Storage is something that’s sometimes overlooked when it comes to PC and gaming performance, and that’s understandable. You wanna tell me that GPUs and CPUs aren’t enough, I also have to keep track of hard drive and solid-state drive performance? Can PC gaming get any more complicated? In reality, it’s easy to determine how important storage is for your experience and when it’s time to upgrade.
Throughout this article, we’ll be touching on how higher transfer rate drives render better performance in your system and what applications benefit most from upgrading from an HDD or old SSD to a newer drive.
Applications become quicker
Let’s say you’re running a 5400 RPM drive. That means that the disk spins 5400 each minute, which seems fast but it’s kind of slow for how many modern applications rely on getting data quickly. There are some better alternatives to the standard HDD which will speed up your system quite a bit.
The first is the SSD. SSDs are still hard drives, they’re just not disk drives. SSDs are solid-state drives, meaning that they have no moving component and can access data much, much faster. This means that applications will load quicker and perform smoother. SSDs have become much more affordable in the past year, so you can get a high-capacity one without spending a lot of money.
SSHDs are a nice alternative to the classic HDD. They’re hard drives with a small cache of flash memory that makes them much faster than a standard HDD. They’re still slower than solid-state drives, but if you’re looking to get a lot of storage and add some speed in the mix, they’re definitely the better choice.
SSDs are also a great way to blow new life into an older system. I put one in my parents’ computer. They just use Chrome and Word, so it didn’t make any sense to buy a new computer for them. An SSD made the PC run faster, improving their experience by a big margin.
Increased Storage Space
Storage space is pretty important for gaming, for a lot of reasons. First off, if you want to play modern titles, a lot of them surpass the 100 GB threshold, which can be a problem if you’re only rocking about 500 GB of free space. For 2020, I’d say you need around 2 TB of storage to feel comfortable.
Other than giving you faster loading times in games and applications, going for an SSD won’t yield any more performance benefits. Although you should know that having insufficient free space will negatively impact your PC’s performance, so keep enough free space to run your applications without any hitch.
Gaming
SSDs are really important for some games. If you’re playing games with a lot of loading screens you’re going to get a lot of value out of an SSD. I play Apex Legends and I constantly have to load in and out of games, and installing it on the SSD was the right choice.
Open world games, on the other hand, can be installed on HDDs, since you load the world once and then you just explore. GTA Online is the exception, where loading times for online lobbies are huge even if you’re running it from an SSD. Don’t play GTA Online from an HDD. It’s horrible.
Energy Saving Features
Modern drives are great for the environment. With a power draw of around 10 watts, you’re getting a lot of storage with very little power consumption, so it’s a win for us and it’s a win for mother nature. If you ever want to throw away a broken HDD or SSD, or any other piece of hardware, make sure to recycle.
Conclusion
HDDs and SSDs are very, very affordable. If you’re looking for a quick speed upgrade and are on a budget, an SSD will speed your system by a big margin. If you don’t have one installed, then we urge you to get one, even a small-capacity drive to put your OS on. In 2020, storage is very important. Make sure to get plenty of it, since media files are constantly getting bigger, games are growing to obscene sizes, and cloud storage is expensive.
