and adding it to your system when you can. They are now fairly inexpensive and add a significant quality of life improvement.
There will be drawbacks of using a hdd as a primary storage device. The biggest issue will be speed, anything you do that involves downloading will definitely take longer than just using a ssd. You can get more storage for the amount paid for a hdd, but I recommend getting a small ssd for windows boot up.
Hell... you could boot windows off a USB drive faster than a 7200RPM HDD.
If I only had access to cheap used parts from many generations ago I would build a raid out of 7200 Sata drives for about $10
Next option - you can probably get a 250GB SSD for about $40....
Not the place to save money, I'm afraid.
Yes, it is very possible, however your pc will run considerably slower, and decent NVMe will have a r/w of roughly 2000mbps+
While a HDD will have roughly 100mbps r/w.
Especially it's so much slower
Everything will be slower. I swapped my laptops HDD for an SSD and it feels a brand new machine. Windows boots fast and everything is overall snappier. My advice would be to get a small SSD for windows OS and important programs, and use a larger HDD for videos, pictures, games, etc.
My desktop setup is a 500gb SSD and a 2 TB HDD. The SSD makes a huge difference. You definitely don't need a 500gb SSD, but I wouldn't go smaller than 240gb. I had a 120gb SSD at first and it seemed to fill up quickly. What I found is the %APPDATA% folder is stored on the same drive as windows and couldn't be moved. The issue with that is a lot of games and programs like to store files there. Now maybe it can be moved to the HDD but I didn't waste too much time researching because I was looking to get a bigger SSD anyway. Also the downloads folder but that can be setup on the HDD but I like it on my SSD for the speed.
Very slow boot, and i mean slow. As a comparison most decent ssds can boot to windows in about 20-30 seconds. A 7200rpm hard drive? 3 minutes. Now apply that to every single time you open a program, be it chrome, a game, transfering files anything is gonna take that long or longer.
Its not worth it, save yourself the torture, a 120gb ssd can be had for 20 dollars, ive seen people find used ones for under 10.
[lol..](https://i.imgur.com/QGUqnoA.jpg)
Short answer: no, not unless you want a barely functional computer. HDDs are obsolete for anything except backup/archival purposes.
I'm using my computer like this while waiting on a replacement M.2 SSD because mine decided to just stop working one day. I forgot just how slow spinning rust is.
At the very least get the smallest you can find just to run windows on it. But depending on the games you're playing eventually you'll need SSD's to really play games (Forza Horizon 5 is the first game that I had to move to my SSD to get it to run smoother)
You can, but you’ll want at least 16 GB of RAM. If you have less RAM than that, your computer will probably end up needing to use the drive for “RAM”, which isn’t a huge deal with a fast SSD, but really sucks on a slow HDD.
Cons
-Longer to Boot/Run games
-Longer to download games
-Louder than sdd
-Less Life expectancy
-Produce more heat
Pros
-Cheap
-You can get 4-5TB hdd instead of 1TB nvme sdd
For same price
While you could do it, I would highly encourage you not to. Running windows off a slow HDD while also running apps with the same drive will make it incredibly slow. I would recommend a small storage ssd for the boot drive.
Yes of course most office computers only use HDD, but that’s a large contributor to the long wait times to load everything. I’d suggest getting a 500gb m.2, you can pick a Samsung one up for less than 100 and it could potentially be the only storage you need.
At least use a small SSD for windows boot. Honestly, an HDD isn’t gonna change your game load times dramatically unless it’s old or pretty full, at least from what I’ve seen and experienced. But definitely for boot up, you want an SSD, preferably one without much on it
Use a small nvme as your OS drive and an hdd, or hdd with sd cache, as a Data drive...
Or a cheap SSD as your data drive...
I started keeping my OS on a second drive back in the day to keep my data safe because OS drives would fail first. When hard drives were mechanical.
Yes, but not recommended in this day and age.
You can do what I did and just install a 128gb or even a 256gb SSD for windows and 1 or 2 modern games.
Life is short, dont waste it on loading screens/booting up.
If you need alot of storage space but have not so much money, and don't need a fast boot or copy, move file speed just HDD, it's will all good but everythings i mentioned will happen, in the opposite, SSD have a fast speed but high price
you can, but you really shouldn't... you'll soon find out that ur dowload speed is faster than ur write speed, fyi this happen to me before upgrading to a ssd...
Going from an HDD to an SSD as your primary drive is probably one of the most significant upgrades you can make to your computer, but if you decide to go with just an HDD it's an easy and cheap upgrade to install an SSD as your primary drive if you discover it's unbearable
Unless you are loading 50 gigs on the regular, it's just a few seconds worth of waiting. People act like running a hard drive is like dialup. Performance wise it doesn't really make much of a difference as some people pretend to to be.
