Currently, finding a computer, be it desktop, laptop or Mini PC, with a mechanical hard drive is difficult. No one assembles a desktop computer piecemeal with an HDD as the primary drive. Due to falling SSD prices, mechanical drives are losing steam as a secondary storage solution.
The adoption of SSDs as the primary storage drive has been natural and organic. It has not been necessary, from the industry, to force its integration due to the brutal improvements with respect to HDDs. Something very different from what has happened with TPM, which is a forced adoption by Microsoft.
Requirements that “force” to install an SSD
first has been Starfield and shortly after it was Phantom Libertythe first Cyberpunk 2077 DLC. Both, among the requirements, specify the need to have an SSD.
Since no one currently has a primary drive SSD, it would be a secondary storage requirement. Many users install a Secondary HDD on your computer to install the games. This strategy, above all, responds to the fact that games are taking up more and more space.
The performance impact when running a game installed on an HDD is minimal. The graphics card has a VRAM to store textures and if it runs out of space, it has the RAM. If you need even more room, you have the SSD to store data and textures.
Whoever has an HDD as the main drive in a computer, most likely, will not be able to run Cyberpunk 2077 or Starfield. These teams would already be many years old and therefore could not run such modern games.
But, there could be two reasons why the “obligation” to have an SSD. The first and most likely is organic, which includes something that everyone already has. It would not be so much a requirement per se, it would be more a “certification” of something common.
The second possibility is that they integrate DirectStorage natively. What this technology does is that the graphics card can access ram discretion without going through the processor. Said mechanism reduces latency, since it does not have to go through the “toll” of the processor and you get some extra FPS (up to 5 in some cases)
SSD price drop
Currently, purchasing a solid state storage drive is very cheap. The 1 TB SATA interface units cost around 60 euros on average and the M.2 PCIe units of the same capacity are around 70 euros. As we can see, prices are currently very good.
We have compiled some very interesting drives in SATA format with very low prices:
The problem with SATA SSDs is that we are very limited in reading and writing speeds. If your motherboard or laptop supports it, better opt for a PCIe drive. The most interesting at the moment are:
