Yeah, saw this as well.

Not liking it.

I have an older but still capable rig. Already hating that W11 is forcing me to upgrade computers in 2 years... and doubly unhappy about SSDs becoming necessary.

Or you could keep using your current computer indefinitely and
make it the computer that you've wanted it to be exactly to the letter.

I have an older rig as well. A Dell Optiplex 9010. A WX 3100 card. A quad core i5-3570. I dread to think how it would perform under the strenuous bloat of Windows.

Long uptimes, ability to chose exactly when updates happen, DNF5 is blazing fast, and hey, Wine has made massive strides in the past few years.

You don't need a new computer. (But I'd suggest getting a SSD for the operating system anyway.)

Outside of waiting a lot longer to load things I don't see SSD would be required. Textures can be pretty hefty these days and reading all that off a spinning disk can take a long while (that doesn't even address decompressing the textures).

I have an SSD and I'm annoyed by the load times so I suspect HDD is worse.

Not mocking you but SSDs have been the new standard (and fairly cheap) for many years now. Windows doesn't come on floppy disks anymore either, technology advances.

Even if technology advances, usage of said technology may not. It's a balancing act, of price vs performance vs max storage vs durability. Just because we have say Ni-MH high storage batteries doesn't mean we've stopped using Lead-Acid for cars. Tape storage is considered old, yet its probably more cost effective per Gig than drives or burning discs. Were floppies improved and adopted more we might still be using them vs thumb drives, and likely the USB standard wouldn't progress quite as quickly as it did.

Personally, max storage is more important than speed of storage. Then again if the games we're talking about weren't so ginormous big this discussion probably wouldn't be happening.

Wouldn't know, all my drives are HDD's. Personally i'd rather have a good ROM/ISO file load that has the base OS that takes say 500Mb, is lean and compressed and copied to ram; And decompresses on the fly depending on what it needs; i'd prefer that over SSD's.

Okay well I play modern games and they work a million times better with an SSD, so...

And i like games like Skyrim to be small enough (even with mods) to copy onto a ram drive, which is faster than an SSD.

On my big PC i do not have to "swap out" games because the entire archive is installed in a fix manner, forever. This indeed will need a lot of SSD space, currently 6 TB is barely sufficient and i still got a PCIE 5.0 slot left for another SSD, so it is safe even in the future.

On a Notebook, i do recommend a 2k USD notebook with a least 1 free M2-slot. Save up your cash and someday you can upgrade this slot with a single 8 TB SSD. This will allow for installing any game and it will still be... far... below 4k USD. Of course a 4 TB SSD may be sufficient for a casual gamer, it depends on your own needs.

In general, if you do not have sufficient cash, the notebook is a bad platform as you may get the same performance on a desktop-PC with half the cash.

No one need to buy a 4k USD Notebook, as the "sweet spot" is about 2k USD. Notebooks below 1k USD usually have a GPU with very low VRAM (4-6 GB), which is a issue on modern games, even at low settings. I think, in order to get at least 8 GB VRAM, the Notebook will be at least 1500 USD... in this range. The main RAM does not matter but you may want 16 GB at least.

10-16 GB DRIVES? Forget it... not even a proper OS can be stored there, except some mobile OS for non gaming purposes. My USB stick got 64 GB and the price was about 10 (yes ten) USD. DO NOT buy notebooks with so few space, it is just not worth it, simply a rip off. Those notebooks will not be offered on the market anymore if people just stop buying it, but as long as they will find a buyer... we never can get ride of ugly stuff.

And please people, you should try to write CORRECT NUMBERS because it gets very confusing if you always make failures with those important numbers.

Neither the game nor the OS are small enough, every single "solution" of you is simply not practical and in any healthy term useless.

However, i am not gonna tell you "how to act" anymore, because this will be your own weird world and you will need to experience all the issues coming out of it... valuable lesson i feel.

I know what works for me, at least, for very good reasons.

You're over-worried about the write limits, which is understandable if you haven't actually used an SSD before. I was worried before I upgraded, especially when they said that a 1TB drive only had a life of 600TBW.

Realistically, even if that 1TB drive is your OS drive and being hammered with temporary files, a normal user isn't going to get anywhere near 600TBW over the same period that you would expect a HDD to last (typically consumer grade HDDs lasted 5-7 years before starting to fail SMART tests and replacement being recommended)

As an example, I have a 1TB WD Black Nvme as a boot drive. I got this drive back in 2019, so it's about 4 1/2 years old. I have written 22TB to it out of a notional limit of 600TBW. However, all internal reporting on the drive is saying that it is still at >99.5% condition.

Even my 1TB Samsung Sata SSD (that I took from a pre-2019 build) and have hammered with an OS on that build and games on this one - is still at 99% of its expected life.

In the time that I have been using that Samsung SSD, I have had one WD Black HDD fail. Of course, my NAS WD Red drives are still going strong after >12 years, but they are only practical for archiving.

tl;dr is that other than in specific use cases, you're never going to hit the write limit before you would usually end up buying a new drive anyway.

I think your explanation of the realistic situation is useless because, people who do not want to hear simply are building their "own world" with their very own truth and usually it may take a long time for making them adapt to the new reality.

Then simply do not use Win 11 and any game in demand of a SSD...

However, the only critical demand is a SSD, Win 10 still works well for any game.

It may be useless, but I thought I'd give him some facts based on my experience just in case.

I generally don't expect anyone to change their views, but if someone is Googling in 6 months "should I upgrade to an SSD - I'm worried about how long they last", that person may come across my post and be reassured.

Anyway, I think I'm done with this thread now - the discussion has looped round on itself again and someone has suggested installing linux, both of which are good signs that the thread isn't going anywhere!

I dont need your empathy Mister. I am fine, dont worry.
As mentionned earlier, BG3 isnt a MUST-have for me. The story seemed interesting so I was considering a purchase. I dont deny being kind of stubborn. I dont like being pushed around or forced into a direction. I can live without BG3. If others cant or desperately want to block 150 GB SSD with BG3 forever, they can do that, no problem. I am not complaining about the requirement, I was like "8 GB RAM and 150 GB SSD, are you kidding me, where did they learn to code?" and wanted to figure it out.

Guess i have to agree... this is simply a topic for the stubborn ones who think they got the freedom to stick to some antique PC forever. It is totally fine but the newest games are tuned with the newest possibilities and demand in mind; because we are moving forward and are enjoying (except the stubborn ones) new technology.

So, it is surely NOT a miracle that most of the newer games may demand a SSD. Yet there is still the option to get a console... with a evil SSD included of course.