Can we really recommend anything below 4TB

[random_matt]

So just thought about it and wished I bought another 1TB for raid or just a 2TB option. These thoughts came about when installing odyssey earlier, 89GB for the base game and 111GB with the DLC. Jeez, any average PC gamer is only going to have a handful of AAA games, and next gen is only going to increase the sizes.

 

[Shaolin Chicken]

The problem is the next gen consoles only have a 1TB or less ssd, so will be interesting to see how things play out.

 

[random_matt]

The problem is the next gen consoles only have a 1TB or less ssd, so will be interesting to see how things play out.

Isn't MS using propriety SSD carts?

 

[Shaolin Chicken]

I think they are both using m.2 ssd's but Sony has the more advanced and faster tech.

 

[Journey]

So just thought about it and wished I bought another 1TB for raid or just a 2TB option. These thoughts came about when installing odyssey earlier, 89GB for the base game and 111GB with the DLC. Jeez, any average PC gamer is only going to have a handful of AAA games, and next gen is only going to increase the sizes.

With regards to the title of the thread "Can we really recommend anything below 4TB" the answer is yes. I'm not aware of anyone that keeps all of their games installed all of the time, even on a PC, unless like me they play very few games. Even if you recommend 4TB and take an average game size of 100GB, with 3.8TB of formatted space, that is 38 games.

The reason I'd be recommending larger drives is simple value per TB, that you can grow into if you want or need to. Normal HDD's can be bought for as low as £12-13 per TB as you get to the larger sizes. SSD's on the other hand are more likely to get cheaper as manufacturer capacity continues to increase, so buying more before you need it will likely cost you a lot more in the long run when you are not immediately using it.

 

[ttaskmaster]

With regards to the title of the thread "Can we really recommend anything below 4TB" the answer is yes. I'm not aware of anyone that keeps all of their games installed all of the time, even on a PC, unless like me they play very few games.

If I had the drive space for it, I would!
Thing is, getting the sudden urge to play something you've not picked up for ages, but then having to download 50-80GB over a 0.7Mbps internet connection, it's not really much fun... Far easier to have everything installed.

Normal HDD's can be bought for as low as £12-13 per TB as you get to the larger sizes.

What sort of sizes are we talking, though, and how decent/reliable are they?
Best I could find on OCUK was a couple of 4TB ones at around £25/TB. Everything else was over that point.

 

[chippy08]

If I had the drive space for it, I would!
Thing is, getting the sudden urge to play something you've not picked up for ages, but then having to download 50-80GB over a 0.7Mbps internet connection, it's not really much fun... Far easier to have everything installed.


What sort of sizes are we talking, though, and how decent/reliable are they?
Best I could find on OCUK was a couple of 4TB ones at around £25/TB. Everything else was over that point.

Thats the issue prices are so high now on this site. looking for 4TB or 3TB myself but virus inflation or retail greed or both has stopped me buying. Also 2 year warranty gives you no confidence the Drive will last long.

Hardly ever buy from here now because prices are so high its becoming a rich mans Hobby.

 

[random_matt]

should have made a better title or clarified a bit better. Because obviously choosing a mechanical drive is dumb imo, but at the same time 2TB+ (SSD) is getting expensive. So yes, having an idea of what would make sense kinda has to be balanced with price.

 

[PC777]

Both consoles have entirely inadequate games storage IMO. COD MW is 170gb alone.

I use a 2tb SSD for games alone which used to be a 4tb HDD that I replaced for noise. If you like fighting and driving games that stay installed as they are played every now and then rather than story games you play once and unistall, base consoles are inadequate storage.

I hope to add a 2tb NVMe which should be enough for 4tb dedicated to games.

 

[Journey]

should have made a better title or clarified a bit better. Because obviously choosing a mechanical drive is dumb imo, but at the same time 2TB+ (SSD) is getting expensive. So yes, having an idea of what would make sense kinda has to be balanced with price.

4TB SSD as a minimum, so £400 minimum presently to add to a system, and that is SATA, if you want NVMe you are talking £700-900, unless you buy 4x 1TB and pop them in a 16x PCI-E adapter card, and run them in a PCI-E slot, still gonna be ~£500, and take up 16 PCI-E lanes.