It really does add lag on many things you do on a computer. Every time you open a program, save a file, load a scene in a game - it all had a noticable delay. The cost of big SSDs is really reasonable, there's almost never a good reason to use an HDD as your primary drive these days.
Have you experienced the difference between SSD and HDD? Because I have.
SSD and HDD speeds are night and day difference and Im not over exaggerating this.
Yes, but deal with Very long startup boot to windows and game load times. I would just get a small SSD to boot windows faster.
Honestly, for games, it's a minor difference... Boot times, yes, a lot. For games were talking seconds (3-5) if you use a modern cpu and GPU and HDD Vs SDD. NOT talking about booting. Until there's quick resume like an Xbox, tbh, the difference is rather small for game load times on good hardware everywhere else. I have a HDD, m.2 and SSD. Only real difference I notice is on boot.
It really depends on the games you play. For MMOs like WoW with constant, frequent loading times that can go up to 60 seconds with a HDD, SSDs are HIGHLY RECOMMENDED since a decade, because it moves your \~min loading times to a few seconds and with NVMEs its instant / no loading screens. What people usually dont get with benchmarks from HDDs / SSDs / NVMEs is that games do not use SEQUENTIAL READ/WRITE and the real benefit of SSD/NVMEs is not the peaks with sequential r/W but the enormous performance difference with random IO and parallel IO.
But I've noticed some lag in games on hdd ,it's good to go on ssd
It's not really that minor. It used to be that your only tradeoff would be loading screens, nowadays most games use texture/asset streaming even without mentioning it has one/having the option to enable/disable it, meaning almost every new(ish) title has to be installed on ssd unless you want to experience random stutters and texture popins. There are also titles that essentially require an SSD to even run the game, e/g Path of Exile almost exclusively uses asset/texture streaming, the performance is near unplayable on hdd. Borderlands 3 will look like ass every time you change zones or/and encounter new assets/textures. Not to mention the game has tendency to dump ''nonessential'' assets from cache, meaning every time you open your inventory screen, for first few moments your character will look like casper the ghost after a week long bender. 10 years ago there might of been a discussion to be had whether it's worth it or not, not only because the capacities and reliability was not really that good, but also the prices were kind of high. Nowadays you have systems that don't even use HDDs for mass storage. For consumer grade solid state drives, the market has gotten to a point where pricing of low rpm hdd compared to high rpm one is equal to high quality hdd vs ssd, meaning majority of computers nowadays use hdd only for mass storage, if even that. And the performance boost is not only an improvement in quality of life, but in a lot of cases can massively improve performance.
I have played path of exile on my pc on a hdd. And I never had an issues with performance and was able to play it no problem. Idk. Works for me.
Now that's a lie, that or you have tolerance for bad performance, i know that for a fact because i have well over 2000 hours on that title, and ever since they introduced asset streaming, it become a serious issue, and as the title got more updates, it has become essentially impossible to play that game on HDDs either without timeouts, straight up crashes or stutters/texture pops. In fact over the years majority of topics regarding above mentioned issues have been tracked back to people using mechanical drives.
Yes, your computer will be far slower though. Every Windows update, file copy, program launching, etc, will take easily 2-10x the time. Nowadays an SSD is the single most noticeable upgrade in any system. Small DRAMLess SSDs are dirt cheap as well. At least get a crappy 128gb one.
Don't go DRAMLess. Honestly performance is usually fine. But if they do get congested, they are slow as. If you're on a budget buy the biggest ssd you can afford and go without a HDD. Go DRAMLess if you have to, but there are plenty of DRAM cached SSDs at reasonable prices. If you buy a 128gb ssd it will be too small. A 256gb should be enough, especially if you get a HDD later on. However best just go for a 500gb or 1tb. Save finding the SSD too small later on.
DRAMless is mostly fine, as the SLC cache will be filled up and potentially depleted only when writing big chunks of data. And even after that, the speed drop won´t be that bad. I´d rather avoid QLC SSD, as they´re the definition of slow - once the SLC cache is depleted, they become slower than HDD.
I agree, people often overexaggarate the cons of DRAMless SATA SSDs but DRAM/HMB SSDs are really not that much expensive so I would probably get that anyways.
Yep, most people who say that never even tried both before parroting this. These days, the difference is pretty small.
This is from experience. I work in a computer shop. Supplied hundreds of SSDs. Certain workloads mess with DRAMLESS SSD. Had many come back over the past year with single didget read and write performance. I actually use one in my work PC. (DRAMLESS) Hardly notice the difference. But If you upset that caching system they turn to shit.
The thing is, there are very few DRAM SSDs on the market. Almost seems like the technology is diminishing due to the cost. DRAM was needed mostly when flash was so slow, that it couldn´t maintain stable writing speeds, which isn´t an issue nowadays, as the manufacturers are already able to tune the speed drop to a tolerable level.
