Blimey games are a lot bigger than they used to be!

danlightbulb · 24 Jul 2016 at 21:27

I thought a 240GB SSD would be enough, given on my old laptop it had a 40GB HDD and I didn't fill that. (I have a home NAS for media and personal files).

Then I installed a game on my new PC, a relatively simple looking World of Warships that I got free with the motherboard. 34GB install!!

Looks like another hard drive will be needed sooner that I thought.

I know games have moved on a lot, but decent games used to fit on a handful of floppy discs, now an install is 9 DVD's big!

Do you think the proliferation of computing power, cheap storage and online delivery has made developers lazy with storage optimisation?

Jae-So · 24 Jul 2016 at 21:32

Try installing GTA V or MGS V - Massive 50/60GB. At least they warrant the size somewhat

BubbySoup · 24 Jul 2016 at 21:32

Big, hi-res textures are the main reason.

kefan77 · 24 Jul 2016 at 21:37

danlightbulb said:
Looks like another SSD will be needed sooner that I thought.

fixed it for you.

danlightbulb · 24 Jul 2016 at 21:39

kefan77 said:
fixed it for you.

Not gonna be spending hundreds on a large SSD unfortunately. Old fashion 7200rpm drive for my second one.

Anyone remember when some special large carts were released for the Mega Drive back in the day? I think Street Figher II was a special, and I think cost around £70 at the time!

Skeeter · 24 Jul 2016 at 22:20

The worst thing is not only have game developers started assuming we all have loads of drive space, but they also assume we have massive speed broadband and leave our PCs on all the time in order to download all the files.

chaparral · 24 Jul 2016 at 22:27

danlightbulb said:
I thought a 240GB SSD would be enough,

This is just my steam games install folder

(That not including my uplay games/Origin Games/Impulse games/Retail DVD-rom games installs /etc

heman · 24 Jul 2016 at 23:17

danlightbulb said:
Not gonna be spending hundreds on a large SSD unfortunately. Old fashion 7200rpm drive for my second one.

Anyone remember when some special large carts were released for the Mega Drive back in the day? I think Street Figher II was a special, and I think cost around £70 at the time!

Yes I remember the Super SF2, was very expensive for the time. It was only a few Mb as well.

danlightbulb · 24 Jul 2016 at 23:25

heman said:
Yes I remember the Super SF2, was very expensive for the time. It was only a few Mb as well.

It was 40 Megabit! (just looked it up on google) = 5 MB.

And I had to buy a special controller with an extra 3 buttons too!

heartburnron · 24 Jul 2016 at 23:26

danlightbulb said:
Not gonna be spending hundreds on a large SSD unfortunately. Old fashion 7200rpm drive for my second one.

Anyone remember when some special large carts were released for the Mega Drive back in the day? I think Street Figher II was a special, and I think cost around £70 at the time!

That's right, I remember playing £60 for Street Fighter 2 Champion Edition.

GBRusty · 24 Jul 2016 at 23:57

I feel your pain. Got a new PC with 2 512GB SSDs. They're nearly full with my Steam/origin/uplay/gog/elite installs ><

I need another couple of TBs but would rather they were SSD rather than HDD.

~>Dg<~ · 25 Jul 2016 at 00:06

install what you actually play you often have plenty of room

Name · 25 Jul 2016 at 00:12

On my old system I kept my top 5 games on SSD and the others on HDD

Best of both worlds that way.

JanxSpirit · 25 Jul 2016 at 01:31

danlightbulb said:
Not gonna be spending hundreds on a large SSD unfortunately. Old fashion 7200rpm drive for my second one.

Chuck the games on the spinner and use Intel Rapid Storage Technology to set up an SSD caching drive for the spinner.

The difference between doing this or running games directly from an SSD is tiny after you've run them the first time for caching to take place. 64GB is the maximum SSD size IRST can directly write to, but it's worth using a 120GB SSD if you can pick a fast one up cheap as 50% over-provisioning gives you fresh-out-of-box performance always.

There is no direct relationship between the size of game folders and how many games an IRST SSD can cache as it's caching data blocks, not entire files or folders. Expect to be able to cache possibly hundreds of games in 64GB depending on how many blocks it decides to cache for each game. When the caching drive eventually gets full, IRST chucks out the least recently accessed data blocks first to make room for new data blocks, so that's likely to be games you haven't played for months anyway.

There's no need to worry about SSD longevity either as the SSD is only ever written to the very first time you launch each game or a new game level. The rest of the time it's just harmless reads.

Before and after performance of my relatively ancient 2TB Hitachi Coolspin HDD (where all my games live) when using an Integral 120GB P Series 4 SSD for IRST caching...

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAoZ25KMHU1N0pxWVk

https://drive.google.com/open?id=0B6DGwrXwCpAobzQtdDlKRUg2MWs

Shop around and you can pick this SSD up for £25 delivered.

VincentHanna · 25 Jul 2016 at 01:55

My internet is fast enough that I don't need to have all my steam games installed. I think I have about 20 installed at the moment.

If I get the urge to play something older I can usually download it in a matter of hours.

Cern · 25 Jul 2016 at 03:33

I don't think developers have become lazy about optimization. It's more a product of the high resolution textures everyone now expects, plus the fact that many titles have copious amounts of voice acting and also lots of cut scenes etc.

Whilst a 500GB+ SSD is ideal, you can get away with less if you don't mind a bit of file management and moving games you don't currently play to your HDD.

If the game is a standalone this is very easy to do, just move the install folder off the SSD if you aren't playing the game, move it back if you decide to start playing again.

For Steam, you can set up an additional library on the HDD for games that benefit less from a SSD, or you can temporarily move Steam games off of your SSD onto HDD while you aren't playing them and back again later without needing to re-download them. It's a hassle of course, but saves the expense of a larger SSD.

Omaeka · 25 Jul 2016 at 05:16

Honestly fast internet is easy to get these days unless you leave out in the sticks, so storage is obsolete mostly. If you do live somewhere with poor internet, do you have any friends or family with good internet that you can download games at? Just take a portable HDD to chuck the files on there.

Failing that, welcome to the 1%!

I only have 4 Steam games installed, just download as I fancy then uninstall them if I feel I won't play them again within the next few days. Though Shadow of Mordor took quite awhile even at 28mb/s :eek:

think that's close to 100GB if you own all the DLCs.

But yes, there will most likely be games close to a terabyte in size in 20 years time, with internet speeds that can pull them off the net in under an hour.

chroniclard · 25 Jul 2016 at 05:57

Dont bother keeping all my games installed, 99.9% of them are digital and can be downloaded in minutes.

bimbleuk · 25 Jul 2016 at 07:17

Only install the games you want to play, that's usually 2 max for me to switch between and once downloaded use the backup feature to store them offline on a large HDD or NAS. Pretty simple really and faster than downloading again rather than have terabytes of data stored on multiple large SSDs at significantly more cost!

My NAS cost peanuts to assemble from second hand entry level server bits with an old Core 2 Quad CPU, 8 GB of ECC RAM and 5 x 1.5 TB HDDs in an Antec Midi-Tower case.

I could upgrade to 300mbps for my broadband but that would be worse than buying more SSDs at £52/mth