What compromise have you made, in your quest for gear and the perfect gaming experience? What have you given up? Is your system slower than you wish? Too expensive? Not quite enough storage space for all the new games you want?
Whether you game on a console, a standard PC or laptop, or a build-your-own PC-gaming rig, you’re always looking for the best balance of features to give you the most fun, on as many games, as you can.
Storage pros and cons for gaming, analyzed
Of course, price is always a factor, when choosing how to outfit a laptop or PC gaming rig. Did you pay big bucks for one component — say, a beast of a video card like the EVGA GeForce Titan X SuperClock? Unfortunately that means you have less to spend on other components… like a bigger 4K screen, decent headphones or an 8-core processor.
Or storage. You know you want plenty of it. And you want it fast.
We asked some of Seagate’s technology experts to analyze and break down some of these tradeoffs, when it comes to choosing storage for a gaming rig, and to ask game experts and enthusiasts for input too. They’ve written a new paper, which I’ll link below.
Hard Drive? SSD? SSHD.
One of the biggest issues for gamers, given a certain price range, is whether they want to opt for the speed of a solid-state drive, or the capacity of a conventional hard drive. Then there’s SSHD. As Seagate marketing manager Adam Ciernicki likes to point out (he works with Team Empire, our favorite world-class champion eSports team), “Seagate’s SSHD provides the best of both worlds by combining NAND flash storage with a hard drive — resulting in faster booting and game-loading speeds and less time spent watching progress bars.”
That means you get the speed advantage, but you still get full hard drive capacity. What’s more, Seagate’s Adaptive Memory technology can even improve performance over time, as it learns your gaming behavior. It works completely independently of the operating system and at the firmware level to move your most regularly accessed data into the SSD portion of the drive, accelerating performance to up to five times faster than a conventional drive.
And given the speedy performance and huge capacity, the amazing thing is the price of SSHD — similar to HDD, and way cheaper than SSD.
How do you get all that goodness? Here’s the analysis.
How does SSHD do all that? And what’s the real benefit to gamers?
Check this out, here’s that paper I mentioned — our tech experts put together some deeper analysis into what happens when you work to balance speed and cost in high-capacity storage for gaming:
- How fast do SSHDs move data?
- How does the technology work?
- How do real-world gaming speeds compare on SSHD vs HDD vs SSD?
- What do the tests show? What do game experts and enthusiasts say?
Read it here. Bottom line? Gaming storage needs have seriously evolved, and Seagate Solid State Hybrid Drives (SSHDs) — for both game consoles and personal computers — are purpose-built to deliver the blend of SSD-rivaling performance, traditional hard drive value and capacity that the world’s gamers demand.
