I built myself a new PC last year, and it runs fantastically, my only concern is attempting to predict if I will need to upgrade my storage or not.

I'm currently running a SATA SSD that pulls out about 400-500MB/s. I've noticed the improvement in game loading times when playing with my friend who uses a HDD. Because consoles always had HDD's games were always going to be designed with that in mind, and a lot of PC gamers also use huge HDD's to store all of their games on because it's much cheaper. 

Now that XSX is using a 2.4GB/s SSD (not including the PS5 because third party games will not require more than the XSX speed) I feel like in 2022 and onwards just like games have minimum RAM requirements, and GPU/CPU minimum requirements or the game can't be expected to work. I'm predicting 18-24 months from now we'll start to see games with SSD speed requirements for new AAA games and even Indie games that want to be more open and not waste time building in time wasting mechanics to hide loading.

My motherboard does support PCI Gen 3.0 which is perfectly capable of XSX speeds but I'm tempted to go for PCI Gen 4 next year to get an SSD around the 7GB/s range just so that if and when Sony does release PS5 first party titles to PC there won't be any issues in trying to run them.

Have you guys thought about this? Or do you think PC AAA games will be able to run on HDD's for the foreseeable future?

Not anytime soon as I have the 970 Evo plus which can do 3.5 GB/s. I doubt we will see most games being fully built around SSDs for the first couple years.

Not to mention things like DirectStorage and the rumored NvCache and Tensor memory compression technologies with Nvidia's 3000 series might do wonders.

So for me, it will be a wait and see.

I finished my current computer earlier this year and running a Corsair MP600 which is close to 5GB/s. I have no plan to upgrade at the moment but if at anytime I find it has become a bottleneck for me that could change. At this point I think it unlikely it something that will require upgrading for me till at least 2023.

Did not vote in poll because both Gen 4 options says planning on upgrading. I guessing the second to last option was intended to say Not Planning to Upgrade but I wait till it changed before voting.

Whoops, fixed.

Since I use a gaming laptop, I'll 'upgrade' the whole thing when it gets too slow to do what I want to do with it. It mostly depends on how well the next flight simulator runs, as that's what I'm interested in. I'm fine running flight sims at 20-24 fps, my SSD is only small (256GB) but reads up to 2.8 GB/s, the GTX 1060 with 6GB ram will be the bottleneck. 16GB system ram also already feels small now.

Btw load times are still not great, a lot depends on how a game is structured. Tons of tiny files are still a bottleneck for efficient loading of data. Speed drops to as low as 55 MB/s when reading tons of random little files.

I'm planning on upgrading chipset anyway for my 3900x as I'm using a B450 board and looking to upgrade to B550 when that becomes available, which is what's tempting me to go for Gen 4 next year at the same time, the differences are very minimal in day to day tasks but it would help give that peace of mind. 

I'll probably sell my 2070 Super for RTX 3070 if there are enough improvements between the two also. I can't see myself parting with this CPU for a very very long time, though.

I will wait and see for PCie gen 4.0 also new GPU is coming from AMD that utilize HBCC this will be important as SSD .

I'm upgrading this year, not because of the consoles, but because hardware releases finally align properly. I've already been playing on SSDs since before the current console generation so I doubt my new PC will be much of an upgrade in that regard. No gaming PC that has been built in the past 3 years is without SSD and that will continue to be the case during next generation with ever faster and faster SSDs.

However I stand by my prediction that SSDs will not be a minimum requirement for games in the coming years and will still be plenty fine to play without them. SSDs much like a strong GPU and CPU will still be optional and people will still be able to build budget PCs or super machines as much as they want or their budget allows. SSDs will be the least concern for budget builds when it comes to performance/money ratio, though I assume most budget builds will go for them regardless considering the massively dropped prices.

PCIe 4 won't be needed at all in the next 5 years. Neither for graphics cards or SSDs. It's luxury, much like all other PC parts.

You sure as shit aren't going to see minimum requirements that leave 80% of gaming PCs unable to run the games. So, I think your timeline probably needs to slide back about two years.

My PC upgrade is long overdue (mainboard, RAM and CPU are from 2013, PC case + keyboard are from 2007).

When I build a new PC later this year, of course I'll get something faster than my SATA-limited SSDs. Since I'm a data hog, most of my games will stay stored on HDD. Only the games I'm currently playing will be moved/copied on the SSD, probably with a few exceptions of evergreens.