yeah, I don't know how I managed to survive with a boot drive HDD for so long maybe something to do with Windows 7 being lighter, but still it took a few minutes to fully boot
one of my friends had a HDD for like 5 years. about 2 years ago, some of his friends were so fed up with him taking forever to get on his computer to play, that they pooled money together to get him a pretty nice SSD. it took up until about last year until he moved his OS over since he figured that would take a while. now he's slightly mad at himself for not switching over sooner. my brother's old computer had an HDD and it took a good 5 min just to boot into windows, then another 8 min to actually load everything to a clickable state, he would watch TV while that was going on and skipping commercials, would sometimes finish a whole episode before the computer was usable. the computer has since stopped working and it would be more trouble than it's worth to figure out what's wrong with it, he used it for a solid 8-10 ish years. I don't know how he lived like that. He just got a new one and moved everything and it's so much faster. I bought mine with a SATA SSD already in it so I didn't have any of that and I am glad. TLDR: get an SSD if you don't already have one, even a 512GB SATA one at $50-$60 will be well worth it.
My 20 year old coworker was talking about how slow a computer that took about 50 seconds to start up was. I told him that when I was a kid, I would start my computer, EAT A FULL BREAKFAST, and then hope that Windows 98 was done booting. Often time, it was not.
I went to my grandmother's house because she had a 1991 Mac with all of the learning games. She was technologically proficient for her age. Loading times were fairly quick. Didn't have a computer in my own home until 2001 with Xp
I had HDD boot drive until 2021, and changed to SSD because it used to take 5-10 minutes for the PC to be usable (when I did a fresh install on an HDD around 5-6 years ago, it used to take 2-3 minutes to be ready for usage).
My daughter just inherited my niece's old laptop. It's about a 12 year old Compaq. A few days ago, I swapped the HDD for an SSD. It does make a huge difference. I had done the same for my laptop several years ago. It was honestly like a brand new computer. It's really one of the cheapest, easiest upgrades you can do for an older system.
I am one of those people who always has HDDs in my rig. I never use them for programs or games anymore, I keep them simply for cheap file storage. Over the years I've accumulated a metric sh!t ton of documents, videos, images, and audio files - those all go on the HDDs.
Honestly Greg, the gpu doesn't even matter in this case. Its all that crappy storage. I love you making us sit there waiting with you. It was a great way to prove a point.
I completely agree that HDD's are now better suited for storage and not usage. Use them for system backups and storage of huge files. I use an HDD for my backups and installation files. I will also use them to store huge audio or video files. I use M.2's and SSD's for usage in the OS and applications.
I wish I seen this video last year. I did a full upgrade to my rig. Went from a 5600x to a 5800x3d, A320 to B550 and 16gb to 32gb of ram. After getting everything installed, I was still experiencing the same load times for boots. Upgraded from a SSD to 980 pro nvme. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing in load times, just off of the updated drive. While I don’t regret upgrading what I did to my rig, I wish I would have known the difference. Great video Greg. Happy holidays everyone!
I remember when I started a new possition (IT Tech/Admin) 4 years ago. Since old IT guy didn't left much documentation about the inventory, that was my first thing to check across the whole company (60-70 PCs, few servers ect.) Design team was using older Dell Precision T1500 workstations for CAD work. Those Dells felt really sluggish, so I checked the state of the drives and imagine my surprise that whole team's PCs had HDDs in them. They told me, that they come to work, turn PCs on and go make coffee. Record breaker took 12 minutes to boot, because HDD was failing and one of the RAM stick was being disabled, that made the PC run full RAM test every time. One of my first purchases was a set of SSDs (no M.2 slots on T1500) and upgrading all of the workstations. People on the team were amazed that those old workstations can run so fast. 6 months later they got brand new, modern PCs with fast NVMe drives.
It isn't just load times affected in games. Depending on the game of course, things like big texture files or other objects being loaded in can be painful on a hard drive.
SSD for boot drives and game library drives today. HDDs for archival, warm to cold storage and media files that don't change that much. That's what I use them for.
I ended up forcing my room-mate to upgrade from a spinning disk for his OS by giving him a 1tb SSD!! This was a few years back. He recently got a few m.2's and gave me back that SSD, so I put it in my ps3!! And when I had a ps4, I upgraded the storage to a SSD as well and it makes such a difference!! Specially since those consoles with 5400 hdd instead of 7200 hhd's (edited a spelling error)
My current setup consists of a 128gb Teamgroup SSD for boot, and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and some games. Now I understand why Dota 2 loads longer than usual. Thanks for this video!
