Can You Run Starfield on an HDD?

Starfield, Bethesda’s space-based action/RPG lists, as one of its requirements, an SSD drive. And if you’ve got a reasonably recent gaming computer, chances are you’ll already have one. But what all you have is a regular hard drive? You might be wondering: Can I run Starfield on an HDD? Here’s the answer.

How Starfield Runs on an SSD

The answer is, yes, Starfield will run on an HDD. At no point during the installation process or during the game itself will Starfield complain that, or even remind you, it’s been installed on an HDD. So, it will run on an HDD. The problem is, it’ll run badly.

Playing off an HDD, you’ll not just encounter longer load times, you’ll have the game pausing mid-play, sometimes for seconds at a time. That’s the problem I ran into when I was running the game off HDD. I bought an SSD drive, transferred the game to it, and those problems went away.

I still had to deal with my graphics card not being up to scratch, but the sudden pauses went away. You don’t have to install every one of your games on an SSD, either. You can buy a cheaper SSD (I paid around $50 for a 500GB SSD) and just install Starfield on that.

So the answer to can you run Starfield on an HDD is yes  You can run the game, but it will pause so much that it’ll become painful to play. And if you’re wondering what the rest of the game’s PC requirements are, here’s what you need to know.

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