SSD VS HDD

waseem

waseem

Limp Gawd
Joined
Oct 14, 2008
Messages
421
How much does it affect my performance to INSTALL games on the 260 gig 7200 rpm drive rather than straight onto the SSD (the SSD has the OS installed on it).

Will games still perform better than having the OS installed on the HDD? I'm guessing they would since the OS is on the SSD and general operations (going from memory to hard drive, etc) are going through the solid state drives. Is that correct logic?

The thing that would slow me down would be when the game had to access files from the HDD only?
 
It's preferable to have both your OS and games installed on an SSD. Both benefit from the ultra low latency of SSD's. Store things like pictures, documents, backups, video's, etc. on the HDD because there is very little benefit to having them on an SSD compared to the OS/games.
 
It'll usually just affect load times. Most games are smart enough to not slow you down in game due to the hard drive as they load everything they desperately need at the start, though there are some games that'll stutter a bit when they have to load something new or save a checkpoint (which you can probably alleviate by having you save games located on the SSD). So yeah, it depends on the game. Most games it'll make little to no difference outside of load times (sometimes even there it won't be a big difference), a few games it might reduce stutter or lad while the game loads a new area or such.

I have a 120GB SSD and my games installed to my HDD, if I'm finding its having stuttering issues or bad load times I might move it to the SSD, but honestly the last game I did that for was The Witcher 1 which I played through early last year... all the other games I've played since then it hasn't been worth the bother and they've just stayed on the HDD.
 
SSD all the way.

Just make sure you don't connect an SSD drive to an older SATA 2 Motherboard.
 
Krenum said:
SSD all the way.

Just make sure you don't connect an SSD drive to an older SATA 2 Motherboard.
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Why? I have my SSD plugged into a SATA 2 port in my older mobo. I had plugged it into the SATA3, but it was playing funny buggers and occasionally booting without recognising the drive. Hell, I was running a SATA 3 SSD in my eeepc 1000HA :p
 
It doesn't really matter unless you want big numbers in your benchmarks. For gaming the difference between 300 megs a second and 600 megs a second is absolutely nothing.. the biggest benefit of an SSD is the 0.1 ms access time.
 
For me I like having a lot of games installed so I opted to put my OS on a ssd and my games on a 750gb disk. I still load very fast so no problems
 
the OS being able to load libraries faster with the SSD would not affect your game performance. Although the concept of having a separate HDD for OS and games would ideally be better performance.
 
Dunno how it actually compares since i installed on the SSD straight away, but with all the doors and fast travel i've been going through in Skyrim, it's gotta be helping.

edit: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7yMS5Hb4dv8&t=2m40s
Yeah, six seconds sounds about right. And there's no microstutter that usually happens several seconds after a load.
 
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To actually install a game to the drive? Depends where you're installing from, if it's from optical media for example then chances are it wont be much faster because the bottleneck is the read speed of the optical drive.

The benefit comes from loading data from the SSD/HDD to RAM where the bottleneck is the SSD/HDD, at which point you see huge benefits between the 2, that's primarily going to be in the loading of games, and assets inside games like new levels, and doing save operations back to disk.

*edit*

Oh you mean OS on one drive and game on another. The OS overhead on the storage medium is pretty minimal, you want both the OS and the game installed on the fastest drive, the SSD.
 
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I install OS, APP and Game on SSD. all other stuff on HDD.
once you SSD, you will never go back to HDD.
 
It helps to know which HDD you have, but lets say a 260 gb HDD sounds pretty old and probably has a low platter density. So my guess is it is very slow. The thing is most games load the whole level and everything they need right at the start of a map or save point / transition. So all the time you are really playing the HDD does not matter. However if you are recording demos or the game loads things at other times then you will feel it. Upgrading from a 200 GB HDD that was fairly old to a 640GB WD hard drive I saw a very big reductions in load times and performance when recording demos. Going from the WD hard drive to an SSD I saw the same thing. But if you are looking for value at the end of the day you dont really need the fast storage for games.
 
Cheetoz said:
the OS being able to load libraries faster with the SSD would not affect your game performance. Although the concept of having a separate HDD for OS and games would ideally be better performance.
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It certainly can , in certain games. In MMO games it makes quite a bit of difference. Completely worthwhile. For FPS games? It'll increase your minimum FPS but that's about it (even then its situation dependent).
 
I had a 1.5TB drive and recently got an SSD @ 128GB, I have a few games on the SSD but the rest will go on HDDI wish they all fit in the SSD.
 
Godmachine said:
It certainly can , in certain games. In MMO games it makes quite a bit of difference. Completely worthwhile. For FPS games? It'll increase your minimum FPS but that's about it (even then its situation dependent).
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Not really so. FPS as in Frames Per Second is how fast your graphics card renders the frames. Mostly in games its due to the quality of the graphics card, but when dealing with a MMO game, downloading model information plays a role. Hence in large towns with lots of people you may experience lower FPS, since your game is trying to update and your video card is trying to render more models.
Since we are discussing HDD vs SSD differences, this is negligible. Only when you enter the zone when the game accesses the hard drive/SSD would you see the difference (as in loading the models/terrain), after you load the zone the video card will pull them from memory hence no hard drive.
 
