Best Hard Drives to Unlock First in Satisfactory

A hard drive scan offers you a small set of alternate recipes and you pick one. The others are not lost forever, but the choice shapes the next several hours, and in multiplayer it is a decision made on behalf of everyone.

How the scan actually works

Find a hard drive at a crash site, bring it to the MAM, scan it. The scan takes a fixed 10 minutes, and when it finishes you are offered two alternate recipes. You pick one; it unlocks permanently for the save.

Four mechanics matter more than the recipe list itself:

You get a free reroll. Each hard drive can be rerolled once, showing two different options. That is four unique recipes visible from a single drive, and the reroll does not consume the drive. If neither option appeals, rerolling costs you nothing but time.

You do not have to choose immediately. If neither pair appeals, leave it. The selection stays accessible later through the Hard Drive Library, so an unwanted offer is deferred rather than wasted.

Storing drives in the library narrows the pool. Rewards do not repeat, so every drive sitting unclaimed in your library removes its two options from what future scans can offer. Holding a few drives makes the next scan more likely to show something you actually want — a genuinely useful piece of strategy that most players never discover.

Only one drive can be researched at a time. Building a second MAM does not let you scan in parallel. With 10 minutes per drive, acquiring drives faster than one per 10 minutes builds a backlog rather than speeding things up.

In multiplayer the unlock applies to the whole save, so whoever is at the MAM is choosing for the group. Agree who does research before someone takes an option nobody wanted.

The ones worth taking early

The pattern that makes an alternate valuable early is simple: it reduces the raw ore behind something you are already making in quantity. Ranked by how much that matters in the first dozen hours:

Coated Iron Plate. Iron plate is in almost everything, and this cuts the raw ore per plate from 1.5 to 0.65 — a 57% reduction — by trading part of the iron for plastic. It also produces 75/min per Assembler against the standard recipe’s 20/min per Constructor. The catch is that it needs oil, so it only helps once you have a refinery running.

Cast Screws and Steel Screws. Screws are the classic early bottleneck: the standard chain wastes an enormous amount of throughput on a low-value part. Either alternate removes most of that pain.

Solid Steel Ingot. Steel is the wall most players hit around Tier 3, and recipes that make steel cheaper compound through everything above it.

Recycled Rubber and Recycled Plastic. These come later, but they are the largest single ore reduction available — roughly 75% against the base recipes — and they convert surplus of one into the other, which solves the oil byproduct problem at the same time.

The ones that look good and are not

Anything requiring a resource you have not unlocked. An alternate using Caterium or Aluminium is worthless until you have a supply. It stays in the pool; take it later.

Anything that increases building count for marginal gain. Some alternates trade fewer raw materials for considerably more machines and power. Whether that is a win depends entirely on whether ore or space is your constraint at the time.

Alternates for parts you rarely make. A better recipe for something you produce twenty of is not worth a hard drive.

The one rule that decides most cases

Take the alternate that reduces ore behind the thing you are currently short of.

Not the theoretically best recipe, not the one with the biggest percentage on paper — the one that unblocks what you are stuck on right now. Early that is usually iron and screws. Around Tier 4 it becomes steel. Later it becomes oil products.

The comparator on this site ranks every recipe for an item on raw ore per unit, power per unit, and throughput, so you can check a specific choice against the alternatives before committing.

Finding hard drives

There are 118 crash sites in the world, each holding one hard drive — so 118 drives exist in a save, and no more. Opening a pod usually requires repairing it with some quantity of a part, often something you have to bring with you.

They do not respawn. In multiplayer, a site your partner already opened is empty for you. Crash sites can be located with the Object Scanner once you have researched it, which turns hunting them from wandering into a directed activity.

Practical approach: mark crash sites as you find them rather than detouring immediately. Many require parts you cannot make yet, and a marked site you return to later costs far less than a wasted trip now.

What to do with a bad offer

If the two recipes on offer are both useless to you:

Reroll first. It is free and shows two different options.

If all four are useless, leave it unclaimed. The Hard Drive Library holds the selection for later, and an unclaimed drive narrows the pool for your next scan. This is strictly better than forcing a choice.

Take something usable over something theoretically better. A recipe for a resource you have not unlocked does nothing today.

Common mistakes

Not using the free reroll. Every drive rerolls once at no cost, doubling what you see from two options to four.

Taking alternates for resources you do not have yet. They stay in the pool. Take something usable now.

Forcing a choice from a bad offer. The Hard Drive Library holds it for later, and an unclaimed drive narrows the pool so the next scan is more likely to be useful.

Building a second MAM to scan faster. Only one drive researches at a time regardless of how many MAMs you have.

Scanning without agreeing who chooses in multiplayer. The unlock applies to the whole save.

Chasing the biggest percentage. The right alternate is the one that unblocks your current bottleneck, not the one with the best number on a tier list.