Is the SSD drive requirement for the upcoming UE5 version a hard requirement? I have an ssd for windows but it’s storage is too small to put anything else on it. I have no idea when I’ll be able to get a new computer. The current one is too old to waste money on upgrading it.
this was answered on discord from ScottB at Inflexion:
“As far as on hdd’s, that’s untested grounds for us and I’m guessing we’ll hear some interesting stories from folks running on a wide range of hardware. We don’t have any hard checks for an SSD.”
Thanks, that makes me a little less concerned. Hopefully it won’t be that much of an issue.
Why wouldn’t it run on an HDD?
I mean it’s just ROM, SSD is faster but that is the only difference.
Note: my PC is 6 years old, I have no intention of buying the new spyPCs, when I can I’ll be upgrading my HDD to SSD and my 1060 to what I can afford when I can afford it.
OFF topic rant, but IMCO new PCs come with preinstalled Microsoft spyware you can not shut off, a special AI system constantly looking over you shoulder. That is what the W11 exertion date check is all about, older PCs can’t run W11 spy AI.
If you’re going to go full conspiracy mode… you can still lobotomize the registry to fix things.
I’m simply not going to be forced to buy a new PC that I don’t need to run something I will never use because some one needs to feed a bubble.
I wish I could simple strip everything away from windows that isn’t part of it being an OS.
I suspect that the recommendation for an SSD is for the faster read/write speeds. If the one of the ways they are reducing the installed size from 120 to 40 GB is by using UE5’s compression features, the faster read/write of an ssd will reduce any access load times that you might run into with an HDD.
You can get external ssds that you could use to free up space on your main drive. Prices aren’t what they were, but still somewhat better than the increases you see in dRAM or video cards.
Also keep in mind that the installed size of the game is going to be reduced by 80GB, so hopefully that will help with your space crunch. I know I’ll be looking forward to having that extra free space 
I played the last weekend of the test and I played on HDD. The loading times were longer when using things like a portal etc but besides that I did not experience a problem.
I did not get in the top dungeons but the Dregs and Midnight Grove played like normal.
Also there were no fully decorated 6+ map grids spanning castles on the server so I don’t know what would happen if you encounter something like that.
Be careful what you say, you may still be under NDA.
That is why I did not say anything about what I saw in the test itself just my setup. When content creators can talk about being in the test without their content being taken down I should be ok as long as I do not spoil things.
Can’t wait for the 5th though!
As most current gaming rigs use SSDs, they probably just have too little test data to say it’s okay with a classical HDD. But that, of course, doesn’t mean it won’t run on a HDD - they just haven’t tested it.
The game will run better from a SSD, but at least to try it out, it should be perfectly okay to use a HDD. The game is eight years old, and all the data was apparently optimized a lot, which should help with load times from the software side. You don’t need a rocket ship to run this.