I remember games back in 2006 or so, particularly Oblivion, stuttered a ton, especially if the OS and game was on the same drive. At least in my mind it felt way better when they were on separate drives. I think over the last few years devs have gotten way better at streaming resources in before they are used, so you really don't see HDD stutter anymore. It might still be there if you have little enough memory combined with a slow enough HDD, but if you're considering an SSD, that's not likely the case.

I'd still love to put the top games I play on an SSD, though the OS would by far have priority.
 
Crash250f said:
I remember games back in 2006 or so, particularly Oblivion, stuttered a ton, especially if the OS and game was on the same drive. At least in my mind it felt way better when they were on separate drives. I think over the last few years devs have gotten way better at streaming resources in before they are used, so you really don't see HDD stutter anymore. It might still be there if you have little enough memory combined with a slow enough HDD, but if you're considering an SSD, that's not likely the case.

I'd still love to put the top games I play on an SSD, though the OS would by far have priority.
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Devs have always been pretty good at stopping stutter due to hard drive slow downs, just a few stand outs that fail to do it well.

The hard drive is like the big ugly anchor in a computer, holding everything up, so developers have long known to keep assets that need to be loaded quickly in RAM and not rely on the hard drive to do anything quickly, so while the SSD is leaps and bounds faster than a HDD, most games are already designed to keep the storage media out of the "performance" equation.
 
My 80+ gigabyte super-modded Oblivion game runs much smoother off my SSD. It makes the stutter-remover mod pretty much unnecessary.
 
I bought a 256gb SSD to replace my 120gb so I could put all my games on it. SSD is the only way to go imo. Gave my wife the 120gb SSD and she was like HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO FAST. Love it
 
Rami100735 said:
Not really so. FPS as in Frames Per Second is how fast your graphics card renders the frames. Mostly in games its due to the quality of the graphics card, but when dealing with a MMO game, downloading model information plays a role. Hence in large towns with lots of people you may experience lower FPS, since your game is trying to update and your video card is trying to render more models.
Since we are discussing HDD vs SSD differences, this is negligible. Only when you enter the zone when the game accesses the hard drive/SSD would you see the difference (as in loading the models/terrain), after you load the zone the video card will pull them from memory hence no hard drive.
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And again in MMO games you are constantly caching data so it is quite worth while. In fact short of CPU/GPU/Memory upgrades an SSD can solve many stuttering issues in such games.

And yes I know what Frames Per Second means , this is the [H] forum not the Windows 7 help forum ;) , for FPS games the difference is minor or non-existent. The biggest headache of SSD are its smaller capacity and cost.

If you play MMO's all the time than its a no brainer , if you don't then not really worth it.
 
Godmachine said:
And again in MMO games you are constantly caching data so it is quite worth while. In fact short of CPU/GPU/Memory upgrades an SSD can solve many stuttering issues in such games.

And yes I know what Frames Per Second means , this is the [H] forum not the Windows 7 help forum ;) , for FPS games the difference is minor or non-existent. The biggest headache of SSD are its smaller capacity and cost.

If you play MMO's all the time than its a no brainer , if you don't then not really worth it.
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I have played WoW on a number of different machines and the only time I have encountered suttering is with network connection/shitty graphics card.

It would be hard to just pinpoint the HD.
 
it depends on the game

i have MOBA games on my SSD to try and beat people in load times
i have Battlefield 3 and Skyrim on the SSD because the load times are fairly long
then everything else is on a mechanical drive (borderlands, saints row, & everything else)
 
I would be careful with disk spanning.

First off it makes imaging harder

second off windows performs faster when everything is on one drive.
 
roaf85 said:
I have played WoW on a number of different machines and the only time I have encountered suttering is with network connection/shitty graphics card.

It would be hard to just pinpoint the HD.
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WoW may not be the best source to say. Its old, and it does have some amazingly good streaming data tech in it. almost the only time it loaded was abrupt change from one zone to another which is cased by entering a dungeon within a zone, or getting summoned from another zone. my 640WD black drive, almsot 3 years old, I would beat most poeple inside, and I never see another loading zone again till end of that instance. I could run it on a Ati 4850 512MB card at 1920x1200 with 4x AA on a intel q8200 and get around 25-30 fps. The only time i iddnt run at that graphics option was in Org or Stratholme, or 10/25 raids. And im thinking the only reason then, was becasue of the sheer count of players that increased the graphics memory MB size. I recently upgraded to an ATI 6850 1gb and no longer play wow and havent been able to verify. I quit in dec.2011.