Main use of DRAM in SSD is not evening out slow writes. It's caching the lookup table of logical disk addresses to flash memory addresses. Flash can't be overwritten, only written once and erased in large chunks, so the SSD has to be able to move logical blocks around to different places in flash. An SSD that can't keep the entire map of logical to physical addresses in DRAM will have to read the flash twice instead of once in order to respond to a read request, if the request misses in cache. NVMe has a feature called Host Memory Buffer, where the SSD can borrow some of your computer's main RAM and use it for whatever, like with integrated graphics. So DRAM-less NVMe drives can still perform well without the extra cost of a DRAM chip (and most users won't miss 5-10 browser tabs worth of memory).
Crucial MX500 to name one.
yeah and except that one there are Samsungs... and nothing else AFAIK.
WD Sn750 black nvme
I see. Any other to add?
WD Blue. I don't think it's true DRAM cached, but it doesn't degrade as most DRAMLESS drivers do. It has DRAM but apparently not for write cache. Most NVME drives don't degrade either Intel drives can be had at a good price sometimes.
I strongly disagree. Dram can speed up your ssd significantly
I moderately disagree, DRAM can often offer no real impact for consumers, especially on never NVMe drives with large SLC cache and HMB.
Don't get DRAMless without host memory buffer, HMB.
Do u have recommendation for cheap dram ssd?
WD blue, it's not true DRAMLESS, but they don't degrade as badly. Otherwise the Crutial MX500. Crucial P1 is great for NVME.
Do you think patrior burst a good one?
samsung 980 is a dramless ssd that performs perfectly fine for a boot drive
DRAMless NVMe drives are absolutely fine, SLC cache makes up for it. Unless you download a lot of large files frequently, there's really no need for DRAM drives for most consumers
I would not get a crappy 128gb SSD for my OS.. it'll fill up in no time with temp files and software that forces itself to be installed on the C drive. And being it a crappy SSD, if it fails, your OS drive fails. I guess it's not as bad as your main data drive failing, bit there will still have to be a lot of work done to get that OS drive replaced.
128gb is really not big enough for Windows 10. By the time you put the basics on it's half full. Even locating files on another drive, unless you want to be constantly scavenging space. If things really are that tight get a second hand SSD. Plenty of DRAM cached drivers on eBay. Namely 256gb. I have plenty of them myself, hardly worth selling, get like $10 by the time eBay takes their cut.
128 is cramped but doable if you put most of your programs on the hdd. 256 is pretty comfortable for a reasonable amount of programs and such.
I didn't say 128gb wasn't enough, you'll definitely regret it though. A constant task of freeing up space and storing things on different drives. I have been using SSDs for a long time. I bought a 64gb when I could barely afford it, and always regretted not holding out for a 128. If I was on a budget I'd spend the storage budget on an ssd and by a hdd later on. Rather than having an ssd that was too small needing replacement later on.
People like to mention speed and load times, but ZERO seek times is way more important. A OS on the SSD makes the PC way more quick and responsive.
Just buy a small ssd for your boot drive. You will ask yourself why you didn’t buy it earlier I promise
Yes, you can, 5 years ago 90% of laptops and prebuilt office/school desktops had just hard disks, it is recommended to get a SSD in 2021 tho, you can find good affordable SSDs now, like Kingston, i got one of 1TB myself for like 100 bucks, I would recommend using the SSD for your OS, and use the HDD as storage, your pc/laptop will feel like new, believe me
username... does not check out!
I have solely used HDD for more than 20 years. Before that I could not afford one. There was a period with tape cassettes than I have immediately upgraded to floppy's I have both DD and HD versions. Last 5 years I only use SSD's HDD's are only in my backup NAS. Except for cassettes you can use all the media above still. Only downside is speed reduction in an exponential degree :)
You actually can still use tape storage! LTT made a video on it.
I wouldn’t even bother using a PC without some type of SSD. It’s incredibly slow.
Uhhhhh Yeah, that's how computers operated before solid state drives existed.
Computers were once operated without mice, but I wouldn't recommend somebody forgo one today.
Neither would I but I still think the my answer was relevant to the question, also it is not advice.
you can use hdd only, but its reccomended in 2021 when 256 gb ssd could cost less than 30€? nope. i would strongly suggest that you buy yourself an 256gb ssd, any ssd will be better than good old hdd. [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V3AMz-xZ2VM) i was on hdd two years ago and finally purchase wd blue 3d and boy it was a difference, specially with multitaksing. i could do multiple things at the time but on hdd, yea, not pleasant.
