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.
I don’t know, I remember being a kid and hearing my mom complaining about some game needing like five floppy disks to install.
My childhood computer had 80 MB of storage on it and 15 of that was used up by the operating system, so I guess installing a 9 MB game was actually pretty taxing.
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.
What the heck did you just say about storage, you little newbie? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in Computer Engineering, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on terrible cable management, and I have over 300 confirmed SSD installs. You’re complaining about space on your PC like it’s some sort of divine mystery? Listen up, sailor.
You’re whining about dropping $120 on BG3 and Starfield? You could get a 1TB SSD for as low as 35 bucks, you scallywag. Don’t even get me started on HDDs; a 1TB one is practically a steal at 22 dollars. And let’s go big or go home: 2TB HDD for 40-65 dollars, or if you’re feeling ritzy, a 2TB SSD at 60-90. Still less than your precious games, maggot.
You’re out of SATA ports? Son, have you heard of a PCIe SATA card? Load that baby up. You’ve got more slots on your motherboard than you have excuses. Talking about running out of space with a setup that should give you 2-4TB at least? Don’t make me laugh. You’re telling me you can’t find space for your precious BG3? That’s only 150GB, sailor, uninstall it if you’re so keen on playing Starfield.
And if you’ve hit the limits of both onboard SATA and PCIe, then I have one word for you: USB 3. Worst case, you get an external drive and run Starfield from there. Don’t act like your OS drive is the final frontier; there are many ways to expand your digital seas, you landlubber.
So before you cry about storage again, maybe do some basic math and stop acting like you’re navigating uncharted waters. Get another drive, or walk the plank.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren’t too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you’d expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner’s laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn’t surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won’t work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to reach their limits with today’s major releases.
I hear what you’re saying, but I have about 200 games stored on a traditional HDD that only provides me a read speed of about 220MB/s absolute maximum and I have never had a single issue with any game running from it. As you say this could become a problem as devs adopt directstorage but as it stands right now, it’s a total none-issue.
I have a 2TB NVME M.2 drive in my PC but don’t really see any advantage to putting games on there, that’s what bulk storage is for. If you are playing online, 99% of games will have a countdown or otherwise make you wait until the slowest PC is also ready to go. If it’s a game that uses loading screens, I really don’t care as it still loads pretty damn fast.
Pretty much the only games that I will throw on my M.2 drive is open world games that load as you go if I am on my first playthrough. RDR2 lived on there for a while.
You also have to be careful with what other USB devices you plug into your computer (both internal and external). The spec is 40 Gb/s for the controller, but ports often share the same controller and the bandwidth will be split between connected devices. For some computers, this could mean that 3 or more ports should be completely blocked off when plugging your gaming USB drive in, at least while playing the game. If your PC only has a single USB controller, I guess you’ll also need bluetooth peripherals.
That would work only in the console (or Apple) world where you can control who and how can access the data. Otherwise someone will stick it to an USB 1.1 hub connected to the USB 2.0 port for the mouse and then complain “the game is unbearably slow!!!”
Plus I don’t think anyone would want to pay $150 for a game (no, you can’t use a $10 USB drive for this)
You can get a USB 3 SD card reader and a fast SD card yourself. Even if it was bundled with the game, you’re paying for the cost of the physical materials.
I don’t think you understand economies of scale. It doesn’t make sense for me to pay retail price for a single unit, especially if I have no other use for it. These costs are trivial at scale, and would also hopefully provide some impetus to optimise the code and texture storage.
Economies of scale aren’t magic. Games are somewhat resistant to price increases in the face of inflation because we’ve shifted to digital distribution that you’re looking to erode with the suggestion of shipping with physical media again, and you’d still have to pay well more than half of the price it would take you to buy that same media on Amazon. The storage size has grown because they’ve been optimizing for other factors, and I’m sure they came to the conclusion that it’s more likely you’ll free up space or buy storage expansions in the future after a price drop than it is that you would buy a game that ran worse or looked worse forever because they optimized more for storage space.
I am happy to pay whatever extra it costs to have the experience of actually owning a game on a lasting medium with some artwork. My experience with digital downloads is that I just never care as much. Often I won’t even finish the game unless it is beyond amazing. I like to receive tangible things for my hard earned money I guess.
Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.
So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.
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.
New MacBooks have their memory soldered directly to the main board and don’t have an extra m.2 port. There are very few windows laptops that meet both of those criteria. But like I said, even in those cases you can install games on an external drive.
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.
I don’t know, I remember being a kid and hearing my mom complaining about some game needing like five floppy disks to install.
My childhood computer had 80 MB of storage on it and 15 of that was used up by the operating system, so I guess installing a 9 MB game was actually pretty taxing.
A 10MB game is basically the equivalent of a 100GB one now.
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.
I swear I’ve seen this post verbaitm elsewhere.
What the heck did you just say about storage, you little newbie? I’ll have you know I graduated top of my class in Computer Engineering, and I’ve been involved in numerous secret raids on terrible cable management, and I have over 300 confirmed SSD installs. You’re complaining about space on your PC like it’s some sort of divine mystery? Listen up, sailor.
