HDD vs SSD: Which should a Gamer Choose?

This is an old debate which still has got no clear answers. Big companies that produce SSDs claim that an SSD would give better performance to gamers.

But is it so? And, is Yes, then is it really significant?

You will find out all your answers in this post. I have tested both Hard drives and Solid State Drives on three main factors i.e. performance, storage and price.

Let us discuss each of these in detail.

1. Performance : I/O & Read Write

The most arguable point between SSD and HDD is the performance. From a gamer’s perspective, the performance simply means faster loading and lag free gaming experience.

A solid state drive offers faster read write speed of up to 1 GBps as compared to the traditional hard drive’s speed i.e. not more than 100Mbps.

This gives a clear advantage during the load time in games. The game reads its files from the drive and loads them into graphics card memory to play. With an SSD, these files can be read and written faster, that's why the loading time decreases.

Although, there are faster spinning Hard drives having speeds up to 15k RPM but still they cannot really beat the SSDs in read write speeds.

When it comes to lag free gaming, the job is in the hands of GPU and not the hard drive or SSD. So, even if you are using an SSD but your GPU is old or less capable, your game is going to lag 100% of the time.

So, overall an SSD would definitely reduce the loading time of your games but it does not have any significant effect on game lags.

2. Storage Space

The second department is storage which is actually the primary function of any hard drive or solid state drive.

If you are someone who requires a lot of storage, then SSDs might not be something you would go for. Most SSDs are available with the maximum storage space of up to 4TB (and it will be around $1000+).

On the other hand, you can get a regular Hard drive with storage upto 12 TB at almost half the price.

So, if you games are more than 4TB of data, an SSD wont be enough for that. In such cases, I would suggest going for a gaming hard drive instead of a regular one. For better options on the same, you can check out the list of best HDD for gaming available 2020.

A gaming HDD would give you perfect balance of speed and affordability.

3. Affordability

Talking about price, Solid State drives are clearly more expensive because it uses Flash memory instead of the metal discs to store the data.

There is a significant difference of cost per terabyte of storage between SSD and HDD. You can get a good 1TB SSD for around 200$ while a good 4TB HDD would cost you less than 150 bucks.

4. Bonus Factors

Final Answer: My Recommendation for Gamers

As a gamer, my recommendation is to buy a 1 TB SSD for your gaming purpose along with a 4TB standard external HDD for storing your data.

With this setup you will get the best of the both worlds without having to compromise with the gaming performance as well as keeping everything in budget.

If you have any questions regarding hard drives and solid state drives, ask them in the comments and I will love to answer them. Happy Gaming!