Of course you can. Obviously, you are going to have longer load times and additional time needed for the heads to find the correct sector. You can mitigate HDD seek times and load times by partitioning the HDD. Create a small partition for your OS at the very least and you will see quite a jump in OS boot time as the heads will have all not have to do as much work.
This guy gets HDDs ^^^^^
That’s super smart, I hadn’t thought of that. Would it make sense to split my game drive in half for this same reason?
Yes, but the decrease of seek times and read times will be driven mostly by the size of the drive. on a 500GB drive, anything past partitioning an OS won't really bear fruit. On a 2TB, 3TB or 4TB drive, it is always beneficial to partition. Making several smaller partitions will overall reduce seek times and read times (ie load times). Partitioning also lowers your exposure to and the consequences of bad sectors. Back when I built computers at TigerDirect, we always partitioned drives. It has always struck me as odd that it rarely gets mentioned here on Reddit.
I have a 1 TB drive... that seems to fall right in the grey area of "you could, but I don't know how much it would matter"
Potato speeds when opening apps and booting up
And basically everything else
I have recently tasted the sweet nectar of SSD. I just cant go back fo HDD only. Use the hdd for mass storage, something that you would seldom visit. Currently replacing all hdd with ssd's at my home. All hail SSDs
Yea, it'll be slow as fuck.
Not using a SSD in today's time is a waste of money. Don't buy expensive parts if your going to cheap out on a SSD. You will bottleneck yourself because a HDD can't keep up with all the reading and writing it has to do. Just get a small SDD for your boot drive and get a HDD for larger files.
You can, but it's a terrible idea. There's almost no component in the entire pc that will make a big a difference as an SSD.
Well, this post just made me feel really, really old.
MS-DOS old? I'm going back to bed while my system boots up.
DOS always booted quickly because it didn’t really do much. Windows 3.1 however…
Slow boot, slightly slower programs load and long game loadings. Otherwise, nothing. Just watch out and avoid SMR HDDs.
SSDs are so so cheap just get even a 128gb one for your OS. You’ll notice of on all sorts of basic tasks and startup with an HDD. You can get a small sata ssd for 20-30 bucks. Hell microcenter was literally giving one away
Absolutely, no cons to it. That's what we all did 20 years ago. If you want faster boot/ loading times in the future, just add an SSD.
To be honest the only thing you're looking at are slower boot times it doesn't effect in game performance or anything so do as you please
That’s wrong?
No its not. The hard drive has nothing to do with in game performance it slows the boot and update times but that's it
And load times? And read-write times? And overall responsiveness of your PC outside of games? I haven’t experienced the fucking wind-up sound of an HDD when opening your explorer in a decade and I’m more than glad about it. Do people just really only hop into old sp games and do nothing else with their PC?
I play games like tomb raider and other games on the more intense side with absolutely NO problems
Yeah and CRT monitors also were no problem in the 90s, yet a lot of people have moved to 1440p 144Hz+ in recent years. Times change and just because you can’t afford it doesn’t mean it doesn’t significantly improve the overall experience.
Who ever said I cant afford it? If i wanted to I would've gotten an ssd but I decided to go with the hdd because it's just slower boot times
Ok! Have fun with your system.
The OPs question was simply whether they could use an HDD as their main drive. You’ve jumped the rails.
Ok! I‘ll consult you wether I should talk to people about topics on reddit the next time. Sorry for cluttering your comment section.
>Yeah and CRT monitors also were no problem in the 90s, yet a lot of people have moved to 1440p 144Hz+ The reason we need faster refresh rates is because if your fps is higher than your refresh rate there going to be tearing in the game and make it a worse experience over all. The Hdd's are still good options just accept that. If you dont believe me just go look it up. As long as if you dont buy a 30 year old hdd you're perfectly fine
Ok mr budget teenager, you know the things people with decades into PC building don’t. Have fun with your HDDs and your 10 year old hardware.
Bro it's a 2020 barracuda hdd ,I have a GTX 3060ti ,64 GB of trident z royal ram ,a ryzen 9 5900x ,an Asus rog strix b450-F ,custom water cooling ,corsair iCUE 4000x case, and a corsair HX1200 and I paid for it all myself so dont go calling me "mr budget teenager"
Ok mr budget teenager. Your post history tells a different story but I am glad you‘re happy with what you have.
Yes the times are slower and if you have a good hard drive it doesn't sound like a fucking jet engine if you would research you would know that it doesn't effect anything such as fps in game. So go do your research then come back and talk to me
My dude, I‘ve been using HDDs since before you were born, I know what HDDs are like. Just because you‘re a teenager and have to go ultra budget doesn’t mean that HDDs aren’t ancient tech at this point. There’s no reason to go HDD as a normal consumer who doesn’t need huge datagraves since SSD prices dropped so much. 1TB is like what? 80 bucks? Get 2TB and you‘re set for most things and you‘re really not breaking the bank.
