Is a HDD still useful for gaming in 2025?

depends entirely on the game, how it loads stuff and how big the stuff is.

100 GB openworld game? HDD probably is going to struggle with the asset loading, probably leading to stuttery gameplay or very noticeable pop-in

<10GB game with closed arenas/levels? Probably loads everything at the start of the level, might take slightly longer on HDD, but probably doesn't make any difference after that.

I was playing Layers of Fear but noticed very occasional stutters when entering new areas, especially when certain visual effects appear on screen. I'm thinking it's probably just a bad port. Otherwise, very playable. If you're not familiar it's a Unity game from 2016. In general I've had good luck running indie games on a HDD.
- I've heard the game's name, but otherwise not familiar with it at all. The stutter could be some kind of dynamic shader compilation too, who knows.

Yeah, as long as you're not too concerned about load time, then an old HDD is still fine.

I'm an addict. I have a ton of games on my computer. I have 4 NVMe drives and that isn't enough to hold all my games. So I have smaller indie games and older games like L4D2 on my old school 4TB HDD. No ragrets.

Some indie games and AAA games from 10 years ago should be fine.

That being said, SSD costs are low enough these days that you should be able to play off an SSD.

Yeah I know, thing is I have a lonely, sad 1TB HDD from 2008 that somehow still works and I thought it would be a shame to not game with it. I want it to spend its final years gaming with me. I know, I'm weird. Once it dies, I'l probably get a SATA SSD. I have an M.2 SSD but it's almost full.
- I'd use it for data storage. Movies, games, backups.

I use HDD for those <5GB sized games which hasn't failed me yet.

I mean it'll work but you'll have significantly longer loading times.

HDDs don't usually affect the performance of a game or how it operates so they're fine even for newer games, the only thing it'll change is that you'll have significantly slower loading times

That's not always the case. Some games stream in assets as you play so you might get bad pop-in or freezes. Forza Horizon 5 was nearly unplayable on an HDD for me, because the map couldn't load in fast enough while driving quickly. No issues after reinstalling it on an SSD.
- I heard Subnautica runs like ass on a HDD. I haven't tested it myself though.
- Lots of people did (and still do) play Forza on an Xbox one which uses an HDD, and back when I did as well the game ran just fine
- Young me got that lesson when trying to play ARMA 2 on a 5400RPM HDD. It would run 60FPS if I didn't move but as soon as I started moving the game started stuttering. When I installed it on a 7200RPM HDD the game no longer had any performance issues.
  
  It all comes down to what specs the game was designed for and I imagine most modern open world games are designed for SSD-s. Putting them on HDDs will absolutely have a negative effect.

You can move things to and from different drives in the steam settings pretty easily, so in the past I used to archive larger games I was not playing to a large HDD on my system to avoid having to download it all again.

When I wanted to play again I moved it back to my SSD.

On Linux, I find that games run great from a mechanical drive. Loading times are slower than with an SSD, of course, but not enough to bother me.

Sounds good to me. Not that it matters but which distro do you use?
- I use Debian.

I play pretty much all my games from a HDD. I once moved Control (2019) and DMC5 (2018) to my SSD, barely any difference. though i suspect it would probably have a bigger impact with recent games.

Have you tested Control with the most recent update? I think minimum system requirements went up.

Personally I use my hard drive for storing large games that I'm not actively playing (to be moved back to an SSD when I do), small games (<15GB) where the load times won't be super long, games with distinct levels with loading screens (hard drives suck for open-world games that stream in assets during play), and games that are just too stupidly large to comfortably fit on my SSD (like freaking ARK, which takes up several hundred gigabytes with the DLC installed).

One thing I haven't seen mentioned is that the delta-patching used by Steam's updater can take ages on a hard drive due to all the random read-writes. Small games (a few gigabytes) can be uninstalled and redownloaded in less time than it'd take to update them. I would avoid putting games that update frequently on your hard drive for this reason.

I used to do that. But then I realized it was faster to redownload than copy over from my HDD. I have gigabit fiber internet though.

Edit: I had a really crappy HDD though
- Much faster, yes. Unfortunately a lot of people have monthly bandwidth caps and a single game could take up a huge chunk of that, so better safe than sorry!
  
  I have a 1TB/month download cap, after which speed is throttled to nearly nothing until the next billing cycle. With several people using the same connection it's hard to know how much we have left, and redownloading a 250GB game could easily push us over.

I would at least take SATA SSD nowadays as it's pretty cheap but honestly I can't see myself go back to SATA after having enjoyed M.2 SSDs for years now.

If you want 8TB of storage I can see why HDD would be great but for 2TB or less SSD are accessible if not cheap.

I don’t like putting games on my ssds, just a waste of space to me

Yup, I have a 500gb HDD for Steam Games, loading screens are a few seconds longer than you would expect but that just makes time for a beer break.

Old games and indie are mostly fine. Anything newer or open world and you'll need a SSD or a level 2 cache at least. NOTE: this only applies to CMR hard disks, SMR hard disks are unusable.

I still run a lot of my games off of spinning rust. Boot times are a little bit longer, but at least i can store a ton of games.

I use a 5TB array of old HDDs for my gaming rig set up with LVM for expandability and raid 0 style striping for speed.

The longest game for me to load is Risk of Rain 2 coming in at about 3 minutes from launch to main menu, even cp2077 only takes about 2 minutes from launch to "in game".

The thing you'll notice most is your drives will slow down significantly as you start to fill them up, it takes longer to read data from the outside of an HDD than the center.

The advice part: Git you a couple high rpm high capacity HDDs, set em up in raid 10, have fun!

Are you asking from a technical aspect, or a financial one?

The former is like asking if you should make roundtrips from unoptimized unorganized cargo to organize to your sorter, to then build a map. Solid states have the exact advantage of having an inboard CPU to organize the assets as you play, so it's presorted data so the CPU only has to build your map. This is also accounting parallel cell fetching, which HDDs can't do.

Financially, nothing will ever beat magnetic tapes. But 3-2-1 storage requires you to burn to somewhere.

The short answer is yes. A high rpm HDD like a Western Digital Black or a Seagate Barracuda will game just fine. Obviously your performance will vary depending on the game but it’s never going to be unplayable. Faster load times are nice but I have never seen a load screen take longer than a 30 ish seconds at most, even on newer titles.

SSD is crazy cheap these days. I will never go back. 5 second loading times plus all the other tasks are easily 10x faster.

on Linux you can get away with it if you have enough ram.