You’re whining about dropping $120 on BG3 and Starfield? You could get a 1TB SSD for as low as 35 bucks, you scallywag. Don’t even get me started on HDDs; a 1TB one is practically a steal at 22 dollars. And let’s go big or go home: 2TB HDD for 40-65 dollars, or if you’re feeling ritzy, a 2TB SSD at 60-90. Still less than your precious games, maggot.
You’re out of SATA ports? Son, have you heard of a PCIe SATA card? Load that baby up. You’ve got more slots on your motherboard than you have excuses. Talking about running out of space with a setup that should give you 2-4TB at least? Don’t make me laugh. You’re telling me you can’t find space for your precious BG3? That’s only 150GB, sailor, uninstall it if you’re so keen on playing Starfield.
And if you’ve hit the limits of both onboard SATA and PCIe, then I have one word for you: USB 3. Worst case, you get an external drive and run Starfield from there. Don’t act like your OS drive is the final frontier; there are many ways to expand your digital seas, you landlubber.
So before you cry about storage again, maybe do some basic math and stop acting like you’re navigating uncharted waters. Get another drive, or walk the plank.
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I mean my biggest recommendation is that you can only really play one game at a time, maybe just download the game you want to play later, later.
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.
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.
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.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren’t too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you’d expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner’s laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn’t surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won’t work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re starting to reach their limits with today’s major releases.
I hear what you’re saying, but I have about 200 games stored on a traditional HDD that only provides me a read speed of about 220MB/s absolute maximum and I have never had a single issue with any game running from it. As you say this could become a problem as devs adopt directstorage but as it stands right now, it’s a total none-issue.
I have a 2TB NVME M.2 drive in my PC but don’t really see any advantage to putting games on there, that’s what bulk storage is for. If you are playing online, 99% of games will have a countdown or otherwise make you wait until the slowest PC is also ready to go. If it’s a game that uses loading screens, I really don’t care as it still loads pretty damn fast.
Pretty much the only games that I will throw on my M.2 drive is open world games that load as you go if I am on my first playthrough. RDR2 lived on there for a while.
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just need the USB 3.2 2x2 gen 2 thing (thanks USB for that fucked up name scheme) that the USB spec mangled for the 40 Gbps transfer speed
You also have to be careful with what other USB devices you plug into your computer (both internal and external). The spec is 40 Gb/s for the controller, but ports often share the same controller and the bandwidth will be split between connected devices. For some computers, this could mean that 3 or more ports should be completely blocked off when plugging your gaming USB drive in, at least while playing the game. If your PC only has a single USB controller, I guess you’ll also need bluetooth peripherals.
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I’ll let ya know.
Should be.
That would work only in the console (or Apple) world where you can control who and how can access the data. Otherwise someone will stick it to an USB 1.1 hub connected to the USB 2.0 port for the mouse and then complain “the game is unbearably slow!!!”
Plus I don’t think anyone would want to pay $150 for a game (no, you can’t use a $10 USB drive for this)
You can get a USB 3 SD card reader and a fast SD card yourself. Even if it was bundled with the game, you’re paying for the cost of the physical materials.
I don’t think you understand economies of scale. It doesn’t make sense for me to pay retail price for a single unit, especially if I have no other use for it. These costs are trivial at scale, and would also hopefully provide some impetus to optimise the code and texture storage.
Economies of scale aren’t magic. Games are somewhat resistant to price increases in the face of inflation because we’ve shifted to digital distribution that you’re looking to erode with the suggestion of shipping with physical media again, and you’d still have to pay well more than half of the price it would take you to buy that same media on Amazon. The storage size has grown because they’ve been optimizing for other factors, and I’m sure they came to the conclusion that it’s more likely you’ll free up space or buy storage expansions in the future after a price drop than it is that you would buy a game that ran worse or looked worse forever because they optimized more for storage space.
I am happy to pay whatever extra it costs to have the experience of actually owning a game on a lasting medium with some artwork. My experience with digital downloads is that I just never care as much. Often I won’t even finish the game unless it is beyond amazing. I like to receive tangible things for my hard earned money I guess.
Flash drives are not a lasting medium. You’d need something like a quad-layer blu-ray, which is not cheap and has slow read speeds compared to solid state storage. Also nobody has blu-ray readers anymore. Also blu-ray publishers are tiny. Also the expense of distributing physical media.
So we’ve arrived back at the beginning - you can have this cake and eat it too, but you’re going to have to eat the expense yourself. Imposing it upon the entire consumer market is selfish and wasteful.
Damn I’m paying $3 more for production costs in a large scale bulk order.
Too much! Better give me a shitty plastic trinket and a postcard.
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.
They are a game reviewer, it’s kinda embarrassing that they don’t hve a decent setup to playtest the games they review.
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.
New MacBooks have their memory soldered directly to the main board and don’t have an extra m.2 port. There are very few windows laptops that meet both of those criteria. But like I said, even in those cases you can install games on an external drive.
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Assuming you have a spare slot (and your laptop is designed in a way to make that swap easy)
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Most laptops come with an empty SATA or NVME drive.