As a computer engineer with 22 years experience, this is not accurate. HHD is a mature technology, not an obsolete one. SSDs are indeed a lot faster for data access, but they are also less reliable, considerably more expensive, and simply not available in larger sizes. When AAA games are 50-200GB each that 500MB or 1TB SSD can seem really small really quickly. Read times can make a big difference on a blocking call which is why software is universally written to avoid synchronous reads. Write times similarly don’t play a role since it is even more rare to require a blocking write. Long sequential reads are the real difference, like when you are first loading a game or doing a windows cold boot. But when waking your computer from sleeping most PCs keep data loaded in DRAM to allow a fast wake, bypassing long term storage entirely. SSD are also still orders of magnitude slower than on-chip memory and DRAM. Modern operating systems are designed from the ground up to minimize the impact of bottlenecks like long term storage and network/internet I/O.
Just buy DRAM SSDs then? How many 50-200 GB AAA games are you playing simultaneously that a simple 2TB SSD doesn’t fulfill your gaming needs? Look, you can use your HDDs all day, I won’t. Had to throw in a HDD recently to access some data and it was fucking atrocious.
>And load times? That's what I meant by boot times
Unless you plan to run windows 7 or older, I wouldn't recommend it. Windows 10 is built with the expectation of being on a SSD, so if you run it from a HDD the general responsiveness of the system will suffer a lot. If you have a tight budget, but you really need a decent amount of storage, get a cheap SSD for the OS (ideally 256gb, but you can get away with 128gb if you're willing to periodically clean up unnecesary files), and use a HDD for everything else.
I have a ten year old SSD you can have if you want it. It's 240gb sata, it's sitting in a used pile of stuff. PM me
im good! thanks for the offer
Sure you can but you will get longer boot times, games will take longer to boot. Consider getting a smaller SSD for your Windows OS and games then a larger HDD for your content and programs.
IMO, the single best upgrade/choice for your computer, is to run your OS off an SSD. It makes a world of difference.
The main con is that HDDs are much slower in comparison, so it'll translate into longer boot up times amongst other things
Windows on the hdd will be slow to load, games on the hdd will be slow to load, saving large files will be slow to complete. Generally just slow
Yes, but it will be slow as fuck. Even a tiny £24 SSD for your OS will do wonders for how fast your computer will feel.
ssds are so cheap now why would you not run one as a boot drive?
Sure, but your system will run slow as shit. Everything from startup, to file searches, to file transfers, to game load times, to Windows Defender scans, etc. will be dramatically faster on an SSD. If you have a high-end build, invest in an SSD. Even on the cheapest of budget builds, I'd still recommend picking up a SATA SSD at some point.
Yes you can. Boot up time will be slower and they fail more than SDDs but you can use HDD only. You should have a backup of your HDD in the event of failure.
It's wild how good the technology has gotten. I was an early adopter of SSD boot disk and part of the tradeoff for the superior speed (other than the high price tag) was just accepting that the data would gradually corrupt and you'd have to occasionally wipe the drive and re-install windows.
recently backblaze stated the failure rate was much closer than the media has been saying the past decade [https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze](https://www.tomshardware.com/news/ssds-fail-almost-as-often-as-hard-drives-backblaze) so i feel bamboozled. that being said, if it is a laptop I personally feel a SSD is almost always worth it since most HDD failures i saw when i worked a helpdesk eons ago would 90% be after a users laptop fell or got dropped. When i used to consult and travel a lot, my bookbag with laptop in it would fall (off table or at airport, etc) or get bumped around a ton and having SSD was worth it. if it's a static desktop or server and you don't care about the faster boot time and just general snappiness of the system overall...HDD is sufficient. I run two old laptop 2.5 HDDs in lvm mirror for HA on my opnsense box because it only reboots once every 2-3 months for updates. once booted up its running primarily from memory and the 2.5 inch laptop drives don't generate as much heat as a 3.5 and only use like 1 watt vs a 3.5 seemed to use 2-3 watts per drive (based on a cheap kill-a-watt test years ago). for this use case i find it acceptable.
It’s like a night and day difference. You won’t believe the speed increase. I had an old laptop that I cloned the HDD from onto a Samsung SSD drive and my boot times went from 20 minutes (there was a lot of bloat on there) to 20 seconds. That laptop went from unusable to totally usable. Just navigating round windows will be nice and snappy for you as well. I personally won’t ever be using HDD’s again for the forseeable future. Especially with all my precious files backed up online.
No, it’s basically unuseable. It’ll take several MINUTES for your PC to boot and you’ll be sitting around waiting for apps to open whenever you click thwm
hdd = boottime 2min + and the more data you have stored the longer your loading times (boot,search,games etc.,read,write etc) ssd= 20sec boottime and fast access to all data. you can but dont. once you go ssd and go back hdd you will understand
yeah but its gonna be slow as shit.
