Kunal Khullar Social Links Navigation News Contributor Kunal Khullar is a contributing writer at Tom’s Hardware. He is a long time technology journalist and reviewer specializing in PC components and peripherals, and welcomes any and every question around building a PC.
hotaru251 i mean…its 2025…almost 2026 just accept that HDD for gaming is not gonna cut it. You can buy a 500GB ssd for sub $50. Don't be like the windows OS and drag dead weight (32bit x86) that holds you back. Reply
Gururu Having the option is key. I wonder if every other +100GB game has the same accommodations. Reply
gggplaya If you're a pc gamer in 2025, you should SSD's should be minimum spec for all AAA titles. I bought a 256GB SATA SSD for $20 years ago. You can get 256GB Sata SSD's on ebay for $15 now. I mean common, it's cheaper than most AAA titles. Even consoles are SSD only now. Reply
teeejay94 hotaru251 said: i mean…its 2025…almost 2026 just accept that HDD for gaming is not gonna cut it. You can buy a 500GB ssd for sub $50. Don't be like the windows OS and drag dead weight (32bit x86) that holds you back. Just accept that you can't get 12TB for 300$ on a SSD 💯 SSDs are also garbage for long term storage. Reply
deadcat27 This is maddening to say the least. Just to sell a few more copies of a title, devs and publishers are wasting space on my storage which is crazy expensive per gb so that I can subsidize other players because they are too cheap or ill-informed to have proper modern hardware. I can't imagine what this has cost the rest of us and it's doubtful that this de-gigafication has anything to do with the user experience but rather the file transfer and hosting fees for the publishers. This 11% is the same group that creates a troubleshooting post/ticket about how their game runs poorly on their PC and when prompted for more detailed system info they reply simply, "It's a Windows PC." Over a decade ago, in 2011-12, I was playing WoW installed on Sandisk CZ80 because my system drive, a crucial m4 64gb, wasn't big enough to handle the OS and wow. I think even as a USB stick its TP and RA was way way faster than the standard hdd at the time and that 64gb was way less than $100. It wasn't anything special, just a i3-2120 and a gt560 and I bet that whole system cost ~$5-600ish and likely outperformed many of its contemporaries simply because it was using sata ssd and a USB flash drive. I can't imagine if I had used that system with just a hdd. This nonsense is directly related to how some titles still have a forced pre-roll when starting up to allow for a hdd to load the game as if its a console while my system had the whole thing loaded before the pre-roll even displayed on my screen. This inconvenience only cost me 20 seconds of my life and not expensive nand though. Just think. A modern W11 install fully configured after its trimming might only be around 25-35gb (ymmv). If the all game space we needed could get reduced like this we could all be using 100% SLC drives rather than a single game needlessly taking up most of it with current designs ! Ugh! Reply
gggplaya teeejay94 said: Just accept that you can't get 12TB for 300$ on a SSD 💯 SSDs are also garbage for long term storage. No one is saying for long term storage, just for gaming. It's not fair that we need to take up 154GB of SSD space instead of 23GB just to accomodate the 11% of the player base that refuse to get an SSD for games. Reply
tennis2 can someone explain this to me? If the "necessary" file size is 23GB and presumably not all of that data needed to be duplicated….say 1/2 of it(?), then they duplicated that 12GB roughly TEN TIMES OVER!?!?! Or am I thinking about it wrong and it's more of a pre-rendered asset library that doesn't need to exist. Reply
bigdragon I took note of the amount of free space on my games drive before updating and switching to the Slim branch. Then I compared it with the number after all the updating and switch was complete. 179GB of space appeared to be freed up. That's HUGE. The game should have NEVER wasted that much space. My number is probably inflated a bit due to downloading the update packages. Still, the game has some serious PC port issues. I am glad they're finally fixing things. Reply
Pyranna87 teeejay94 said: Just accept that you can't get 12TB for 300$ on a SSD 💯 SSDs are also garbage for long term storage. For modern gaming, you want good read speeds. Huge capacity and long term unpowered storage are not important issues for most people. The vast majority of gamers would probably be more than fine with a 1TB nvme. Reply
tennis2 Gururu said: Having the option is key. I wonder if every other +100GB game has the same accommodations. Well, between that and the 30GB HD audio pack…. Reply
Key considerations
- Investor positioning can change fast
- Volatility remains possible near catalysts
- Macro rates and liquidity can dominate flows
Reference reading
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/SPONSORED_LINK_URL
- https://www.tomshardware.com/video-games/pc-gaming/helldivers-2-install-size-slashed-from-154gb-to-just-23gb-85-percent-reduction-accomplished-by-de-duplicating-game-data-an-optimization-for-older-mechanical-hard-drives#main
- https://www.tomshardware.com
- [Daily Due Diligence] NVDA NVDA
- My Arcade launches portable Pac-Man 45th anniversary-themed retro arcade games — available in both pocketable and desktop versions
- The Largest Digital Zoo: Biology Model Trained on NVIDIA GPUs Identifies Over a Million Species
- Nvidia’s TiDAR experiment could speed up AI token generation using hybrid diffusion decoder — new research boasts big throughput gains, but limitations remain
- Seagate's 24TB BarraCuda is back in stock for just $0.01 per gigabyte — the storage steal of the weekend returns, still great value
Informational only. No financial advice. Do your own research.