My nephew currently has a PC with an HDD, and he says it's sooooo slow. We are updating his PC over Xmas and gonna install an M.2 drive. He will be so happy as it will be so much quicker for him.
I upgraded from a HDD to a SATA SSD last year and it really does make a difference. Just the boot alone is almost instant, but opening programs like photoshop is so much better than on the HDD. I did keep the HDD in the PC as a storage drive for my music, but everything else is on the SSD. The drop in price was my biggest reason for making the jump, and I just wish I had done it sooner.
I mentioned this in response to your X post on this video - I've done this very migration on maybe a half-dozen friend and family laptops and the change is like a new system. Its just reflective of how much worthless bloatware is just baked into Windows (Windoze?) these days. Migration if an existing system is easy with a bootable Linux USB distro that does exact volume copies or a dedicated SATA deck that can copy offline. Totally worth the time and effort.
While the framerate readout might not look any different between a game running on an SSD vs HDD, I'd still discourage people from playing current gen games on HDDs because things like texture and asset streaming are still affected. If you need a visual of what that might look like then seek out some Cyberpunk 2077 initial release footage on PS4.
My friend was so excited to play Armored Core 6 and Baldur's gate 3 last year that he never realized he only had an HDD and wondered why the games were running so poorly this is the exact solution to his problem he needed.
I used to be super patient with computers when I was a teenager (my first laptop was 2010 when I had a hand me down Thinkpad X31), discovering the wonders of a SSD has definitely made me less patient with computers nowadays
Games which dynamically load stuff like textures, assets, and in-game regions tend to stutter when loading from a hard drive, a game not being on an SSD can affect the game performance, especially the 1% and 0.1% lows.
The best use of a HDD is capacity. It also has the lowest cost per terabyte. What is large capacity good for? Media files large archives are where they shine. If you have lots of large files that don't benefit from the read speeds of SSD's, the HDD is the way to go. Put your OS on an SSD. Put your games on an SSD. Your movies, music, photos and any other large files can go on OSR (old spinning rust) drives.
I am about to retire my current EVGA 970 i7 3770k build. I switched to an SSD back in 2011 and it was a game changer for speed. Never looked back. Only soon to be a secondary back of an external SSD
I found Mum's old laptop that was about 12 almost roughly 13 years old. I immediately upgraded to a 256 GB SSD that I had lying about and spent about £5 on a 4 GB stick of RAM (8 GB in total) and this system runs great for such an old machine. Sure it won't run games but being able to load programs like Word on it is great. So for anyone who has an old system lying about or a laptop that's running slow. Swapping to an SSD is such a game-changer.
@bretthibbs6083 that's good, this is my second wd blue drive, first was last year a 2 tb hard drive, still serves me well for games that don't need fast storage but gonna one day replace it with a SATA SSD. They make very good products for the money.
The hard disk in my brother-in-law's 8-year-old PC was defective. He didn't want to upgrade because he only uses it for the internet - “It's easily good enough for that.”. I still had an old 250GB SATA SSD lying around and installed it for him. His comment afterwards: “Ok, now you can really say ‘I'll quickly switch on the PC’.”
These days, the only time i buy/use HDD's is for mass storage, and i don't buy anything under 20TB drives for spinning storage. (if you look around you can get re-certified 20TB drives for $250)
most people don't value the importance of great storage this explain the miles a part speed performance of an disk drive and a NVME... why the summer hair cut though put me a bit off but other than that a great informative video Greg. Happy holidays to you and you're beautiful family.
HDDs excel at providing affordable bulk storage, while SSDs are perfect for time-critical applications and frequently accessed files. Both 3.5" and 2.5" HDDs, as well as SSDs, serve distinct and essential purposes. The fact that HDDs are slower does not diminish their value or relevance in modern storage solutions. When used appropriately, both can perform their roles effectively without any issues.
The primary applications we discussed - gaming and general productivity - 100% benefit from SSDs. The exception is bulk storage, which we also discussed in the video, so I'm not sure why you're acting as though this was glossed over. 99.9% of PC users are _not_ in the market for 8+TB of general storage. The fact that they are _significantly_ slower DOES diminish their value and relevance in modern PC solutions, which, again, is what was discussed...