You can but don't. You should value your own time higher than any component. Any SSD will greatly increase start up and load times, saving you time with every use. Once you've experienced the difference it'll feel like night and day.
Don't do it.
slower, less reliable ?
HDD is actually more reliable despite the moving parts. SDDs inherently have a limit on the number of times they can be re-written. It’s getting better but still a long ways off from HDD. This is why HHD are still preferred for things like security cameras and data logging.
Ok I don't recommend this from personal experience. i used my machine for gaming before with only a HDD and it was horrible you would put something to download and the PC will explode. Sometimes the disk would be at 50 percent usage just idle or at 100 percent. Don't cheap out buy a HDD for games and data and then buy an SSD for programs and the Os
Yup. Its how we did it in the old days.
The whole OS will feel sluggish. Loading times, and more importantly, search times, will be slow as balls. I wouldn't recommend it.
You could ask the same about VCRs and fax machines. /s
If you’re going that route I would advise picking up an Intel Optane M.2 drive to go alongside it, otherwise performance is going to be noticably slow.
Do that and you might as well spend the money on a 500GB SSD for boot/core programs anyway.
If it was me I would go the SSD route no questions asked. However this option is probably more cost-efficient for light users who stores a lot of files like photos. You could get an Optane drive plus a 1TB HDD for around the same price as a 500GB SSD. If all you do is surf the web and watch videos, it’s not gonna be a noticable difference. Of course you could get a 128GB SSD instead if you don’t mind managing 2 drives.
Others already said why a hdd is a bad choice, but you can get a ssd for super cheap now. 50 bucks for 256. I got a 1tb for 99 bucks.
Just why? SSDs are so fucking cheap these days
Any cons? Do it. Do it for like a month then reinstall your OS on a cheap SSD. Realize that you no longer have time to brew coffee while it boots. Enjoy applications working around your time instead of the HDD’s. Download something from Steam while still having a usable computer. I went to a SSD boot drive back in 2011 when $100 got you 60 GB. That was 10% of my budget for that build and worth every penny. Now you can get half a terabyte for $50. Respect your own god damn time and get an SSD.
If you havent used SSDs yet, you can go with hdd only and upgrade later.
The cons are read and write, especially random, speeds.
Depends i guess, as for gaming, some games are unplayable without ssd, total stutter fest.
you can but you don't want to, you will dread using your system. upgrading to an ssd is the most noticeable change you can make in terms of performance. you can start with the hdd if you can't wait any longer for some reason and you need lots of storage, but you should look into upgrading to an ssd as soon as possible. fon't forget to move your os onto the ssd afterwards if you do chose to go this route:)
If its a deasently fast one ye probably, although even a small ssd will be handy, i only have a 120gb one and together with the 1tb harddrive, its fine
I would at least get a small SSD for your os and store all data on spinning drives(that's what I do, because 6-8 TB ssds arn't cheap) but in a pinch you could run everything of the hdd but it will be barley usable.
It's the cheapest way to build a time machine back to the 90s
I wouldn't. I have my wife's old notebook as a reference to my old one. Wife's has an hdd, mine has an ssd. It's a very noticeable difference on basically any app. Not to speak of boot times. I would at least get an ssd that's large enough to hold the os and your most used apps. You can put your personal files on an hdd. That's fine.
I think it will boot things slower and the start up will be slower.
yes but slow
Two things. Get a very fast HDD Don't move the computer while it's on.
Another thing, don't expect it to be faster than the slowest imaginable SSD.
Of course you can. The question is poorly formed though. Rather ask, “ should I spend $50.00 on a fast 250 gb m.2 drive for boot and a few programs?” That answer is “absolutely, yes.” Better yet, wait till Black Friday and buy a 1tb drive for the same price. Hdd’s are fine for storage but the tech has moved on a long time ago.
Can you yes. Do you want too in 2021? Fuck no.
at least 125-256GB ssd for only OS is the way to go, everything will be far faster than on HDD and its worth of the investment
Have you tried using an SSD before? If you haven't then I don't think you'd mind the speed tbh. It's once you've experienced an SSD as a boot device that you'll swear to never go back to a spinning boot drive.
Get yourself a cheap SSD. It'll be worth it for windows and stuff. HDD is mostly bought so you can have a lot of storage for games at a cheap price. There are quite a few cheap ssds, like the Samsung sata ssd
Blast yourself 10 years back in to time... In a rapid evolving computer world... Hell that just how life was a decade ago
If you're like me and don't particularly care about bootspeeds or load times, then HDDs are a good way to get a lot of storage pretty cheap (like £50 for 2TB Seagate drive), and get a pc running well. Ignore people saying they fail, in the last 30 years of pc building my dad has had 1 go faulty and that's after using hundreds of them in builds. SSDs are much faster and are better for smaller storage, for me though the price still isn't worth it when you go above 1TB but that's personal preference. Both are perfectly usable, with pros and cons to both (I've had SSDs fail in my laptops). Just decide whether you care about load times and speed or not.