I doubt that is practical for a great deal of people who only use their games for PC's unless they are very serious about it. A 1TB drive, with 16TB of storage would cost less, and you can just copy/paste games between the drives as you need them, would take about 9 minutes to copy a 100GB game from a modern large HDD to an SSD, and copying the other way makes no difference how long it takes, all you need to do is make sure you keep some space free on the SSD.

 

[MissChief]

256GB NVME for Windows and I think a game too, 480GB SATA SSD for games, 2TB mechanical for some other less often played games and some video content. Ok, a lot of video content.

 

[kitkat9933]

I heard one of the reasons games are so big is due to the lowest common denominator across the shared platforms which was the speed of system storage.

It meant developers had multiple copies of large assets in many locations, to avoid having to seek shared assets.

One example was in Spider-Man, the traffic light and stop sign objects existed thousands of times to save having to find the shared object..

With consoles now catching up and in fact over taking, it means console games and maybe pc games will be able to get smaller, if not actually shrink in standard install size.

With a weaker gpu etc you can dial down settings but for storage you can’t really.

 

[MichaelAwkward]

I heard one of the reasons games are so big is due to the lowest common denominator across the shared platforms which was the speed of system storage.

I don't think that's the case - multiplatform games aren't a new thing and storage speeds were much slower previously when games were much smaller.

I think game developers have just gotten lazy in their methods and don't have to worry as much about storage space now - they don't have to fit games onto fixed storage media any more, generally, and the teams are so large (300+) that nobody really keeps track of the filesizes so all of the audio is left in uncompressed file formats, containing multiple languages regardless of the chosen install language, plus 4K texture sizes are just ridiculous.

Battlefront 2 is a prime example - there's no justification for it being a 90GB download. There isn't that much game in there.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Don't need an ssd for most games.

After all consoles don't use ssds currently.

Gta v is a good example. It takes half an hour to load and I have a fast 1TB nvme ssd drive.

You are making small savings here and there. You can easily store a lot of games elsewhere they don't all need to be on an ssd.

Or like me I only play 6-8 games and all of them are on my only ssd.

 

[Salty22]

Is there a way to have a mechanical hdd in your system that never spins up unless accessed?
I've got a 500gb NVME as my boot drive and 1TB for photos/games so totally got rid of my mechanical games drives because the noise got on my nerves.
The old mechanical drives i used to have would randomly spin up when opening task manager etc, even when not directly accessing the games stored on those drives.

 

[NightSt@lk3r]

Just picked up a 500GB NVMe drive, it has windows on it and a cache for my 2TB mechanical drive.

Won't be picking up a larger NVMe till the prices come way down.

 

[NightSt@lk3r]

EDIT: forum seems to be dying and double posted.

 

[Yaayuh!]

I have 6 games installed. Once I'm done with a game it'll either get uninstalled or archived onto my NAS. I can copy it back or just download it again.

I don't really see the need for anything larger than 1TB for games on PC.

 

[pugheaven]

I don't think that's the case - multiplatform games aren't a new thing and storage speeds were much slower previously when games were much smaller.

I think game developers have just gotten lazy in their methods and don't have to worry as much about storage space now - they don't have to fit games onto fixed storage media any more, generally, and the teams are so large (300+) that nobody really keeps track of the filesizes so all of the audio is left in uncompressed file formats, containing multiple languages regardless of the chosen install language, plus 4K texture sizes are just ridiculous.

Battlefront 2 is a prime example - there's no justification for it being a 90GB download. There isn't that much game in there.

Exactly this, it's a joke. I recently picked up Quake as it was free on EPIC and it downloaded in 4 seconds and installed in a couple. download and playable within 10 seconds, was a 24mb file.

Now, look at COD Warfare, that game still looks crap compared to BF5 YET is now the largest game you can get... look at the textures in BF5 they blow COD into the weeds and smaller... like you say it's absolute lazy people with this and TBH, I've got storage dropping out of my backside but I'm absolutely SICK TO DEATH of the Warfare downloads it's the most disgraceful game I think I've ever played in that way... such a shame as it's a great game BUT leaves the most sour taste of any game I've played. They're taking the absolute P*SS!

 

[clv101]

Both consoles have entirely inadequate games storage IMO. COD MW is 170gb alone.

How big is the download? Downloading 170GB on a 10Mbit connection would take 37 hours!

 

[wesley]

Gta v is a good example. It takes half an hour to load and I have a fast 1TB nvme ssd drive.
QUOTE]

Half an hour to load GTA V?