1 TB SSDs are 35-60 dollars.
1 TB HDDs are 22-50 dollars.
2 TB HDDs are 40-65 dollars.
2 TB SDDs are 60-90 dollars.
Clearly, price shouldn’t be an issue because one of these drives that give you 10 times the storage is the cost of 1 new release, and the theoretical person who just bought BG3 and Starfield just spent 120 dollars minimum. So theoretical person let’s do some math!
Seems really silly to complain that you ran out of space on your PC. Get another drive. If you’ve filled up your SATA ports, get a PCIe SATA card. If you have all your onboard SATA slots full, plus your PCIe slots are full, plus you’ve upgraded all the drives you could to at least 1 TB, that typically gives you at least 2-4 TB total. BG3 is taking up 150 GB that you reserved for gaming. Uninstall it if you want to play Starfield. If you don’t want to play Starfield that badly then you have your answer.
Clearly, the real answer is that this person needs another drive in their computer. They act like the OS drive is the only thing that could possibly exist in a computer. Worst case, go get a USB 3 drive and toss Starfield on that.
Nah, you can find people complaining about games being too big in cycles going all the way back to the beginning of retail PC gaming. I remember Screen Savers built their “Ultimate Gaming PC” in like 1998 with a few gigabytes of storage, and they said something like, “I know that seems like a lot, but games these days can be hundreds of megabytes, so we want to be able to just fit them all”. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield are both large games. Not every game is that big, nor are these games necessarily doing something wrong by being that big.
SSD prices finally started dropping rapidly, and HDDs are even cheaper, for games like Sea of Stars or 30XX that don’t need read speed performance, both of which have options to extend laptop storage space like the author’s use case.
Remember Strike Commander? The floppy disk version (with very limited speech as well) wanted some 40-50MB when the common HDD sizes were 80-120 MB. I had a larger-than-average 240MB and it’d still have hurt if I didn’t have a CD-ROM drive to play the CD edition instead.
Remember Baldur’s Gate 2, which had multiple installation options for different amounts of the game running from the HDD vs CD, and it felt so extravagant to go “install all of it on the HDD!”
The sentiment isn’t wrong. Space is cheap now. Had Star field come out when SSDs were having GPU-like pricing I’d be more outraged, but prices are falling and having multi-terabyte systems shouldn’t be an issue. Way cheaper than GPUs that can play the game, that’s for sure.
I’d be inclined to agree but I’m frankly somewhat at a loss from this articles perspective. Why a 256gb boot drive in 2023? I’m only assuming, based on the math. If it were 512GB I’d assume they’d be able to shuffle off more data. If it’s important files you need to access, store them on an external HDD? If they’re a gamer and they know space is an issue, a SSD enclosure is not much more added cost to a 1TB drive and it solves the issue…
Like I said, I understand the intent about game sizes. But people playing BG3 or Starfield on their laptop are going to have other issues on top of storage, since most laptops have a pretty linear upgrade path. If you have the 256gb model the rest of the hardware probably reflects that pricepoint. Like @[email protected] said, at a certain point the idea of a game coming preloaded on a USB drive makes sense, but until then the ease for general use of an SSD enclosure makes more sense.
Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that’s a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive’s measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn’t take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.
I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free “DLC” on Steam, for example.
Than most Solid State Drives you mean, since Hard Drive Disks have way slower read speeds than USB 3.0/3.1, I even have proof, My partners BG3 game was laggy as hell in her hard drive, but it’s manageable to play in an external SSD connected to USB3.1. The read speed changes from 35MB7s-ish to 500MB/s-ish iirc. it was VERY noticeable. Her laptop is a gaming laptop bought 4 years ago, and the processor/grapphics card works pretty well still, but the 250GB SSD is just not enough to manage windows and all the other games/programs, and the HHD is way too slow, so yeah. In the future changing the SSD to put a bigger one would be the best but for now an external drive works wonders.
USB 3.2 gen 2x2’s theoretical speeds cap out at 20Gb/s (or 2.5GB/sec). It’s certainly a performance improvement compared to USB 3.0, but still doesn’t quite meet the performance of an internal NVMe. If your PC supports Thunderbolt, you get double the bandwidth (so 5GB/sec) which does match what some slower PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can handle. This is of course assuming you’re comparing to a NVMe, a SATA drive won’t come close to these speeds but I believe most laptops these days use NVMe drives.
Regardless, if you’re loading games off a USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface, and assuming you’re using a single drive to a single controller (keep in mind that performance is split between connected devices per controller, and PCs often only have a couple controllers at most to manage all the ports), your read performance is probably more than enough.
Ah, most laptops these days ship with an internal NVMe, so that’s what I assumed you were comparing against. A USB 3.2 gen 2x2 enclosure will vastly outperform a SATA SSD I believe, again assuming it’s the only device connected to your controller.
1 TB SSDs are 35-60 dollars.
1 TB HDDs are 22-50 dollars.
2 TB HDDs are 40-65 dollars.
2 TB SDDs are 60-90 dollars.
Clearly, price shouldn’t be an issue because one of these drives that give you 10 times the storage is the cost of 1 new release, and the theoretical person who just bought BG3 and Starfield just spent 120 dollars minimum. So theoretical person let’s do some math!
