Was a good internal hard drive to install games to ? 3-4tb

truewraith

truewraith

truewraith

Associate
Joined
5 Aug 2006
Posts
838
Location
England
about to buy a new internal hard drive from ocuk for all my games to install on as i have then everywhere lol on about 3 different drives. so was finally thinking of buying a 3tb or 4tb to install them on but wasn't sure if such a large drive would have an issues with a lot of games being on.

thanks for any help
 
I would say either WD or Seagate's would be fine, I have mine on a 4 year old WD Green (they don't sell these anymore) and I've never had an issue with it regarding loading times.
 
Games deserve a SSD, makes a large difference in load times
I fit both windows and games on 512GB, not a problem in a world of steam and all other download services.
 
If you are getting HDD, then you should get 7200 rpm one. WD or Seagate would be be obvious choice. WD Blacks are great but they are loud, and click and whatnot. On the other hand some of Seagates drives doesn't have best reputation for being reliable. however I have my 3 TB Seagate 7200 and it's been serving me well for past 6 years.
 
huge thanks guys for the help, im looking into th wd blue and black and couldn't afford a large ssd drive at the moment as i have a lot of games installed on my steam as sometimes i let me kids play as well so i have quite a lot on these drives. if the blacks are loud i dont mind as my pc isnt right next to me unless they are really loud! would like a 3 or 4tb though but if too expensive then i see a good 7200 would be ok as im skint from kids draining all me cash over the hols lol
 
Just picking up on people saying get an SSD, well I kind of disagree.

The 4TB Samsung EVO is over £600, that's the cost of a very good CPU and GPU, not practical for most people

Games are mainly sequential reads, think of the large game map data that's loaded in. HDD's are perfectly fine for this type of reading.

Whats more important than an SSD for games is RAM, as space RAM is used for caching of data. For example you play a map level, you die, then play that level again. If you have spare RAM the map levels get cached.

I think a WD Blue and primocache on an old SSD would suit you fine.
 
Rossi~ said:
This.
Why the need for more than 1TB for games? Just install what you're going to be playing.
Click to expand...

because i can afford 1 other awesome pc besides my own for my kids to play on and with 3 kids playing multi games i like to have many installed so they can bounce between games depending on what mood they are in just like me and that way aint stuck to playing the same game to the end :) but its all cool as i got all the info i need on here
 
JasonM said:
Just picking up on people saying get an SSD, well I kind of disagree.

The 4TB Samsung EVO is over £600, that's the cost of a very good CPU and GPU, not practical for most people

Games are mainly sequential reads, think of the large game map data that's loaded in. HDD's are perfectly fine for this type of reading.

Whats more important than an SSD for games is RAM, as space RAM is used for caching of data. For example you play a map level, you die, then play that level again. If you have spare RAM the map levels get cached.

I think a WD Blue and primocache on an old SSD would suit you fine.
Click to expand...

thanks for understanding and the advice is greatly appreciated and we come in useful for sure :) thanks. i will have to look into the primocache as i aint come across that yet.
 
truewraith said:
thanks for understanding and the advice is greatly appreciated and we come in useful for sure :) thanks. i will have to look into the primocache as i aint come across that yet.
Click to expand...

One more thing, people saying have a small SSD and keep un-installing and re-installing games, it's a nightmare.

Having lots of storage space is luxury, the ability to install all your apps and data, not have to look for things to delete all the time.

Lets be honest, an SSD is going to take maybe 20 seconds at most from game load time over a WD Black. Go get a cup of tea, that 20 seconds won't change your life, and as mentioned if you have lots of RAM windows standby starts caching files. Plus a WD Black will push around 200Mbit/s for sequential data, and most games the data is sequential anyway. A current generation WD Black is miles quicker than older especially budget HDD's from a few years ago.

I've been buying SSD's since 2008, I have maybe 10 SSD's here of various types. Guess what my current development computer an i7 8700 with 48GB RAM (i'm a software dev) uses 2 x 2TB WD Gold's HDD's, one is a boot / app, and the other is data. I do have a Samsung 840 Pro that's dedicated to caching.

Now anyone would think that using those HDD's my computer would be running at Commodore 64 speed! But the reality my computer is totally fine, especially with the 840 Pro helping out as caching, I don't feel that the HDD's are slowing down my workflow. Yes it takes a bit longer to start up in the morning, but the luxury I have so much space. I use to have computers that booted from SSD, and I would always run out of space.

So spend your money on CPU, GPU, extra RAM, reuse an old SSD for some caching if you have one. The most you will loose on a modern high-end HDD over SSD is the time it takes to get a beer from the fridge while your game loads.
 
Last edited:
WD Blacks are really noisy. I had a 4TB one for a short period but it’s ticking and clunking just annoyed me. They are also pretty pricey for spinning rust.

Toshiba have the X300 performance drive which is also a 7200rpm drive based on Hitachi’s manufacturing process. Might be worth a look.

Alternatively, a 2TB SSD can be had for around £170 (not much more than a 4TB WD Black).
 
As sequential speeds are often key to game load times, I would consider getting 2 (1-2 TB) HDDs and run them in Raid 0. Not much difference in price but a significant bump in performance.

Regds, JR
 
You can have a SSD, and a traditional HDD and move the installations between them as you fall in and out of love with the various games (SteamMover?)
What I am finding though is that a 256GB SSD does not fit many AAA games once you get DLC and all the other stuff.. how big are AC:Oddessey and Hitman for examples of absolute space hogs.
 
sorry i didnt respond again, i was quite ill for a few weeks. thanks for all that advice its greatly appreciated and i will be looking for a WD blue as i cant afford the Black at all right now, but only ones i ever see go on offer anywhere is Red which i think are the ones aimed at nas drives. i will look more into these hence to find out why red is more for nas than games etc

thanks again
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom