How well does ESO run on a HDD?

Narvuntien · May 19

I don't have enouhg space on my SSD for FH6 so I am thinking I can free up the space I need moving ESO to my HDD, how well does it run?

zaria · May 19

I say it depend a lot on how much memory you have. This is because memory act as disk cache.
People who get long loading screen going in an out of buildings like banks has very little memory.
Less than 16 GB and you get problems. I has 64 GB and I did not notice any improvements moving ESO on a SSD

freespirit · May 19

I had to move my install to my HDD when my SSD ran out of space, I've not noticed any difference.

Only thing I would say though it went from a too full SSD to a virtually empty HDD. 🙂

Edit to add:- Very old PC in general now, have 32gb Ram though.

Gabriel_H · May 19

The only "issue" you will run into is there will be a small rendering delay of a few seconds when you first login. If you can keep your addon folder on your SSD do so. It will shorten load screen times.

Marto · May 19

I run it on an 8 year old 7200rpm HDD. It runs well on 90% of occasions. The only exceptions I've encountered are:

Big cities where a lot of players port in and out. All those motifs and outfits tend to slow things down.
Combat encounters with 20+ players, like World Bosses during events or the Night Market. Even after upgrading my CPU, my framerate drops a lot. I suspect this is caused by my hard drive, but I'd need to do more testing to confirm.
Old DLC zones (Thieves Guild, Dark Brotherhood, Orsinium, Summerset). Something about how ZOS coded and optimized textures back then causes city geometry to load very slowly. If I teleport to Hew's Bane and walk with my mount to the bank, not even a full sprint, the entire building is still a block, and will take 10-30 seconds to load. This is not at all a problem in newer zones, thankfully.

If you really can't afford the space on your SSD, I say go for it. ESO runs pretty well.

Tandor · May 19

In my experience (since launch), extra RAM is far more critical to performance than upgrading from HDD to SSD.

Necrotech_Master · May 20

in terms of general gameplay there should be minimal to no difference, the only bigger difference i noticed was on the loading screens, loading screens are significantly longer on a slow HD compared to an SSD

other graphical object loading may also be slower (such as loading into populated towns)

Narvuntien · May 20

I tried to move it across using steam but it didn't work because of the launcher. how would I keep my add-ons separate from my game files?

Estin · May 20

It's not terrible, but it's not great. A couple of years ago I was still playing on a regular HDD and every day that I logged in, I had to wait at least 1 minute for everything to load when I walked into a city. NPCs will be invisible and couldn't be interacted with, and all players will have a black character model. After everything loaded, it was fine for the rest of time playing with the only negative thing being long load screens.

zaria · May 20

Note that if not on an laptop you can usually get used small and very cheap SATA SSD. An 256 GB ssd will handle ESO and some other games. You can also get expansions cards for a couple of M2 drives for $20.

zaria · May 20

Estin wrote: »

It's not terrible, but it's not great. A couple of years ago I was still playing on a regular HDD and every day that I logged in, I had to wait at least 1 minute for everything to load when I walked into a city. NPCs will be invisible and couldn't be interacted with, and all players will have a black character model. After everything loaded, it was fine for the rest of time playing with the only negative thing being long load screens.

How much memory did you have? Including graphical one. An one minute load is insane.

On an side note TES 4 Oblivion was designed to run only from the DVD with no disk on the 360.
They had to cut content and voice lines as it would require an second DVD.
Now that feels like an loading screen nightmare.
Did anybody played Oblivion on an 360 without and HD?

Necrotech_Master · May 20

Narvuntien wrote: »

I tried to move it across using steam but it didn't work because of the launcher. how would I keep my add-ons separate from my game files?

addons are already separate from the game files

the addons are stored in the Documents/Elder Scrolls Online/live folder which is usually in your user directory

the game can be installed pretty much anywhere (C drive, any other drive being used for storage, etc)

so if you move the games install location, it shouldnt affect addons at all

Freelancer_ESO · May 21

I play on a HDD every day.

It generally works fine. For stuff like dungeons, I feel like I load in maybe 5- 10 seconds behind other people while also having minor things besides ESO running.

I would note that your load screens can get quite bad if the other things running on your system start to use lots of hard disk resources.

For example, if I am on ESO and have my launcher for ESO up and the PTS starts installing an update having a load screen that takes over a minute will be the norm until it gets done.

Estin · May 21

zaria wrote: »

Estin wrote: »

It's not terrible, but it's not great. A couple of years ago I was still playing on a regular HDD and every day that I logged in, I had to wait at least 1 minute for everything to load when I walked into a city. NPCs will be invisible and couldn't be interacted with, and all players will have a black character model. After everything loaded, it was fine for the rest of time playing with the only negative thing being long load screens.

How much memory did you have? Including graphical one. An one minute load is insane.

On an side note TES 4 Oblivion was designed to run only from the DVD with no disk on the 360.
They had to cut content and voice lines as it would require an second DVD.
Now that feels like an loading screen nightmare.
Did anybody played Oblivion on an 360 without and HD?

It was 2 years ago, so I had a 3070 and 32GB RAM which was more than enough for ESO. The city that was loading in was rawlkha and it always took a minute for NPCs to load in on first time boot. As soon as I moved the game over to SSD, all of the issues went away.