Forza Horizon 6 file size revealed, sparking debate over whether HDDs still have a place in modern gaming

Information is starting to surface about the much-anticipated Forza Horizon 6 ahead of its May 19th launch. Recently, Forza Horizon 6 went gold, and several other details regarding its map, city size, and Japan's density also leaked. Now, more information has come out regarding the upcoming game, but this time it requires a deeper discussion.

According to a blog post, Forza Horizon 6 is now available to preload ahead of its launch, revealing the game's size. Evidently, the file sizes of Forza Horizon 6 are absolutely gargantuan, and you may need to clear up some space on your drive for this game. The blog states that the game requires 135 GB of space on the Xbox Series X, 130 GB on the Xbox Series S, and a whopping 160 GB on PC.

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The file sizes were further corroborated by a Reddit post on the Forza Horizon subreddit, which revealed the exact sizes via the Xbox phone app: 144.84 GB for the Xbox Series X|S and 156.65 GB on PC. Furthermore, the Forza blog says that an SSD is mandatory for this game, which could mean there's a potential performance dip if you run the game from a hard drive.

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This is where the discussion point comes in. With game sizes reaching this ridiculous size, do hard drives still have a place in today's PC gaming landscape? Given the current DRAM and NAND shortages, which have slowly but surely affected SSDs as well, it may get quite expensive to go full solid-state for a new build. Perhaps, with recent price hikes for storage drives, hard drives might be poised to make a comeback just to house these enormous games.

This view was shared by redditor Kingsays on the aforementioned Reddit thread, who said that building a PC nowadays with anything below a 2TB drive is obsolete. A reply from nine16s states that they have 8TB of storage, and still, that feels too little. In the current market, getting 8TB or even 4TB of solid-state storage for modern games might just get too expensive for the average gamer, which is where they might have to resort to hard drives.

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Not to mention, game file sizes increase over time with updates and game progression. Forza Horizon 5 was launched at 103 GB (still huge), and currently sits at around 150 GB. It's not just Forza; other games are following the same pattern. Crimson Desert (2026) is around 120-130 GB, WWE 2K26 (2026) can occupy up to 150 GB, and who knows what kind of requirements GTA 6 will eventually launch with. A 1TB SSD ($150-250) can fill up quickly with just 2-3 games.

While hard drives might just be too far gone to make a real comeback, it will be interesting to see how game file sizes evolve over time. Forza Horizon 6 is set to launch on May 19th, 2026, but users who pre-ordered the Premium Edition will get early access on May 15th. A PlayStation 5 port is also set to launch later this year.