The faithful HDD has served us well over the years, storing mountains of games, photos, movies, homework and other assorted junk, but several developers have begun the process of transitioning fully to their games requiring an SSD to run.

The news isn’t hugely shocking, of course: the current Playstation 5 and Xbox Series S/X both have solid state drives under the hoods to provide quicker loading times, better texture streaming and a host of other benefits. This and the consistent drop in price for large SSDs means that traditional hard-drives have been getting gradually pushed out because most gamers building a rig now will opt for the fast solid state drives. Hard drives have become more useful as mass storage options for large amounts of files that don’t need to be accessed quickly.

But now, an SSD may be an actual requirement going for, potentially upsetting some folk who are still running their trusty hard drive.

Bethesda is the biggest of the developers who have come forward to say that their games going forward are not going to support the classic platter drives. The official minimum system requirements for Starfield state that an SSD is required, along with 16GB of RAM.

CD Projekt RED then came forward to publish a blog post outlining their plans to update the basic system requirements for Cyberpunk 2077 and the upcoming Phantom Liberty expansion. They explain that the new specifications are “a reflection of our new standard of requirements, which we believe better represent the minimum PC configuration required to run the game at 1080p, while maintaining an average of 30 FPS at low preset.”

“One of the changes is the choice to stop supporting HDDs for the minimum requirements – SSDs offer faster loading times, improved streaming, and better overall performance when compared to HDDs. “ said CD Projekt RED.

Importantly, they do clarify that this does not mean the game will suddenly stop working on hard drives, so don’t panic too much. But it does mean that moving forward, CD Projekt RED will no longer actively support hard drives or even test games on a setup using an HDD.

The changes to Cyberpunk 2077’s base requirements are due to CD Projekt RED upgrading a bunch of things in the game before the Phantom Liberty expansion launches later this year. The alterations seem to be pretty substantial, too, including adding a new ending. I guess I need to get my butt in gear and check out the game in its current state, since the first time I played it there were…problems.

I expect Starfield may be somewhat similar – it probably will run on a HDD, but Bethesda won’t be testing or supporting on anything other than an SSD. In other words, buy and play the game at your own risk if you plan on running it from a hard drive.

There’s also the Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart PC port that’s due to launch in July. When the game hit Playstation 5, Sony and Insomniac heavily pushed the narrative that it needed the console’s nippy SSD to pull off its dimension hopping antics. While there’s certainly been a lot of debate over how accurate these claims were, Sony may very well stick to their guns, in which case even the minimum system requirements will call for an SSD.

That shift is happening quite quickly it seems, though it is hard to find solid data. In 2021, for example, Tom’s Hardware reported that SSDs were outselling hard drives by a ratio of 3:2.

In 2022, it was reported that 92% of all laptops shipped with an SSD as standard, with that number expected to rise to 96% this year. Meanwhile, companies like Seagate and Western Digital saw sales of HDDs continue to drop, both in the commercial and private markets. Seagate, for example, was reported by Trendfocus as seeing a decline of -43.7% -41.7% in HDD sales. In their defense, though, this was largely attributed to a drop in enterprise cloud storage. Sales of HDDs to individuals only went down by single digits.

As the two types of drive get closer and closer in price, the far superior SSD will become the industry standard. A quick look at Amazon shows you can pick up a 1TB SSD for around £45, which is just £5 more than a 1TB hard drive. With those kind of prices, there’s no reason to choose the bulkier, slower hard drive. The exception is when you want far larger storage options. An 8TB HDD from Seagate, for example, can be picked up for £140, whereas an equivalent SSD retails for over £400.

With one of the biggest games of the year and the expansion to Cyberpunk 2077 both calling for an SSD as standard, I think more companies are going to start listing an SSD as required. Indie games may be different, but triple-A titles will shift toward the faster drives as they become the norm. This is the way of technology, after all, but it does mean that inevitably a portion of gamers will be slowly pushed out until they can afford to upgrade.