This is why I took the opportunity to swap my old spinning rust 8TB mass storage drive for an SN850X during the black friday week. I saw transfers of up to 2 GB/S once everything was off my HDD. ...I also took the opportunity to add second 8TB SN850X as an additional storage drive, replace my aging 2TB Corsair MP600 with a 4TB SN850X version, and another 4TB as a game drive.
I think it really comes down to how often data is used. For example if you have documents you might not look at for years on end, or old digital photos, you can move those to spinning rust, because the data could go years without being used. 1TB SSD's are cheap enough now, that even using a 128GB SSD to boot from, and storing your data on a HDD, no longer makes sense. One place where spinning rust can be useful though, is backups, put a spinning rust drive in your gaming PC, then set up a backup once a week or so, to keep a copy of that SSD on a backup drive, then back that up to the cloud.
Hard Drives can impact game performance. For example. Someone with an HDD as a boot drive or a console with an HDD could lose the 1st round of Search and Destroy in Call of Duty because they failed to load in while people with an SSD boot drive are already in the game.
Hello there indeed. And i have to say, this was quite an experience to wait for the pc to boot on a hdd. Never had a hdd for boot before xD Looking forward to the next video :)
greg what your missing is there is an extra draw back to the HDD after u install windows, programs and games on a HDD but u and not a lot of people are probably not aware of this but this what i do and i had to this recently, when u install windows 7, 10, 11 to a HDD with all the drivers, programs and games to the drive they dont clean up the drive using windows utilities that is made for maintenance and this can help load times booting into windows, programs and games. every time i install windows whether its a HDD, 2.5 ssd/m.2 drive i always do a disk clean up, defrag and a check disk through the admin cmd prompt to get all glitches out of the programs and the os, this has improved boot times to get into windows, loading every day programs and games, i do understand games installed on HDD can extended load times but if you defrag the drive and do a check dsk it will run smoother. the reason y it takes longer to load in windows or any other os/program/game is because the files on the drive are fragmented meaning putting barriers on launch to load up so it take longer to load especially games, but me this how i do it and i only install the os and programs to the main boot drive and install games to another drive in the computer whether its a HDD/SSD depending what i have available in my inventory otherwise install to a network drive on my nas or even plug in an external usb drive to the nas and have as additional network drive for games and documents.
i refurbish older systems for sale and donation, and i do exactly what you recommend. i remove any HDD and replace it with SATA SSD or nvme if possible! great video, great advice! Love your channel Greg, keep up the amazing work! much love from a fellow nerd! ❤ (p.s. the intro is pure gold!)😂
Forza Motorsport is a game that you can't exactly play on a single HDD. Loading screens are glacial and you have to AFK in the map preview until it loads the entire map into memory or you'll end up driving on the void. Forza Horizon 5 is a game that will just pause if it's too slow. You can brute force it by combining drives though.
When I was early in my current position one of the first things I did was go through the plant, pull the computers (one at a time!) and clone the spinning rust drives to SSDs. The difference was dramatic, especially because of all the corporate malware... er security software these machines are burdened with. There was one machine, it had a spinning rust drive that had problems and wouldn't clone, it was also our last Windows 7 machine. I rebooted that thing one afternoon and it took a solid HOUR (I timed it). I replaced that computer the next day.
Storage can very much have an impact on framerates and frametimes as assets load, you can have really bad stuttering as you move through scenes and assets need to be loaded.
A long time ago. 2005-2008. Hard drive was critical for multiplayer games because if some one loaded the game before you. They were running around shooting everyone first. So you needed to load first.
I had a Motion Computing tablet with a core solo 1.2 and a 4200rpm Zif drive, Windows XP was impossible to use on it. Found a 60gb Zif SSD and happy days. Great video.
