this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2023
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Sequential speeds aren't the only metric for storage performance though. Random reads are quite important and the HDDs will literally be hundreds of times slower than an SSD for random reads. It may be fine for older games if you're fine with waiting for a minute at each loading screen, but some modern games now require SSDs and that number will likely skyrocket soon.
agreed. games read a lot of random data. performance won't be nearly as 'good' as op expects.
the difference of $50 matters that much for op, i think that not spending anything would be the more prudent choice.
that said, if it were me i'd raid-0 two of them and keep the third as a single drop-in replacement for when that array dies; containing a full backup of the array's contents kept up-to-date with every major patch the games on it gets.
In that case a 3 drive RAID-5 is what you want. One drive dies you lose nothing but redundancy. You still get two drives with of data along with parity checking. It isn’t quite as fast as a zero, depending on hardware (most will max the HDD speed before being bottlenecks). Nothing will be as fast for random reads as an SSD or NVME, but you get the storage and piece of mind.
Yeah, I'm mega broke right now, lol. For reference, $50 for average people is around 8 days worth of salary here. And I'm unfortunately, an average people.
This is what I do. I have a massive old-school hard drive and I use it for things like Rimworld or various indie games. It's honestly manageable for some more-demanding stuff, but if I try to run anything intensive, I might as well not play it, at all. The old-school drive is great for anything Steamdeck level or below, basically.