Why HDDs are out and SSDs are in for gamers – 3DMARK Storage Benchmark Tested

Conclusion – Why HDDs are no longer “Good Enough” for gamers

Most hardened PC enthusiasts will already know that SSDs (Solid State Drives) are better than HDDs (Hard Disk Drives) in practically all areas. Yes, HDDs are cheaper per Terabyte, but SSDs offer users faster access times, higher data rates and give us more responsive systems. 

3DMARK’s new Storage Benchmark gives us a way to test the “gaming” performance of storage without going deep into the realms of like-for-like testing with timers and capture devices where human error can easily add milliseconds to results and game patches can easily render old results irrelevant. It’s hard to test the gaming performance of storage mediums, especially given the fact that most modern games are optimised with slower HDDs in mind. 

Today’s benchmarks highlight why HDDs have been thrown to the wayside with PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S, and why SSDs have been adopted. SSDs deliver higher data rates and are much more responsive. With the power of SSD storage, game developers will no longer need to wait for HDDs to find data or wait as long for data to be delivered where it is required. 

If your game needs to find specific files, long access times can cause a game to stall. Giving precious milliseconds to data seeking times is time where CPUs and GPUs are sitting waiting on data. Beyond that, slow data reads extend the time it takes for data to go from storage to your system’s memory. As games are optimised for current generation consoles exclusively, HDDs will soon become too slow for modern gaming workloads. 

  
What about SATA SSDs? 

We already know that hard disk drives will soon be too slow for gaming workloads, but what about SATA SSDs? Will SATA SSDs soon be too slow for PC gaming? Yes and no. 

As games start to be optimised for SSD storage, games will begin to be optimised around the NVMe protocol and the high data rates offered by PCIe SSDs. Both PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X/S use PCIe NVMe SSD storage mediums. Microsoft’s DirectStorage API is designed explicitly to achieve this on PC and Xbox Series X/S. 

What does this mean for SATA SSDs? It means that future games will not be optimised around the SATA interface, leaving SATA SSD users in a bad position. SATA-based SSDs will be relegated to legacy game storage. That said, the price gap between SATA SSDs and NVMe SSDs is continuing to get lower, giving today’s PC gamers little reason to invest in new SATA-based SSDs. The future is NVMe, but it will be a while before SATA-based SSDs become obsolete for gamers. 

You can join the discussion on UL Benchmarks’ 3DMARK Storage Benchmark on the OC3D Forums.