Seems really silly to complain that you ran out of space on your PC. Get another drive. If you’ve filled up your SATA ports, get a PCIe SATA card. If you have all your onboard SATA slots full, plus your PCIe slots are full, plus you’ve upgraded all the drives you could to at least 1 TB, that typically gives you at least 2-4 TB total. BG3 is taking up 150 GB that you reserved for gaming. Uninstall it if you want to play Starfield. If you don’t want to play Starfield that badly then you have your answer.
Clearly, the real answer is that this person needs another drive in their computer. They act like the OS drive is the only thing that could possibly exist in a computer. Worst case, go get a USB 3 drive and toss Starfield on that.
I legitimately hope you’re trolling.
Nah, you can find people complaining about games being too big in cycles going all the way back to the beginning of retail PC gaming. I remember Screen Savers built their “Ultimate Gaming PC” in like 1998 with a few gigabytes of storage, and they said something like, “I know that seems like a lot, but games these days can be hundreds of megabytes, so we want to be able to just fit them all”. Baldur’s Gate 3 and Starfield are both large games. Not every game is that big, nor are these games necessarily doing something wrong by being that big.
SSD prices finally started dropping rapidly, and HDDs are even cheaper, for games like Sea of Stars or 30XX that don’t need read speed performance, both of which have options to extend laptop storage space like the author’s use case.
Remember Strike Commander? The floppy disk version (with very limited speech as well) wanted some 40-50MB when the common HDD sizes were 80-120 MB. I had a larger-than-average 240MB and it’d still have hurt if I didn’t have a CD-ROM drive to play the CD edition instead.
Remember Baldur’s Gate 2, which had multiple installation options for different amounts of the game running from the HDD vs CD, and it felt so extravagant to go “install all of it on the HDD!”
I had to uninstall all other games to play baldurs gate back in the days. Running the game without ever needing to switch CDs. Was worth it.
Nah, I loved changing out those disks. Core memory nostalgia material right there. Waste of time for sure, but one I remember fondly in hindsight.
The sentiment isn’t wrong. Space is cheap now. Had Star field come out when SSDs were having GPU-like pricing I’d be more outraged, but prices are falling and having multi-terabyte systems shouldn’t be an issue. Way cheaper than GPUs that can play the game, that’s for sure.
It’s a touch trickier to upgrade a laptop, which the writer is talking about.
I’d be inclined to agree but I’m frankly somewhat at a loss from this articles perspective. Why a 256gb boot drive in 2023? I’m only assuming, based on the math. If it were 512GB I’d assume they’d be able to shuffle off more data. If it’s important files you need to access, store them on an external HDD? If they’re a gamer and they know space is an issue, a SSD enclosure is not much more added cost to a 1TB drive and it solves the issue…
Like I said, I understand the intent about game sizes. But people playing BG3 or Starfield on their laptop are going to have other issues on top of storage, since most laptops have a pretty linear upgrade path. If you have the 256gb model the rest of the hardware probably reflects that pricepoint. Like @[email protected] said, at a certain point the idea of a game coming preloaded on a USB drive makes sense, but until then the ease for general use of an SSD enclosure makes more sense.
Yeah, 256gb doesn’t really get you very far these days. Everything is so bloated, including the operating system.
No it’s not, unless they have a MacBook. And even in that case it’s not hard to find an external SSD with a thunderbolt or USB3.2 interface.
There are plenty of PC laptops with drives that aren’t easy to upgrade, it ain’t just MacBooks anymore.
I’ve got a better idea. You want to make your game stupidly large? Ok fine, sell me a physical copy pre-installed on a fast USB stick. Job done.
Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that’s a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive’s measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn’t take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.
I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free “DLC” on Steam, for example.
Than most Solid State Drives you mean, since Hard Drive Disks have way slower read speeds than USB 3.0/3.1, I even have proof, My partners BG3 game was laggy as hell in her hard drive, but it’s manageable to play in an external SSD connected to USB3.1. The read speed changes from 35MB7s-ish to 500MB/s-ish iirc. it was VERY noticeable. Her laptop is a gaming laptop bought 4 years ago, and the processor/grapphics card works pretty well still, but the 250GB SSD is just not enough to manage windows and all the other games/programs, and the HHD is way too slow, so yeah. In the future changing the SSD to put a bigger one would be the best but for now an external drive works wonders.
USB 3.2 gen 2x2’s theoretical speeds cap out at 20Gb/s (or 2.5GB/sec). It’s certainly a performance improvement compared to USB 3.0, but still doesn’t quite meet the performance of an internal NVMe. If your PC supports Thunderbolt, you get double the bandwidth (so 5GB/sec) which does match what some slower PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can handle. This is of course assuming you’re comparing to a NVMe, a SATA drive won’t come close to these speeds but I believe most laptops these days use NVMe drives.
Regardless, if you’re loading games off a USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface, and assuming you’re using a single drive to a single controller (keep in mind that performance is split between connected devices per controller, and PCs often only have a couple controllers at most to manage all the ports), your read performance is probably more than enough.
I said “Internal SSD” not NVME SSD. So some description fail on my part, I meant SATA SSD.
Ah, most laptops these days ship with an internal NVMe, so that’s what I assumed you were comparing against. A USB 3.2 gen 2x2 enclosure will vastly outperform a SATA SSD I believe, again assuming it’s the only device connected to your controller.