Ever since 2018, My PCs have had a modestly sized SSD for the OS and a large hard drive for additional storage, tho over the years I've been gradually buying more SSDs and by this point even my game libraries are on SSD now a days. I do get the argument that SSDs for some people still aren't cost effective, but having personally experienced using a PC with only a Hard Drive and then a PC with a small boot SSD and a hard drive for extra storage space I will never willingly go back to only a Hard drive, SSD is just a night and day difference, and Greg only showed how slow a new install, on a new hard drive, on a new PC is, let alone a old hard drive on a old, and a old OS install that's been through hell and back. Hard drives slow down over time due to disk fragmentation, which SSDs are immune to. Maybe for some really, cash strapped people SSDs still don't make sense, but to me SSDs are worth it. I still have a 4tb hard drive, but I only use it to back up TH-cam video footage, that's it :P
Before SSD's became more affordable they used to offer a hybrid drive, SSHD. With the SSHD your boots times were drastically reduced compared to a standard HDD. Now it was not as fast as an SSD, it was not far behind.
The reason nvme isn't faster in day to day use. Is because seek times is most of the requirements especially when tons of files are being loaded. In fact a hdd would probably not be much slower feeling if you had near instant seek times like nvme and SSD.
I use HDD for Server Storage so I can backup my movie collection and watch them in the cloud, I dont use them for gaming at all. I have a gaming ITX Pc with 1tb M.2 SSD Boot drive and the other 4TB M.2 SSD just for my game installation and I love it, barely got 2TB used with game files ^^
I got a hand me down PC in 2019 with an HDD. Christmas 2021 I got an NVME SSD and I was so smitten by the performance that it led me down a massive rabbit hole and now I've built three high end PCs. I love it 🥹
Almost didnt even recognize the guy in the thumbnail for a split second. He shall be called "Crew Cut Greg"
His supervisor put her foot down!!!
Temu John Bernthal
That's not a crew cut. That's a short, back and sides.
It's a fade bud, it's a fade..
2 most important tips :
Never share your underwear.
Never change your barber
It is so comical to me that you made us sit with you in real time while it booted off the HDD. 🤣🤣
I think thats why the video is 14:35 min long. its just the boot up from the HDD 😂 and we all watched it.
yeah, I don't know how I managed to survive with a boot drive HDD for so long
maybe something to do with Windows 7 being lighter, but still it took a few minutes to fully boot
one of my friends had a HDD for like 5 years. about 2 years ago, some of his friends were so fed up with him taking forever to get on his computer to play, that they pooled money together to get him a pretty nice SSD. it took up until about last year until he moved his OS over since he figured that would take a while. now he's slightly mad at himself for not switching over sooner.
my brother's old computer had an HDD and it took a good 5 min just to boot into windows, then another 8 min to actually load everything to a clickable state, he would watch TV while that was going on and skipping commercials, would sometimes finish a whole episode before the computer was usable. the computer has since stopped working and it would be more trouble than it's worth to figure out what's wrong with it, he used it for a solid 8-10 ish years. I don't know how he lived like that. He just got a new one and moved everything and it's so much faster.
I bought mine with a SATA SSD already in it so I didn't have any of that and I am glad.
TLDR: get an SSD if you don't already have one, even a 512GB SATA one at $50-$60 will be well worth it.
My 20 year old coworker was talking about how slow a computer that took about 50 seconds to start up was. I told him that when I was a kid, I would start my computer, EAT A FULL BREAKFAST, and then hope that Windows 98 was done booting. Often time, it was not.
I went to my grandmother's house because she had a 1991 Mac with all of the learning games. She was technologically proficient for her age. Loading times were fairly quick. Didn't have a computer in my own home until 2001 with Xp
I remember 1hr loading tape drives on the commodore plus 4.
@@brokeandtired Yeah, me too.
@@brokeandtired yeh them days were brutal
I had HDD boot drive until 2021, and changed to SSD because it used to take 5-10 minutes for the PC to be usable (when I did a fresh install on an HDD around 5-6 years ago, it used to take 2-3 minutes to be ready for usage).
I remember those days. Used to go make myself some coffee while the computer booted.
I was going to say the same. Turn on, go make coffee.
My daughter just inherited my niece's old laptop. It's about a 12 year old Compaq. A few days ago, I swapped the HDD for an SSD. It does make a huge difference. I had done the same for my laptop several years ago. It was honestly like a brand new computer. It's really one of the cheapest, easiest upgrades you can do for an older system.
How to extend a YT video, boot up an old HDD.
I am one of those people who always has HDDs in my rig. I never use them for programs or games anymore, I keep them simply for cheap file storage. Over the years I've accumulated a metric sh!t ton of documents, videos, images, and audio files - those all go on the HDDs.
Same, I have a HDD in my PC to use as a PRE backup of what I DL, before moving to external HDD's.
