The fact that the game is unplayable on an HDD is really upsetting. That’s it, I can’t form an opinion on the rest because the stuttering is so bad that I cannot play it.

Yeah physical spinning disks haven’t been relevant on mondern systems outside of cold data storage since roughly 2016. Price difference between SSD and HDD are pretty much the same up to the 1-2tb range. Its also listed in the minium requirements for the game.

Think its time for a modern storage medium my dude.

Honestly, I would go as low as 2013. As someone who works in IT, that was about the year all the regular desktop stations basically came with an SSD standard or didn’t really cost much to swap so it was a must. 2016 was more of the move to NVME with M.2 drives.

For myself I believe I made the switch in 2010, once you get a taste of that speed boost it was hard not to justify the extra cost! Wasn’t to bad either if you got small storage to cut cost. I just wanted my OS to load quick.