Is it a difference if D4 is installed on a ssd drive or on a regular one ?
I’m right now at the decision of making space on my ssd and would really like to know if it’s a must ?
Greetings SoulScar,
An SSD is listed as a minimum requirement for Diablo IV here, so I would strongly suggest to make space on your SSD. If you try to launch the game from an HDD most likely it will not launch at all, or if it does the performance will be very bad.
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Hmm! Requirements theses days. Just to point out the additional info listed in the linked item;
** Diablo IV will attempt to run on hardware below minimum specifications, including HDDs, dual-core CPUs, and Integrated GPUs. However, the game experience may be significantly diminished.
The HDD / SSD thing is important in that, generally speaking, an SSD provides greater access speeds than HDD and this can / will help with the loading of assets for example. This is not to say the game will not work with HDD! I’m sure a large portion of D4 players on PC will be using PC rigs that have the game installed on HDD and will enjoy the game with little or no real issue. We have to take the other specifications of those PC rigs into consideration of course.
So! Generally; using SSD is better than HDD. If using HDD it should be good enough but remember that the rest of the PC rig needs to be up to the job.
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You could also look into external ssds, that could solve your issue.
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Its a large open world game, if your happy with rubber banding and the game stuttering and lagging out while it loads large several gigabyte areas to vram and system memeory from a HDD at 150mb/s then power to you.
Any system this day and age that only has a HDD was due decommission if non-upgradable about a decade ago.
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Yeah! There may well be problems using HDD. This is not to say game will be entirely unplayable. The real issue is not just the use of HDD but the likelyhood that systems with HDD are likely to be older and likely much less powerful than modern builds. As will be known by many; CPU. GPU and memory all play a very large part in the equation. That noted; some modern builds still use HDD and have modern games on HDD.*
Of course SSD will be better. However, if the rest of the system is up to the job then the game will probably be playable from HDD - just with likely problems such as listed by @FastTrakz-2757.
*I’m lucky in that my laptop uses M2 drives and plays the game [server slam] really well. My desktop has a variety of HDD, SSD and M2 internally. Yes! Games go on SSD [usually M2]- as they do work better that way.
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While I agree that SSD is the best option for performance, I find it very sad you misinform people with a “most likely it will not launch at all”.
For sure, both patching & game loading take longer on HDD compared to SSD, but even with an HDD the loading screen when entering in a dungeon isn’t so slow (often I couldn’t completly read the hint written at the bottom of the screen, for example, compared to WoW area switching using a boat’s load screens, D4 area switching load screen is a lot faster!).
I played both March betas and also the slam beta in May, with Diablo IV installed on a good old HDD, and it was working perfectly (for sure again, a longer loading than it would be with an SSD).
If OP’s available space on his SSD is a problem, he can install the game on his HDD (and if he really feels the loading is too long, when he can afford buying a larger SSD, he would have the possibility to move the D4 folder from the HDD to the SDD & for safety use the “check and repair” procedure).
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Thx for the replies , i made space on my ssd , apparently u can uncheck some of the graphic stuff which is like 40gigas , and full version was like 84 .
We talk based on our minimum requirements and depending on how slow the Hard Drive is due to age, fragmentation, etc, the loading may just take too long and will crash during loading. We can’t predict what will happen when playing on systems below minimum spec, we just give the information, what can happen if not playing on the minimum requirements.
Please keep in mind, that this may lock you out of higher resolutions and quality settings.
I’m full aware , my graphics isn’t that good , on server slam and beta i was on medium/minimum anyways 
Thank you Dresiaron for your answer.
Regarding fragmentation, as far as I know, Windows 10 is set to automatically analyze and optimize HDD once a week so it should prevent most of the extreme slowing issues caused by a very deeply fragmented partition, furthermore I have great doubt any gamer would have an HDD in the 1200-4200 RPM (or even maybe 5400 RPM) range. The very old disks probably aren’t even allowing to store the 50~85 GB required by Diablo IV. Yetn there is a great difference between the “Diablo IV will attempt to run on hardware below minimum specifications, including HDDs, dual-core CPUs, and Integrated GPUs. However, the game experience may be significantly diminished.” sentence from Blizzard Support - Diablo® IV System Requirements and your collegue’s sentence that has saddened me.
The main (unpredictable?) issues about systems below minimal recommandations are probably those linked to too much RAM, slow CPU / GPU.
Another thing that saddened me too was the official claim (was it on twitter?) the retail client was totally different from beta, as if it would have been the case for example, if in between the storage system was completely changed, making it totally uncompatible ; it caused millions of people deleting their beta files & redownloading them from scratch which is totally unresponsable towards global warming (and probably costs you more money by the way, if you have to pay for the used bandwidth, isn’t it?) and also may be problematic for those with very slow internet connection and/or monthly quota ; and once again, if fragmentation may be at some level a concern (for HDD), deleting & downloading again isn’t solving anything & weekly Windows 10 automated maintenance would anyway fix the potential issue. Someone who for example has downloaded World of Warcraft PTR prior to having bought the most recent expansion for example isn’t instructed to first delete anything, the Battle.net client reuses all the common assets and deletes the old unused data, this works well for WoW & in fact worked the exact same way between both D4 March beta, and the May beta slam client (& now the retail client, unfortunately it wasn’t made build-in & easy to proceed but it clearly could have been easily done on your side, please make a note to developpers about this, so the mistake won’t be done again, given it’s causing such a huge waste of energy/bandwidth/global warming contribution, thanks).
The last think that saddens me is that the installation process is a bit misconceived for the case of a partition with only 50~80 GB free (instead of being locked, people would have automatically the high-res textures unchecked). It is very likely that people with low disk space don’t have anyway a high end CPU/GPU required to comfortably play the game with 2K/4K ultra settings. It would have been pretty logical to pair the high-res texture with the matched CPU/GPU/RAM requirements and it’s pretty easier to manage an “add more download” rather than sort of a “substractive” logic.
Regards,
MGLiquid
How about you bore a customer service representative with a support ticket with these mundane issues you have chose to pour so much energy into if you really need to get it out of your system.
Realistically no one really cares, all your issues affect a tiny tiny fraction of the player-base who were hanging in there by a thread in regards to compatibility and service they are capable of receiving even before the game was a thing.
And to start corelating having to download the game to the environment and global warming… I’m out 
HDD reading assets with multiple queues, all files fragmented, system doing other things in the background, and 150 MB/s rate? That would be very optimistic, and more realistic value is under 100 MB/s. So, 5 GB of textures meaning one minute of load time.
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I was using best case scenario, I have a 8TB HDD for cold storage of games and backups and that’s about the best it reads at when after its defragged, so I used that in my example.
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That’s a valid example. But many fragmented and battered HDDs in people’s machines will be well under 50 MB/s. It’s actually reasonable that Blizzard said this is not supported. Otherwise they would have people moaning all the time that their machine meets the required specs but its lagging and loading maps for one minute at a time.
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