I’ve upgrade several old computers for my coworkers at work with SSDs and they are amazed at the difference lol.
It is like night and day difference on older PCs.
Honestly Greg, the gpu doesn't even matter in this case. Its all that crappy storage. I love you making us sit there waiting with you. It was a great way to prove a point.
I just liquid cooled mine with Red Bull
Bet it's flying now!
I did my laundry while this PC started
I completely agree that HDD's are now better suited for storage and not usage. Use them for system backups and storage of huge files. I use an HDD for my backups and installation files. I will also use them to store huge audio or video files. I use M.2's and SSD's for usage in the OS and applications.
I wish I seen this video last year. I did a full upgrade to my rig. Went from a 5600x to a 5800x3d, A320 to B550 and 16gb to 32gb of ram. After getting everything installed, I was still experiencing the same load times for boots. Upgraded from a SSD to 980 pro nvme. Couldn’t believe what I was seeing in load times, just off of the updated drive. While I don’t regret upgrading what I did to my rig, I wish I would have known the difference. Great video Greg. Happy holidays everyone!
Gonna need another haircut by the time the PC posts
I thought this was already settled but this refresher was illuminating anyway. Good job sir.
I remember when I started a new possition (IT Tech/Admin) 4 years ago. Since old IT guy didn't left much documentation about the inventory, that was my first thing to check across the whole company (60-70 PCs, few servers ect.)
Design team was using older Dell Precision T1500 workstations for CAD work. Those Dells felt really sluggish, so I checked the state of the drives and imagine my surprise that whole team's PCs had HDDs in them. They told me, that they come to work, turn PCs on and go make coffee. Record breaker took 12 minutes to boot, because HDD was failing and one of the RAM stick was being disabled, that made the PC run full RAM test every time.
One of my first purchases was a set of SSDs (no M.2 slots on T1500) and upgrading all of the workstations. People on the team were amazed that those old workstations can run so fast. 6 months later they got brand new, modern PCs with fast NVMe drives.
My general rule with storage for a while has been to use HDDs for backups/NAS and SSDs for everything else. The fastest SSD gets used as a boot drive.
It isn't just load times affected in games. Depending on the game of course, things like big texture files or other objects being loaded in can be painful on a hard drive.
SSD for boot drives and game library drives today.
HDDs for archival, warm to cold storage and media files that don't change that much.
That's what I use them for.
I have a 4TB nvme just for games, lol, good enough for probably 4 games ;p
The last personal system I built with a HDD for boot was 2008. It was quickly replaced in 2009 by an 80GB Intel X25-M and haven't looked back since.
Wort wort wort!
Just took my old HP elitedesk tower, fresh win 10 and pc games on a ssd, 2 hdd for media and emulated games. Great media center.
I ended up forcing my room-mate to upgrade from a spinning disk for his OS by giving him a 1tb SSD!! This was a few years back. He recently got a few m.2's and gave me back that SSD, so I put it in my ps3!! And when I had a ps4, I upgraded the storage to a SSD as well and it makes such a difference!! Specially since those consoles with 5400 hdd instead of 7200 hhd's (edited a spelling error)
Greg is the only TH-camr that I watch that actually responds to my comments. I appreciate you and your videos. Thank you.
Much appreciated! I try my best.
My current setup consists of a 128gb Teamgroup SSD for boot, and a 1TB Toshiba HDD for storage and some games. Now I understand why Dota 2 loads longer than usual. Thanks for this video!
My nephew currently has a PC with an HDD, and he says it's sooooo slow. We are updating his PC over Xmas and gonna install an M.2 drive. He will be so happy as it will be so much quicker for him.
Hello everyone. Keep up the good work Greg
I upgraded from a HDD to a SATA SSD last year and it really does make a difference. Just the boot alone is almost instant, but opening programs like photoshop is so much better than on the HDD.
I did keep the HDD in the PC as a storage drive for my music, but everything else is on the SSD.
The drop in price was my biggest reason for making the jump, and I just wish I had done it sooner.
I mentioned this in response to your X post on this video - I've done this very migration on maybe a half-dozen friend and family laptops and the change is like a new system. Its just reflective of how much worthless bloatware is just baked into Windows (Windoze?) these days. Migration if an existing system is easy with a bootable Linux USB distro that does exact volume copies or a dedicated SATA deck that can copy offline. Totally worth the time and effort.
