Support NeoGAF

[Deleted member 471617]

I don't have any interest in PC gaming but since I bought a PS4 Pro in 2016, I swapped out the HDD for a 1TB SSD and while the console doesn't take full advantage of it, it's still way faster than the HDD. For me, I would never go back to an HDD and the SSD should be the standard.

As for PC, if those who game on PC spend thousands on GPU's and CPU's and whatever else, I would believe that they also spend money on a damn good SSD because if not, in a way, kind of defeats the point of even bothering to begin with.

 

[deriks]

HDD will never die, but as a matter of changing, the first step was made with 8K cameras, then operation systems also did, peple started using to gaming and there you go

 

[ZywyPL]

A wise man once said - once you go SSD, you cannot go back. The sooner HDD dies completely on the consumer market the better for all of us. The price barrier of drives of up to 1TB is already extremely narrow between SSD and HDD, the (strong) upper hand HDD still has is 2, 4 and more TB drives, where the price for those in SSD tech is still absurd.

 

[xrnzaaas]

It makes sense, you build your entire console around very fast loading times so no wonder you're not going to support hdd's. I still use hdd on my PC, because I know they're more reliable for long term use.

 

[Skyr]

I use a ssd in my PC since 2011. Welcome to the future console bois.

 

[Orta]

PC gamers killed hdd's a long time before the PS5 and XBX were even suggested.

 

[kraspkibble]

it's a big step towards making HDD obsolete for consumers at least. HDD drives are going nowhere but with consoles finally now getting around to ditching them then there really is no need for anyone to have one unless you want cheap storage capacity. so maybe a few years from now we will only see HDD's in home PCs used for back up and home/business servers.

the only HDD i have is my 1TB drive in my PS4 and my 2TB drive in my PC which i use for backing stuff up. my boot drive + game drive are both NVMe SSD. i haven't used a HDD for boot/games since 2015. i haven't used a HDD as my primary boot drive since 2008.

with consoles using SSDs i hope it brings the price down. my 2TB drive cost me £380! an NVMe 4.0 drive is about £100 on top of that. console owners are in for a big shock when they see the cost of these new consoles and the cost of adding more storage. even a 1TB drive is significantly more expensive than a 1TB HDD.

the cheapest NVMe 4.0 1TB drive i could buy for my PC is £230. a 1TB HDD is as little as £34.

 

[jackets with pockets]

The hard disk drive should have died ages ago.

I've been SSD-only since 2009. Never looked back.

 

[German Hops]

The death of hdds can't come soon enough.

 

[kraspkibble]

The death of hdds can't come soon enough.

i was kinda hoping consoles would go SSD and ditch the archaic disc drive too this generation but i guess that was asking too much. maybe next gen

 

[Kerotan]

What will replace the SSD?

 

[-Troid-]

Didn't Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo basically kill off memory cards 7th gen? It's called progress yo.

 

[German Hops]

What will replace the SSD?

STDs

 

[martino]

Main usage of disk is still storage. HDD are still miles ahead in capacity and price to do that
SSD become interesting only if, for your usage, the need for fast read/write access is more important than storage.

 

[kraspkibble]

What will replace the SSD?

there is nothing right now that will replace them. they'll just keep getting faster. they were first on SATA bus but saturated that. NVMe drives use PC PCIE which is signifcantly faster. SATA3 capped out at ~550mb/s speeds. NVMe 3.0 maxes out 3.5GB/s and 4.0 is 7GB/s. 5.0 will be about 14GB/s.

until a point comes where PCIE speeds slow down then SSD will be on it.

 

[darkinstinct]

If next gen games can only be played with a capable SSD doesn't that mean all PC gamers trying to play next gen games are going to need to upgrade? Thus this is the gen where HDD decline.

Could be. Could also be that the SSDs on console get no use aside from faster loading screens because the publishers can't ignore 30 % of the market (actually it's closer to 80 % for the first years of these new consoles). I think for the foreseeable future games will be built for a maximum of 500 MB/s.

 

[Iorv3th]

There are still plenty of uses for HDDs outside of gaming.

But even they they have been slowly fading away as SSD prices continue to drop.

