I know the opposite can be done because I did it just recently.
I have a nearing 10 year old set up from when it still made sense to have a 200gb SSD with a 2tb HDD for games. This hard drive is absolutely struggling with these massive games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk (and Baldur’s Gate 3 has the annoying habit of not waiting for assets to finish loading before playing a cutscene).
I used this thing called bcache to take a 100gb partition of my SSD to automatically cache the most frequented files from the HDD. Even though Baldur’s Gate 3 is 120gbs (which I don’t think it needs to be, I think it’s poorly optimized) it was still enough to mostly get rid of any loading issues.
To make this relevant to your question, you could get a massive cheap but slow hard drive or even an external drive and use something like bcache to get the performance of your internal SSD.
I know the opposite can be done because I did it just recently.
I have a nearing 10 year old set up from when it still made sense to have a 200gb SSD with a 2tb HDD for games. This hard drive is absolutely struggling with these massive games like Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk (and Baldur’s Gate 3 has the annoying habit of not waiting for assets to finish loading before playing a cutscene).
I used this thing called bcache to take a 100gb partition of my SSD to automatically cache the most frequented files from the HDD. Even though Baldur’s Gate 3 is 120gbs (which I don’t think it needs to be, I think it’s poorly optimized) it was still enough to mostly get rid of any loading issues.
To make this relevant to your question, you could get a massive cheap but slow hard drive or even an external drive and use something like bcache to get the performance of your internal SSD.