I really like Greg smiling while looking on NZXT boot logo😂
While the framerate readout might not look any different between a game running on an SSD vs HDD, I'd still discourage people from playing current gen games on HDDs because things like texture and asset streaming are still affected. If you need a visual of what that might look like then seek out some Cyberpunk 2077 initial release footage on PS4.
rocking the fresh cut, good on ya
As someone who put a sata ssd in my old rig for my son yesterday I felt that intro all the way in my soul lol.
My friend was so excited to play Armored Core 6 and Baldur's gate 3 last year that he never realized he only had an HDD and wondered why the games were running so poorly
this is the exact solution to his problem he needed.
looking sharp, greg! love the new hairdo. keep up the great content 🫶🏼
It’s always a good time when my boy Greg’s on the scene
I used to be super patient with computers when I was a teenager (my first laptop was 2010 when I had a hand me down Thinkpad X31), discovering the wonders of a SSD has definitely made me less patient with computers nowadays
Games which dynamically load stuff like textures, assets, and in-game regions tend to stutter when loading from a hard drive, a game not being on an SSD can affect the game performance, especially the 1% and 0.1% lows.
We discussed this in the video already. If files are being pulled from the hard drive concurrent with in-game demand, you'll see stuttering.
The best use of a HDD is capacity. It also has the lowest cost per terabyte. What is large capacity good for? Media files large archives are where they shine. If you have lots of large files that don't benefit from the read speeds of SSD's, the HDD is the way to go. Put your OS on an SSD. Put your games on an SSD. Your movies, music, photos and any other large files can go on OSR (old spinning rust) drives.
I am about to retire my current EVGA 970 i7 3770k build. I switched to an SSD back in 2011 and it was a game changer for speed. Never looked back. Only soon to be a secondary back of an external SSD
I found Mum's old laptop that was about 12 almost roughly 13 years old. I immediately upgraded to a 256 GB SSD that I had lying about and spent about £5 on a 4 GB stick of RAM (8 GB in total) and this system runs great for such an old machine. Sure it won't run games but being able to load programs like Word on it is great. So for anyone who has an old system lying about or a laptop that's running slow. Swapping to an SSD is such a game-changer.
that bootup intro was so painfully slow i swear my windows xp dell latitude from 2004 couldve booted in a 5th of the time
I have 2 8TB WD BLue HDD's still, those are great for movies and shows.
I've completely moved on from HDDs in my daily driver. Instead I moved all of them to an Unraid rig. Having a NAS is another huge QoL upgrade.
more RAM and an SSD
these two upgrades will make a big difference
just got that same wd blue nvme last month, sure is an amazing drive especially for the price !
I've been using wd blue for close to 20 years now and I love them both hdd and ssd drives and knock on wood I've had really good luck with them.
@bretthibbs6083 that's good, this is my second wd blue drive, first was last year a 2 tb hard drive, still serves me well for games that don't need fast storage but gonna one day replace it with a SATA SSD. They make very good products for the money.
Would you have bought it if it retained the old name of Sandisk?
Imagine thinking Western Digital makes SSDs, they are an OEM rebrand of Sandisk
@@johnt.848 didn't know that, but yeah. I've had a 64 GB SanDisk flash drive for over a decade that somehow still works 😂
Kingston FURY Renegade PCIe 4.0 NVMe is a really good buy.
Dude you crack me up lol. The look in the beginning waiting for the pc to start 😂😂
Clean cut Greg looking good
Great opening 😁
Replacing ssd and adding rams are 2 of the best and easiest upgrades to a computer.
Love the videos greg!
The hard disk in my brother-in-law's 8-year-old PC was defective. He didn't want to upgrade because he only uses it for the internet - “It's easily good enough for that.”. I still had an old 250GB SATA SSD lying around and installed it for him. His comment afterwards: “Ok, now you can really say ‘I'll quickly switch on the PC’.”
Before SSDs, what other activities did people do until the pc/ laptop booted up?
These days, the only time i buy/use HDD's is for mass storage, and i don't buy anything under 20TB drives for spinning storage. (if you look around you can get re-certified 20TB drives for $250)
most people don't value the importance of great storage this explain the miles a part speed performance of an disk drive and a NVME... why the summer hair cut though put me a bit off but other than that a great informative video Greg. Happy holidays to you and you're beautiful family.