 

[Elektro Demon]

If next gen games can only be played with a capable SSD doesn't that mean all PC gamers trying to play next gen games are going to need to upgrade? Thus this is the gen where HDD decline.

Microsoft and Sony ain't doing jack shit, Sonny Jim.
Pc crowd has had SSD's for years and years before peasants ever heard about it.

 

[HE1NZ]

If next gen games can only be played with a capable SSD doesn't that mean all PC gamers trying to play next gen games are going to need to upgrade? Thus this is the gen where HDD decline.

You still need HDDs for storage. No reason to keep videos and stuff on SSD. HDDs will be fine.

 

[llien]

Much slower, much bigger and much cheaper HDDs will still have their use.

 

[Thaedolus]

You still need HDDs for storage. No reason to keep videos and stuff on SSD. HDDs will be fine.

Shhhhh! One or the other, no middle ground!

 

[DunDunDunpachi]

They're helping, that's for sure. On PCs (and I'm simplifying things, I know) the SSD just fills up the RAM cache faster. To my knowledge neither software nor hardware is tailored to fetch data from the SSD in a way that leverages its speed. PC architecture is still using RAM caches for both the CPU and GPU to perform tasks.

Sony and Microsoft are changing that paradigm by building consoles with speedy SSDs as the standard. This will dictate software design going forward.

 

[INC]

i thought you meant with how all the data is constantly moving back and forth, the SSD will die quickly

 

[GymWolf]

i fucking hope so.

most devs are not gonna start develop games around ssd with the majority of people having slow HDD in their computers (also current gen console ports).

maybe in 3-4 years from now...

 

[V2Tommy]

I've been only buying SSDs since 2008, and all my PS3s even had them at that point. Outside the datacenters, it's hard to fathom buying an HDD for daily use.

 

[SentientStone]

Just like the headphone jack, that popular song from Frozen is coming for the HDD.
I will only miss the headphone jack.

 

[Stuart360]

Could be. Could also be that the SSDs on console get no use aside from faster loading screens because the publishers can't ignore 30 % of the market (actually it's closer to 80 % for the first years of these new consoles). I think for the foreseeable future games will be built for a maximum of 500 MB/s.

Exactly what i have been saying. Thats the way it will be imo, for multiplatform games at least.

 

[LordKasual]

Yes, but Sony/MS by no means were the ones to start this. SSD has been blowing load times away on PC for years.

But now that SSD is about to be the minimum standard, yes HDD is about to go bye bye.

But only in terms of gaming.....HDD's are absolutely staying around for the sake of storage space.

 

[martino]

Exactly what i have been saying. Thats the way it will be imo, for multiplatform games at least.

also because of cost to produce

 

[MadYarpen]

I have only SSDs in my PC at the moment, so... They are SATA drives though, so next gen could make me buy M.2 drive, because at the moment there is no significant advantage in gaming and I don't need it to work.

 

[yewles1]

This happens, tech gets fazed out for something newer, whether we like it or not.

 

[M1chl]

Storage devices hardly ever die (as in EOL sense), they just serve different purpose, if you backup your files to SSD, than you are doing it wrong.

 

[JimboJones]

I have a HDD for loading older games, there is no noticeable gain in performance from loading FF7, GoG games or even emulated Wii/PS2 /GC etc games. So no point wasting space on a SSD.

 

[StreetsofBeige]

I've never used a PC with SSD.

For you PC people with SSDs (even modest speed ones vs. PS5/SeX), how fast is booting up the system and loading games?

A few seconds? 10 seconds?

 

[Kadve]

Any gamer worth it's salt already uses an SSD for gaming. But If you need more than 500gb worth of storage, SSDs are simply not feasible from a price standpoint.

Also, unless the game is question is using your HDD/SSD as a cache (ie, most MMOs. planetside 2 for example went from a couple of minutes to ~20 seconds to load), the performance difference tend to be quite negligible from my experience.

I think most people have like me, an relatively small SSD for OS + Games that benefit from it. And a large HDD where everything else is put.

