11% still play HD2 with a spinning drive? I would've never guessed that. There's probably some vicious circle thing going on: because the install size is so big, people need to install it on their secondary, spinning drive...
Even though I have two SSDs in my main machine I still use a hard drive as an overflow for games that I judge are not SSD worthy.
Because it's a recent 20TB HDD the read speeds approach 250MB/s and I've also specifically partitioned it at the beginning of the disk just for games so that it can sustain full transfer speeds without files falling into the slower tracks, the rest of the disk is then partitioned for media files that won't care much for the speed loss. It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
> It's honestly fine for the vast majority of games.
Yes, because they apparently still duplicate data so that the terrible IOPS of spinning disks does not factor as much. You people need to stop with this so that we can all have smaller games again! ;-) <--- (IT'S A JOKE)
PrimoCache is awesome, highly recommended. I’d only say to make sure your computer is rock stable before installing it, in my limited experience it exponentially increases the risk of filesystem corruption if your computer is unstable.
It is no surprise to me that people still have to use HDD for storage. SSD stopped getting bigger a decade plus ago.
SSD sizes are still only equal to the HDD sizes available and common in 2010 (a couple TB~). SSD size increases (availability+price decreases) for consumers form factors have entirely stopped. There is no more progress for SSD because quad level cells are as far as the charge trap tech can be pushed and most people no longer own computers. They have tablets or phones or if they have a laptop it has 256GB of storage and everything is done in the cloud or with an octopus of (small) externals.
SSDs did not "stop getting bigger a decade plus ago." The largest SSD announced in 2015 was 16TB. You can get 128-256TB SSDs today.
You can buy 16-32TB consumer SSDs on NewEgg today. Or 8TB in M.2 form factor. In 2015, the largest M.2 SSDs were like 1TB. That's merely a decade. At a decade "plus," SSDs were tiny as recently as 15 years ago.
Perhaps my searching skills aren’t great but I don’t see any consumer ssds over 8TB. Can you share a link?
It was my understanding that ssds have plateaued due to wattage restriction across SATA and M.2 connections. I’ve only seen large SSDs in U.3 and E[13].[SL] form factors which I would not call consumer.
The mainstream drives are heavily focused on lowering the price. Back in the 2010s SSDs in the TB range were hundreds of dollars, today you can find them for $80 without breaking a sweat[1]. If you're willing to still spend $500 you can get 8TB drives[2].
I bought 4x (1TB->4TB the storage for half the price after my SSD died after 5 years (thanks samsung), what you mean they 'stopped being bigger'?
Sure, there is some limitation in format, can only shove so many chips on M.2, but you can get U.2 ones that are bigger than biggest HDD (tho price is pretty eye-watering)
By stopped getting bigger I mean people still think 4TB is big in 2025. Just like 2010 when 3/4TB was the max size for consumer storage devices. u.2/u.3 is not consumer yet, unfortunately. I have to use m.2 nvme to u.2 adapters which are not great. And as you say, low number of consumer cpu+mobo pcie lanes has been restricting from the number of disks side until just recently. At least in 2025 we can have more than 2 nvme storage disks again without disabling a pcie slot.
I think this is more a symptom of data bloat decelerating than anything else. Consumers just don't have TBs of data. The biggest files most consumers have will be photos and videos that largely live on their phones anyway. Gaming is relatively niche and there just isn't that much demand for huge capacity there, either -- it's relatively easy to live with only ~8 100GB games installed at the same time. Local storage is just acting as a cache in front of Steam, and modern internet connections are fast enough that downloading 100GB isn't that slow (~14 minutes at gigabit speeds).
So when consumers don't have (much) more data on their PCs than they had in 2015, why would they buy any bigger devices than 2015? Instead, as sibling commenter has pointed out, prices have improved dramatically, and device performance has also improved quite a bit.
(But it's also true that the absolute maximum sized devices available are significantly larger than 2015, contradicting your initial claim.)
I read that SSDs don't actually guarantee to keep your data if powered off for an extended period of time, so I actually still do my backup on HDDs. Someone please correct me if this is wrong.
A disk that is powered off is not holding your data, regardless of whether it is an HDD, SDD, or if it is in redundant RAID or not. Disks are fundamentally a disposable medium. If you don't have them powered on, you have no way to monitor for failures and replace a drive if something goes wrong - it will just disappear someday without you noticing.
Tape, M-DISC, microfilm, and etched quartz are the only modern mediums that are meant to be left in storage without needing to be babysit, in climate controlled warehousing at least.
Do you poweroff your backup HDDs for extended periods of time (months+)? That's a relatively infrequent backup interval. If not, the poweroff issue isn't relevant to you.
(More relevant might be that backups are a largely sequential workload and HDDs are still marginally cheaper per TB than QLC flash.)
Which doesn’t matter at all in the case of Helldivers 2 as it’s only available for PC, PS5, and XBS/X. That’s a good part of why PC players were so irritated, actually: when all this blew up a few months ago, the PC install sizes was ~133 GB vs the consoles’ 36 GB.
Helldivers 2 is only on current gen consoles so older ones are beside the point, the current ones use NVMe SSDs exclusively. PC is the only platform where HDDs or SATA SSDs might still come up.