HDDs excel at providing affordable bulk storage, while SSDs are perfect for time-critical applications and frequently accessed files. Both 3.5" and 2.5" HDDs, as well as SSDs, serve distinct and essential purposes. The fact that HDDs are slower does not diminish their value or relevance in modern storage solutions. When used appropriately, both can perform their roles effectively without any issues.
The primary applications we discussed - gaming and general productivity - 100% benefit from SSDs. The exception is bulk storage, which we also discussed in the video, so I'm not sure why you're acting as though this was glossed over. 99.9% of PC users are _not_ in the market for 8+TB of general storage. The fact that they are _significantly_ slower DOES diminish their value and relevance in modern PC solutions, which, again, is what was discussed...
This is why I took the opportunity to swap my old spinning rust 8TB mass storage drive for an SN850X during the black friday week. I saw transfers of up to 2 GB/S once everything was off my HDD.
...I also took the opportunity to add second 8TB SN850X as an additional storage drive, replace my aging 2TB Corsair MP600 with a 4TB SN850X version, and another 4TB as a game drive.
Even with the diminishing returns, just the fact that NVME gets rid of cables in your rig is worth the extra $20+.
This is true :-D
HDD still useful to store my "Research" and "Homework"
:p
I still use newer hdd drives for storage. I didnt use 2.5ssds long before I switch to nvme drives to boot.
Im glad you showed this off.
Always appriciate the content :) Always remember patience is the key.
i've been using 3 of them. 3 HDD, 1 SSD & 1 M.2 drive. Using M.2 as boot boot drive & save me a lot of waiting time
This is my exact circumstances im booting off that exact 1tb HDD and have been contemplating a m.2, this confirms how much of a difference itll make
a hard disk drive is no longer acceptable for gaming. the importance of fast load times is waaay underestimated
Love these videos. .
I appreciate it!
my NZXT Z790 takes 3 times as long to start up as my MSI Z790 tomahawk. I have purchased my last NZXT product
That isn't the only reason you shouldn't buy NZXT but you do you
Been throwing SSDs into old PCs for years now. Even at SATA speeds the difference is night-and-day.
I boiled the kettle.....made a drink....and actually drunk it before the HDD PC loaded
Lmao something about the awkward silence and that smile as the PC takes decades to boot up had me dying laughing 😂 SSD is must have
Nice Cut G!
I think it really comes down to how often data is used. For example if you have documents you might not look at for years on end, or old digital photos, you can move those to spinning rust, because the data could go years without being used. 1TB SSD's are cheap enough now, that even using a 128GB SSD to boot from, and storing your data on a HDD, no longer makes sense.
One place where spinning rust can be useful though, is backups, put a spinning rust drive in your gaming PC, then set up a backup once a week or so, to keep a copy of that SSD on a backup drive, then back that up to the cloud.
Ooooh, boy! This is going to be a loooooooong podcast, even my 3.5 inch hard drive is NOT that slow.
not first. not last. just slowly showing up like a hdd boot into windowss
Even a SATA SSD for boot is better than a HDD
Hard Drives can impact game performance. For example. Someone with an HDD as a boot drive or a console with an HDD could lose the 1st round of Search and Destroy in Call of Duty because they failed to load in while people with an SSD boot drive are already in the game.
I can't help but to think Greg took a subtle .22 caliber sized shot at NZXT here lol
Hello there indeed.
And i have to say, this was quite an experience to wait for the pc to boot on a hdd.
Never had a hdd for boot before xD
Looking forward to the next video :)
I remember my first SSD, I used to open Adobe Photoshop over and over because I couldn't believe how quickly it launched.
greg what your missing is there is an extra draw back to the HDD after u install windows, programs and games on a HDD but u and not a lot of people are probably not aware of this but this what i do and i had to this recently, when u install windows 7, 10, 11 to a HDD with all the drivers, programs and games to the drive they dont clean up the drive using windows utilities that is made for maintenance and this can help load times booting into windows, programs and games.
every time i install windows whether its a HDD, 2.5 ssd/m.2 drive i always do a disk clean up, defrag and a check disk through the admin cmd prompt to get all glitches out of the programs and the os, this has improved boot times to get into windows, loading every day programs and games, i do understand games installed on HDD can extended load times but if you defrag the drive and do a check dsk it will run smoother.
the reason y it takes longer to load in windows or any other os/program/game is because the files on the drive are fragmented meaning putting barriers on launch to load up so it take longer to load especially games, but me this how i do it and i only install the os and programs to the main boot drive and install games to another drive in the computer whether its a HDD/SSD depending what i have available in my inventory otherwise install to a network drive on my nas or even plug in an external usb drive to the nas and have as additional network drive for games and documents.