 

[rofif]

I've had ssd and hdd since 2012.
But last year I've upgraded to all nvme and I never plan to use hdd again (aside from 360 and ps4... )

 

[DoctaThompson]

We all know consoles invented ssd's. This isn't even up for debate.

Spoiler: Proof

 

[Physiognomonics]

Good riddance.

 

[LazyParrot]

SSDs have been slowly killing HDDs for the past decade, consoles have nothing to do with it.

 

[diffusionx]

I have had primarily SSDs in my computers for almost a decade now. It's common, mainstream tech in PCs and has been for 4 or 5 years by now.

Edit: I went on Best Buy's website and even the cheapest low end PCs, the stuff they sell for $300-$500, have SSDs in them. If anything consoles have been helping prop up HDDs the past several years.

 

[DaMonsta]

No, don’t believe the SSD hype.

HDD will be just fine to play games for the foreseeable future.

Now I do see a future where there’s just no place for a HDD in modern computing setups. But I don’t see that happening for a long time.

I honestly think ram speeds/prices will make SSDs obsolete before SSDs kill HDDs

 

[BlackTron]

Doesn't everyone on PC already use a SSD, and if you need mass storage get a HDD?

I can see more people probably relying on a SSD and that's enough for storage too, with it so easy now to rely on services and streaming for music and movies and etc.

I can't fathom running Windows off a HDD anymore though...even if I'm not playing any games.

 

[phil_t98]

its not like Sony or Microsoft consoles are the only places HDD's exist is it?

 

[OnThePathToWisdom]

Spoiler

HDDs had their time

 

[ThatGamingDude]

As said in the thread by many

Yeah, consumer world they're on their way out
Corporate world? Not going anywhere for a bit
Fuck, we're still using back up tapes, so I can see HDDs sticking around as another layer of redundancy for cold storage

Source: My office is literally attached to our data center, and I work in said data center

 

[lukilladog]

It started to decline very fast when ssd´s got cheaper, few people really needs terabytes of storage.

 

[BusierDonkey]

HDDs are reliable, cheap and good for use as a bulk storage device handling items that don't require the faster transfer speeds of an SSD or NVMe drive.

I use both in my PC. OS and one game at a time goes on my NVMe drive. I have several SATA SSDs with games split into groups. I also have a large external HDD for bulk storage. On my PC I keep the large external bulk storage device or "Porn Dumpster" with every video and image files I've saved/made going back over a decade.

For gaming, when I play a game I move it to either my NVMe drive or one of my SSDs depending on whether I think the drive speed will add any real benefit. Games that I frequently go back to like racing games or open world/open ended games have a permanent home on an SSD. When I'm done a game I'll remove it from the NVMe drive and move over the next game. Moving the game from the HDD takes way less time than re-downloading off Steam and if I really need to I can play it off the HDD as well. The other benefit is the external drive is portable and I can take it, along with all my Steam and Xbox installed games with me and connect it to other PCs.

The other benefit is that if the internet gets fucky (I'm in Canada in the middle of a frozen wasteland, it does that) I can still access all my games since I keep a copy local.

 

[alabtrosMyster]

I specifically built a PC for Diablo 3 back in 2012 and SSD's were a bit more expensive than HDD's. Then the tidal wave hit and SSD's skyrocketed for the year.

I would be surprised, I had a 128gb ssd drive for windows back then... And few outside the hardcore audience had those in their computer (or apple mac book pros)... A regular 1tb drive was still cheaper than a small 128gb boot drive.

 

[Hostile_18]

Yes the message is loud and clear.

I love that both MS and Sony are pushing this.

Ever since putting a 1TB Samsung SSD into my PS4 Pro, i no longer have to wait almost 2 minutes to boot up Division 2. I'm in the game in less than 20 seconds. Fast travelling takes me 5 seconds. Usually it would take round half a minute or more to fast travel in the game on my old stock HDD.

I cant remember the speed tests been anywhere near that dramatic!?

 

[RiccochetJ]

I would be surprised, I had a 128gb ssd drive for windows back then... And few outside the hardcore audience had those in their computer (or apple mac book pros)... A regular 1tb drive was still cheaper than a small 128gb boot drive.

I was looking at 500gb drives at the time. C'mon now.