Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam’s updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.
Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!
I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the
same connection it’s hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.
I don’t have a bandwidth cap but my download speed is 40 Mbps max, soooo copying back and forth between HDD and SSD is way faster for me lol.
Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.
Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.
I hear you. Games preservation is a travesty of greed. I have a folder full of installers for old abandonware in case the publishers decide to revive a franchise and DMCA the sites hosting them.
Though Steam must have a rider in their publishing contract to never be forced to revoke licenses or something, because delisted purchased games remain downloadable even when the game has been completely wiped from existence. They’re the one store I trust to not completely screw me over - even GOG has had to remove downloads before.
(On the other hand the way they allow developers to remove demos when the full game comes out is absolutely rage-inducing, but that’s a rant for another time…)
Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I’m not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won’t be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).
One thing I haven’t seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam’s updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it’d take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.
I used to do that. But then I realized it was faster to redownload than copy over from my HDD. I have gigabit fiber internet though.
Edit: I had a really crappy HDD though
Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!
I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the same connection it’s hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.
I don’t have a bandwidth cap but my download speed is 40 Mbps max, soooo copying back and forth between HDD and SSD is way faster for me lol.
Plus, it doesn’t happen much (if ever) that a game gets delisted/removed, but I prefer having a local copy of game files for games I care about rather than trusting remote servers to always have it available.
I hear you. Games preservation is a travesty of greed. I have a folder full of installers for old abandonware in case the publishers decide to revive a franchise and DMCA the sites hosting them.
Though Steam must have a rider in their publishing contract to never be forced to revoke licenses or something, because delisted purchased games remain downloadable even when the game has been completely wiped from existence. They’re the one store I trust to not completely screw me over - even GOG has had to remove downloads before.
(On the other hand the way they allow developers to remove demos when the full game comes out is absolutely rage-inducing, but that’s a rant for another time…)