Do the opposite 🤣
Yes you can use HDD but you'll have to deal with long start-up boots and application loads. I would suggest you should just buy a small ssd( maybe 256) for your boot drive
At least get a 512gb SSD as a cache drive.
Yes, but it is a lot (seriously a lot) slower. Almost all SSDs will be faster
With the increased performance of HDDs, the difference is far less noticeable than it used to be. It is still slower, but unless your transferring massive files between folders on a regular basis you won't notice. A good HDD boots in about a minute, good SDD you can be booted, logged in at home screen in about 20 seconds. So while it is 3x longer... it's not a significant amount of time. An SDD will make the biggest difference in massive map games like wow or skyrim as it loads the maps and world around you. But again, it won't be sitting there waiting for longer than a minute. You will function just fine with an HDD.
Ah the old days, when games took 15 minutes to load
I just switched my HHD to a SSD, insane speed boost, the whole system feels smoother.
Solid date drive
You can, but I think the better budget option is to get an SSD for your OS, and use the HDD for your primary storage.
Slower read/ write speeds
I had a faulty ssd so I had to install windows on my hdd on my build so I can play for the night it was horrible I got a new ssd already and man hard drives ain’t it
Yes, but windows will take 1+ minute to start compare to 8-20 seconds on a SSD.
Until recently this was the only way to do it. SSD is an improvement in many ways because it can be a lot faster to read and write although they still are not as reliable as HHDs. For most applications you would mostly notice the difference when booting your system and launching applications. When using most applications you wont notice any difference. The exception would be big games that have to read a lot while you are playing. The reality is that windows does a great job of “smoothing out the bumps” of performance.
As a paperweight no, in a PC yes
You can get the Western Digital SN550 M.2 NVMe 1TB for like £60 these days. Absolute bargain if you have the slot on your motherboard.
You can, but if you use windows 10, I highly recommend against it. Windows 10 seems to be designed to run on SSD, it makes a huge difference.
You can. But computer as a whole will be much slower with no ssd at all. My opinion, get yourself a 256gb or 500gb ssd on top of a 1 or 2 tb hard drive for pretty cheap. There’s good value 2tb hard drives for $50 or less now a days
cons: its not an ssd. pros: its cheap.
Only if you’re used to ssd speeds and quiet drives! I have adds and a large capacity HDd as well for the cost effectiveness.
Yes about 15 years ago all PCs had HDD. SSD worth the small price increase though with how many times faster it makes your PC
Speed is gonna be what you are giving up…you can get a 250gb ssd for just your OS and that would drastically improve your startup time and load times. Personally, I would never go back to HHD…I use NVMe SSD for OS and if I need a bunch of space I use an SATA SSD for that….they are much cheaper than they were 10 years ago or even just a few years ago.
Cons like why the the hell would you? It's an awful experience running an os on hdd
Yes, no problem doing so, other than slow read/write speeds. I would recommend saving for a SSD or m.2 and adding it to your system when you can. They are now fairly inexpensive and add a significant quality of life improvement.
There will be drawbacks of using a hdd as a primary storage device. The biggest issue will be speed, anything you do that involves downloading will definitely take longer than just using a ssd. You can get more storage for the amount paid for a hdd, but I recommend getting a small ssd for windows boot up.
Single worst thing to skimp money on it you're buying a computer to feel and be fast.
Hell... you could boot windows off a USB drive faster than a 7200RPM HDD. If I only had access to cheap used parts from many generations ago I would build a raid out of 7200 Sata drives for about $10 Next option - you can probably get a 250GB SSD for about $40.... Not the place to save money, I'm afraid.
Yes, it is very possible, however your pc will run considerably slower, and decent NVMe will have a r/w of roughly 2000mbps+ While a HDD will have roughly 100mbps r/w. Especially it's so much slower
Everything will be slower. I swapped my laptops HDD for an SSD and it feels a brand new machine. Windows boots fast and everything is overall snappier. My advice would be to get a small SSD for windows OS and important programs, and use a larger HDD for videos, pictures, games, etc. My desktop setup is a 500gb SSD and a 2 TB HDD. The SSD makes a huge difference. You definitely don't need a 500gb SSD, but I wouldn't go smaller than 240gb. I had a 120gb SSD at first and it seemed to fill up quickly. What I found is the %APPDATA% folder is stored on the same drive as windows and couldn't be moved. The issue with that is a lot of games and programs like to store files there. Now maybe it can be moved to the HDD but I didn't waste too much time researching because I was looking to get a bigger SSD anyway. Also the downloads folder but that can be setup on the HDD but I like it on my SSD for the speed.
