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For the love of all things good, do not install Starfield on a hard driveIt really does need an SSD to… well, work
It really does need an SSD to… well, work
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda Softworks
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Bethesda Softworks
On today’s installment of Bad Calls I Have Made, I will cop to never really buying the idea ofStarfieldneedinganSSD. Even among its astronomicalsystem requirements, an inflexible demand for solid state storage seemed like a stretch; after all,Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apartruns mostly fine on a hard drive, and in a previous life that game was employed as a cheerleader for the PS5’s SSD.Starfieldwould probably just have rubbish load times or texture pop-in or something, and all would be revealed once I could try it on mechanical storage. Which I now have.
So, can you play Starfield on an HDD? No. It’s bloody awful.
To see this content please enable targeting cookies.Manage cookie settingsWas Starfield worth the wait? Liam and Alice B discuss this question - and more - in the video above.Watch on YouTube
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Not Starfield per se, which ismostly good– when it’s running off an SSD. On a hard drive, it’s a completely different game, which is to say its structual integrity is snapped to bits like the chocolate on a freshly bitten Magnum. In addition to the largely benign, often hilarious bugs you get on an SSD, HDD!Starfield is riddled with skipping audio, animation failures, stuttering, hanging, crashing, the lot. Also, it has rubbish load times and texture pop-in.
Starfield - Freezing Issues During Combat When Using a HDDDo not adjust your set.Watch on YouTube
Starfield - Freezing Issues During Combat When Using a HDD
Starfield - Sound Issues When Using a HDDWatch on YouTube
Starfield - Sound Issues When Using a HDD
Before the extent of all this misery became apparent, I’d planned a straightforward loading time comparison using my test rig’s SSD (a 2TB Crucial P3 Plus) and a typical HDD (a 1TB WD Caviar Blue). I know that given the other problems, this must now seem as useful as measuring the blood pressure on Anne Boleyn’s cadaver, but these results still reflect the totality of how Starfield rejects non-SSD storage. In one case, the hard drive was a full ten times slower.
If all this sounds like I’m outragedly flag-waving for mechanical storage’s good old days, when we frolicked through the sunlit uplands of spinning platters and didn’t have to worry about woke NAND flash, I am not. For gaming specifically, I’m more of the mind that HDDs have had their time; SSDs are both faster and cheaper than ever, and we’d all be a bit happier with our PCs if we fully switched.
You could say Starfield is simply reflecting these changing times. You could also point out that hard drives are mere tools, and don’t need to bow out gracefully like a beloved veteran footballer getting his testimonial. Still, if Starfield being irreparably wrecked on HDD represents some kind of ending… I dunno, I suppose I just didn’t imagine it being such a violent one.