Nice trim!
i refurbish older systems for sale and donation, and i do exactly what you recommend. i remove any HDD and replace it with SATA SSD or nvme if possible! great video, great advice! Love your channel Greg, keep up the amazing work! much love from a fellow nerd! ❤ (p.s. the intro is pure gold!)😂
Forza Motorsport is a game that you can't exactly play on a single HDD. Loading screens are glacial and you have to AFK in the map preview until it loads the entire map into memory or you'll end up driving on the void. Forza Horizon 5 is a game that will just pause if it's too slow. You can brute force it by combining drives though.
When I was early in my current position one of the first things I did was go through the plant, pull the computers (one at a time!) and clone the spinning rust drives to SSDs. The difference was dramatic, especially because of all the corporate malware... er security software these machines are burdened with.
There was one machine, it had a spinning rust drive that had problems and wouldn't clone, it was also our last Windows 7 machine. I rebooted that thing one afternoon and it took a solid HOUR (I timed it). I replaced that computer the next day.
In Australia the cost is about 2.5-3x the times, but your talking around $30 vs $80
This
Storage can very much have an impact on framerates and frametimes as assets load, you can have really bad stuttering as you move through scenes and assets need to be loaded.
A long time ago. 2005-2008. Hard drive was critical for multiplayer games because if some one loaded the game before you. They were running around shooting everyone first. So you needed to load first.
I had a Motion Computing tablet with a core solo 1.2 and a 4200rpm Zif drive, Windows XP was impossible to use on it. Found a 60gb Zif SSD and happy days. Great video.
I just did this on my bee club's laptop. It made all the difference in the world.
Seems right proud of the fact that he's got a hdd taking ages to load.
General rule of thumb is ssd for general use of PC and gaming, HDD for mass storage as its cheaper per MB .
Me: *has 1TB m.2 boot drive, 2 2TB m.2 storage drives, 1TB SSD, 512GB SSD, 2TB 7200 RPM drive* Ah, yes. *nods*
Ever since 2018, My PCs have had a modestly sized SSD for the OS and a large hard drive for
additional storage, tho over the years I've been gradually buying more SSDs and by this point
even my game libraries are on SSD now a days. I do get the argument that SSDs for some people
still aren't cost effective, but having personally experienced using a PC with only a Hard Drive and
then a PC with a small boot SSD and a hard drive for extra storage space I will never willingly
go back to only a Hard drive, SSD is just a night and day difference, and Greg only showed how slow a
new install, on a new hard drive, on a new PC is, let alone a old hard drive on a old, and a
old OS install that's been through hell and back. Hard drives slow down over time due to disk
fragmentation, which SSDs are immune to. Maybe for some really, cash strapped people SSDs still don't
make sense, but to me SSDs are worth it. I still have a 4tb hard drive, but I only use it to back up
TH-cam video footage, that's it :P
Before SSD's became more affordable they used to offer a hybrid drive, SSHD. With the SSHD your boots times were drastically reduced compared to a standard HDD. Now it was not as fast as an SSD, it was not far behind.
Did you sign up with the marines? Oorah!
i switched to a ssd in 2014, THE best upgrade i ever did!
0:17 The face of relief after finally finishing up the install of Windows 11 on a hard drive.
The reason nvme isn't faster in day to day use. Is because seek times is most of the requirements especially when tons of files are being loaded. In fact a hdd would probably not be much slower feeling if you had near instant seek times like nvme and SSD.
I use HDD for Server Storage so I can backup my movie collection and watch them in the cloud, I dont use them for gaming at all. I have a gaming ITX Pc with 1tb M.2 SSD Boot drive and the other 4TB M.2 SSD just for my game installation and I love it, barely got 2TB used with game files ^^
I got a hand me down PC in 2019 with an HDD. Christmas 2021 I got an NVME SSD and I was so smitten by the performance that it led me down a massive rabbit hole and now I've built three high end PCs. I love it 🥹