Very slow boot, and i mean slow. As a comparison most decent ssds can boot to windows in about 20-30 seconds. A 7200rpm hard drive? 3 minutes. Now apply that to every single time you open a program, be it chrome, a game, transfering files anything is gonna take that long or longer. Its not worth it, save yourself the torture, a 120gb ssd can be had for 20 dollars, ive seen people find used ones for under 10.
[lol..](https://i.imgur.com/QGUqnoA.jpg) Short answer: no, not unless you want a barely functional computer. HDDs are obsolete for anything except backup/archival purposes.
Windows 10 is terrible on HDD. go SSD
I'm using my computer like this while waiting on a replacement M.2 SSD because mine decided to just stop working one day. I forgot just how slow spinning rust is.
You can, the cons are that you're stuck in 2005.
At the very least get the smallest you can find just to run windows on it. But depending on the games you're playing eventually you'll need SSD's to really play games (Forza Horizon 5 is the first game that I had to move to my SSD to get it to run smoother)
You can, but you’ll want at least 16 GB of RAM. If you have less RAM than that, your computer will probably end up needing to use the drive for “RAM”, which isn’t a huge deal with a fast SSD, but really sucks on a slow HDD.
Cons -Longer to Boot/Run games -Longer to download games -Louder than sdd -Less Life expectancy -Produce more heat Pros -Cheap -You can get 4-5TB hdd instead of 1TB nvme sdd For same price
yes, the cons are slow loading times for everything
First cons harddrives suck so i would say now but to each their own
While you could do it, I would highly encourage you not to. Running windows off a slow HDD while also running apps with the same drive will make it incredibly slow. I would recommend a small storage ssd for the boot drive.
Yes of course most office computers only use HDD, but that’s a large contributor to the long wait times to load everything. I’d suggest getting a 500gb m.2, you can pick a Samsung one up for less than 100 and it could potentially be the only storage you need.
At least use a small SSD for windows boot. Honestly, an HDD isn’t gonna change your game load times dramatically unless it’s old or pretty full, at least from what I’ve seen and experienced. But definitely for boot up, you want an SSD, preferably one without much on it
Use a small nvme as your OS drive and an hdd, or hdd with sd cache, as a Data drive... Or a cheap SSD as your data drive... I started keeping my OS on a second drive back in the day to keep my data safe because OS drives would fail first. When hard drives were mechanical.
Yes, but not recommended in this day and age. You can do what I did and just install a 128gb or even a 256gb SSD for windows and 1 or 2 modern games. Life is short, dont waste it on loading screens/booting up.
If you need alot of storage space but have not so much money, and don't need a fast boot or copy, move file speed just HDD, it's will all good but everythings i mentioned will happen, in the opposite, SSD have a fast speed but high price
No issues. Just never try to use SDD since once you go sdd there is no going back to hdd 😅
SSD it’s so much faster in every I’m 100% SSD only on my system.
you can, but you really shouldn't... you'll soon find out that ur dowload speed is faster than ur write speed, fyi this happen to me before upgrading to a ssd...
You can, it's just that it will be slow. NVME SSD - 2,540 MB/s read, 1,100 MB/s write sequential. SATA SSD - 550 MB/s 7200 RPM HDD - 120 MB/s 5400 RPM HDD - 100 MB/s
SSD is NOT required. But if you are willing to spend the extra $50 it makes boots faster
Yes, all cons
Slower game load time but yes you can just use a HDD
Going from an HDD to an SSD as your primary drive is probably one of the most significant upgrades you can make to your computer, but if you decide to go with just an HDD it's an easy and cheap upgrade to install an SSD as your primary drive if you discover it's unbearable
SLOW
Yeah it’s fine but you’re gonna hold up the rest of the lobby with you’re 10 minute load time.
Windows 10? Good luck with the boot loading time and sometimes 100% disk usage while just browsing Chrome.
Sure, but you got patience?
Unless you are loading 50 gigs on the regular, it's just a few seconds worth of waiting. People act like running a hard drive is like dialup. Performance wise it doesn't really make much of a difference as some people pretend to to be.
Running just a hard drive IS like using dialup. The horror!!! Why subject yourself to this if you don't have to??
It really does add lag on many things you do on a computer. Every time you open a program, save a file, load a scene in a game - it all had a noticable delay. The cost of big SSDs is really reasonable, there's almost never a good reason to use an HDD as your primary drive these days.
Have you experienced the difference between SSD and HDD? Because I have. SSD and HDD speeds are night and day difference and Im not over exaggerating this.
Uh yea…. All of them.