Best hdd for gaming?

[ayrefo]

Hi all, I'm building a gaming rig with an r5 5600x and rtx 3080 or rx 6800 xt, I currently have an sn550 500gb m.2 ssd for my boot and some games but I'm wondering on what hdd I should get to store games, I'm not too bothered about blazing fast loading times but would like a drive that's fast enough that it won't slow down my game visuals and textures loading and affect fps so I'm looking at a minimum of 7200RPM, I'm looking at a Toshiba p300 but I'm just wondering if anyone has any suggestions, preferably 3 or 4tb, not too bothered about price, as long as it's good value, could drop to 2tb if needed. Help appreciated, thanks, have a great day.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

Toshiba X300 IIRC. However,I would consider if you are using a B550/X570 motherboard to invest in a decent 1TB/2TB SSD for games and use the SN550 for boot.

[DanceswithUnix]

It depends on the games you are playing, and if you want to store more than games. It is level loading times as much as game start time.

I don't generally bother with spinning rust drives any more. 1TB is enough for me to fit enough games to keep me happy, I delete them when finished and tell Steam, GOG Galaxy or whatever to download the next one.

I switched during my WoW playing days. I would go into a dungeon, and by the time my system had loaded the level the others would have started. Then there is game patching, a non event on an SSD and a time to put the kettle on with a hard drive. I really don't like hard disk whine, you may well not be bothered.

OTOH if you have video you want to store or a slow internet connection then it makes sense. The X300 is a decent choice, that's the last drive I bought. The alternative was to grab a WD 8TB or larger USB drive and tear the disk out of that. You usually get a rather nice NAS grade drive from doing that. Small drives you can get one of the nasty shingled recording ones that are only good for backup, but if you want a ton of storage it can be worth a look.

If you have a second M.2 socket on your motherboard, then do check whether it is SATA only or can do NVMe.

[Scryder]

I've been gaming on a WD Black for over 3 years, without any problems or slowdowns. I've only had 1 or 2 games on an SSD, most others I play with HDD.

[Jmurr]

I agree think you should go for a 1/2TB SSD - if you've got the money for a 3080 and 5600x, pair it with a ssd at the minimum!

[Solex]

Ideally you want to go for a SSD or better as you don't want to wait forever for a game to load, also prevents some games from stuttering as newer games need to load huge/tiny files. Hopefully those 2TB SSD's will be under 100 quid by the end of this year.

[danq]

You can pick up a decent sata SSD for £70 odd. I saw a Samsung 1TB 970 Plus going for £100 on eBay today. It went so quick (new). Gutted.
But yeah I'd recommend you stick with SSD whether it's sata or M.2. But mechanical drives aren't worth it. Too slow and moving parts... invest in an SSD for storage and you won't regret it.. Unless you need MEGA amounts lol

[iiTsMus]

I have a 2TB 5400RPM WD Blue HDD for all my games and other files. For the most part it's been fine but loading times for certain games are a pain. I'd recommend buying a Seagate or WD 7200RPM drive or buying SSD if you don't need tonnes of storage. I have multiple games downloaded that I jump between and I also have a few movies and full TV show sets so mass storage is a necessity for me

[beebub]

Buy a standard pciv3 M2 or SATA ssd from Sabrent, Micron (Crucial) or similar. Whatever works out at about £100 per TB. SN550 is a good shout too I guess. But whatever you get make sure you have a regular backup schedule to keep your important docs and pics safe. Ideally in 2 separate places. Game files can be easily redownloaded. I have 1tb M2 Sabrent as OS drive. One cheaper WD blue SATA 1tb drive for games. A cheap portable 2tb WD passport for some of my steam library ( so I can move it between laptop / other without redownloading). Then backups (my docs/pics) go onto another removable 2tb WD passport which is occasionally backed up again onto a 4tb drive in another room. And to be fair I have considered also having some sort of cloud backup solution. In case of fire etc. Over the top probably but makes me feel better. Very minimum you could just have a 1tb ssd and some cloud storage for backups.

[watercooled]

Another SSD would be ideal (it does make a difference in some games now regarding loading time, sometimes texture popping, etc). I'd tend towards a TLC SATA drive over a QLC NVMe one though. But failing that I agree with the Toshiba drive recommendations and it's what I use myself.

Just be aware that there are lots of SMR drives polluting the market now. Some people will claim they are not an issue in some applications, however it depends on manufacturer and I *have* encountered severe issues with an SMR drive effectively locking up under write workloads. Granted it was a 2.5" drive but I didn't know it was an SMR drive when I purchased it, and the drive it replaced performed fine. Trying to run a VM off it was catastrophically bad (task manager IO 100% but effectively zero transfer speed), and although it's now been relegated to backup duty which in theory it should be fine with, it still periodically tanks in write speed (tens of MB/s) under sustained writes. I.e. it's quite easy to trigger in everyday workloads - I suspect even game downloading could trigger this behaviour with a faster connection, not to mention extracting/unpacking/patching. SMR is to HDDs what QLC is to SSDs - a small amount of extra storage capacity for the price at the expense of pretty much every other performance metric, severely so in some areas!

I think Toshiba's P300 drives are non-SMR in the 1-3TB forms, but above that are SMR. I'm not sure how well implemented it is on Toshiba drives but personally I wouldn't take the chance.
Toshiba's X300 drives (also mentioned earlier in thread) are non-SMR too, I think in all capacities but not 100% on that. Info here https://toshiba.semicon-storage.com/...0200428-1.html

WD Black drives are also supposedly non-SMR but I don't understand their pricing model; they're just too close to SSDs.

[adidan]

A 5600x and 3080? Spinning rust shouldn't be anywhere near it IMO unless it's for rarely used storage or backup.

[hammy434]

I'd go for at least a SATA SSD for your games. Doesn't have to be top of the range if you don't want to spend much, but just an SSD. Loading modern games on HDDs is painful. As for which HDD is fastest, a 7200RPM might be better, but tbh it's still going to be slow in games.

[jwhitbread]

I mean the "best" is hard to define in terms of there is actually very little difference between SSD and M.2 performance at the moment. However, as you've been buying decent components, why not just splurge a bit on a nice PCIE4.0 NVME drive! That's what I'm doing lol

[Ampersand79]

for todays games SATA SSD's are fine, but assume that Devs will begin optimising their games for the consoles using super fast bandwidth NVME SSDs in years to come and usually an SSD is bought to be used for 5-10 years so if you want future proof imo a top speed PCI-E 3.0 NVME isa good price to perf compromise. can move it to the data drive if PCIe 4.0 drives drop in price and shoot up in capacity in years to come.

I would go 500gb NVME for OS and core apps and 2TB SATA SSD for Games repository. You lose a second in load times on SATA vs NVME today.

[Alloys]

SSD or bust to be honest