You’re going to need an SSD in order to play Final Fantasy 16 on PC

I hope I dont need to upgrade my Sound Blaster audio card!

Still rocking my SoundBlaster X-fi Titanium Fatal1ty edition. It’s not necessary, but I have it and it still works, so I may as well use it.
- Wow, that's gotta be like, 15 years old by now? Creative stopped using the Fatal1ty branding around 2010, I think!
that would be awesome.
The AWE32 was the best sound card ever change my mind.
- 2 words: no pci

I'm a bit baffled that some people still use HDDs considering how cheap SSDs have gotten. You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100. If you've got the specs for new games, there's no excuse.

I'm baffled that some people update their hardware before it stops working.

But then I just keep playing old games that run on my system, so I'm probably not the target demographic.
- I mean I play pretty much exclusively old and 2D games. If you asked me to give up my SSD or my GPU, the GPU would be the first to go.
- I've seen too many people spend more money keeping a system alive than they would have spent upgrading to modern hardware and I refuse to be like them.
- Well what do you mean by "stops working?" Like, literally the hardware no longer functions, or would you also consider hardware that just doesn't run the newest stuff as well as older stuff?
I can get a 10TB HDD for under 250€, and there are some technical advantages. For example, if you have an ssd lying around unpowered, it will lose data much quicker than magnetic storage
Games keep getting bigger and bigger. This game is expected to be about 100GB, and that's not uncommon for modern AAA games. The CoD games have been over 200GB for a while now. Previous FF games have been similar size. RDR2 was 120GB.

I would expect most people playing FF16 on PC to have a small SSD drive with their OS, key programs, and maybe a couple of games, then a HDD for bulk storage.

I'm not interested in the FF series, but if I was this message from the devs means "clear up some space on your SSD". Which can sometimes be an inconvenience.
- It’s because the upgrade for this console generation was an SSD
- It is an inconvenience. AAA games will alway try to push hardware, and SSDs just happen to be one of the things that can do that.
i don't play 'new' games, i don't have the hardware for them. most my gear is older salvaged stuff that didn't cost me anything to get. between constant rent increases and the cost of groceries these days, i simply can't afford to upgrade unless i get lucky and salvage something useful.
- You're not the target market for FF16 then.
SSD's with more than a 500gb-1tb start to get way more expensive than hard drives
I’m a bit baffled that some people still use HDDs considering how cheap SSDs have gotten. You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100. If you’ve got the specs for new games, there’s no excuse.

I don't know why you got some downvotes. Buying an SSD to store the latest games is much more cheaper than buying a GPU. If one already has a powerful GPU, I don't know why they consider an SSD "not affordable"
SSD for newish games, OS, and programs, HDD for videos, photos, music, and old games.
- This. My HDD also holds local copies of games in case I want to move them to the SSD.
  
  My PC was built in 2015, the case, PSU, 2xHDDs, 2xSSDs, and fans are all original. No reason to change what isn't broken. If I ever move on to a new case, I'll just turn these into a server farm ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
If you’re just buying a terabyte or two of storage there’s absolutely no reason to buy spinning rust at this point. If you want many terabytes of storage 12tb+ hard drives are going to be a fair bit cheaper than SSDs currently. SSDs have been rapidly dropping in price and increasing in capacity, though, so hopefully it just gets more and more cost effective to have a bunch of storage with SSDs.
It's simple: My SSD can only fit so many 100-300 GB games, while I already have hard drives with plenty of free space.

(Also, running Linux means that an SSD doesn't help game performance much anyway, outside of initial loading time.)

You can get a 2TB M.2 for around $100.

More like $150-200 if you want a good one.

If you’ve got the specs for new games, there’s no excuse.

What a very privileged perspective. I don't have much money, but most new games are playable on my existing hardware if I tune the graphics settings. I would rather spend what money have on things like food and heat. (Or if the basics are covered, then maybe a newish game.)
- Just to share my recent experience: I found that games of that size compress quite well. So if you're using a filesystem like btrfs that supports transparent compression, you can fit much more onto your disks, at the cost of slightly slower reads and writes (M.2 ssd). With my HDD, compression actually increased write speed!

In 2023/4 you should not be running a hdd in your gaming machine anyway, SSDs are so affordable now

What a privileged thing to say.
- Playing modern games as soon as they come out is privileged too.
- SSD's have massively decreased in price over the last couple of years. I'm confused by your comment?
- A basic GPU will cost you $150-$250 dollars. A 1tb SSD will cost you $50, or the same price for a half terabyte nvme.
  
  You can't even realistically get a proper HDD below $40, they just don't sell. You'd be best served at the $80 price point, getting either
  
  1tb nvme
  
  2tb SSD
  
  4tb HDD
  
  I'd suggest the nvme in this situation.
- A cheap SSD is less money than a cheap HDD at this point.

I probably also need at least a dual core CPU.

this is nothing new... fuck game journalism

So what? I accidentally installed Baldur's Gate 3 on a hard disk and it was unplayable, because the assets took ages to load. Transferred everything over to an NVMe drive and it's butter smooth. Just don't put anything that requires interaction on a hard disk and get with the times and plop in an SSD. Best bang for your buck in terms of an upgrade with a massively noticable effect.

Are you telling me I should stop gaming using a raid10 set made from 8x500GB HDDs?

I haven’t had an HDD since around 2004, maybe 2002. Sure I cant keep tons of big games installed, but decent internet makes that not really an issue.

What were you storing your stuff on?

The first reasonable sized consumer ssds I remember were the original ocz line. What was it like onyx or agility? And that wasnt until almost 2010 ish.

2002 seems suuuuper early.
- Probably floppy disks
That’s super early to have adopted SSDs solely, no?
- Yeah it is, and Windows didn’t get TRIM support for SSDs until Windows 7 in 2009.
  
  The MacBook Air didn’t even get SSDs until 2008, and I believe it was the first mass-produced consumer computer with an SSD. Linux also got support around that time.
  
  I’m skeptical unless OP’s dad worked somewhere that had enterprise drives to discard… and allowed drives to disappear.

PS5 supremacy. 😊