In short, WoW i dont think would benefit from SSD as much as some other MMOS because its old..

Pure and simple, if i had SSD, i think this is what i would do. Put the os on it, and my majorly played games that met certain criteria. Some of the criteria: Does it have lots of loading screens? Does it take forever to load? How often do i play it?

As pointed out by Danith, there is apps if using steam, that will transfer games from regular drive to ssd so you can rotate your games it easily without messing up steam. From what i hear, its pretty awesome.
 
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roaf85 said:
I would be careful with disk spanning.

First off it makes imaging harder

second off windows performs faster when everything is on one drive.
Click to expand...

Does this apply for just apps and games or data and media as well? i.e music movies pictures documents
 
Zohar78 said:
WoW may not be the best source to say. Its old, and it does have some amazingly good streaming data tech in it. almost the only time it loaded was abrupt change from one zone to another which is cased by entering a dungeon within a zone, or getting summoned from another zone. my 640WD black drive, almsot 3 years old, I would beat most poeple inside, and I never see another loading zone again till end of that instance. I could run it on a Ati 4850 512MB card at 1920x1200 with 4x AA on a intel q8200 and get around 25-30 fps. The only time i iddnt run at that graphics option was in Org or Stratholme, or 10/25 raids. And im thinking the only reason then, was becasue of the sheer count of players that increased the graphics memory MB size. I recently upgraded to an ATI 6850 1gb and no longer play wow and havent been able to verify. I quit in dec.2011.

In short, WoW i dont think would benefit from SSD as much as some other MMOS because its old..

Pure and simple, if i had SSD, i think this is what i would do. Put the os on it, and my majorly played games that met certain criteria. Some of the criteria: Does it have lots of loading screens? Does it take forever to load? How often do i play it?

As pointed out by Danith, there is apps if using steam, that will transfer games from regular drive to ssd so you can rotate your games it easily without messing up steam. From what i hear, its pretty awesome.
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Disagree. When I played WoW and got my first SSD, I beat everyone with load times, and whenever I would move to other areas I wouldn't notice any texture pop ins or loading etc. My old Samsung F3 is now in a file server and my SSD beat the SHIT out of it in WoW. I never lagged in any of the major cities at all (with a 4890 at the time) and I could load into dalaran in WOTK days in no time at all. My old roommate who used a good spin hard drive would take 3-4 times longer to load and then you could see all sorts of texture popping and different items in the game loading from the way their caching works out.
 
Langly said:
Disagree. When I played WoW and got my first SSD, I beat everyone with load times, and whenever I would move to other areas I wouldn't notice any texture pop ins or loading etc. My old Samsung F3 is now in a file server and my SSD beat the SHIT out of it in WoW. I never lagged in any of the major cities at all (with a 4890 at the time) and I could load into dalaran in WOTK days in no time at all. My old roommate who used a good spin hard drive would take 3-4 times longer to load and then you could see all sorts of texture popping and different items in the game loading from the way their caching works out.
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Yeah, the load times would be better. But how often does that pan out? The game doesnt flatout load that often and even if you beat people inside, you will still have to wait on them. I didnt lag in major ciites because of hard drive load, just had to cut resolution/aa down because at 1920x1200 4x/8x can take something like 300MBs alone. That doesn't leave much room for anything else with a 512mb card. Also SSD would not give any fps boost. Once it does initial load, it switches to a cpu/gpu load. Its also 22+gb. I think my folder was almost 30GBs. I can see though if you switch characters alot, it could help. WoW is ~7+ years old, and not a graphically intensive or storage intensive game.

Ive been playing Star trek online lately, and due to how "instanced" that game is I would definetely put that on SSD.
 
Langly said:
Disagree. When I played WoW and got my first SSD, I beat everyone with load times, and whenever I would move to other areas I wouldn't notice any texture pop ins or loading etc. My old Samsung F3 is now in a file server and my SSD beat the SHIT out of it in WoW. I never lagged in any of the major cities at all (with a 4890 at the time) and I could load into dalaran in WOTK days in no time at all. My old roommate who used a good spin hard drive would take 3-4 times longer to load and then you could see all sorts of texture popping and different items in the game loading from the way their caching works out.
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I had the same results as you....only I went from 2 gb of ram to 4 gb of ram.

Like I said hard drive is so hard to pinpoint. I was using a old as hell 8 mb 120 gb western digital drive from 2001 and yea I noticed a difference going to a WD 320 gb sata drive, but not like you described. Basically for something like WoW which throughout the years has scaled well I would spend my money into something like Ram vs buying and SSD.
 
B!nd. said:
Does this apply for just apps and games or data and media as well? i.e music movies pictures documents
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I am not sure. I read that somewhere and had a MS rep tell me that once as well. Basically this was before SSDs though. MS would manage the partition table and organize most recently used data in places on the drive where it could access it quickly. Putting applications across multiple drives screws up how MS manages the master partition table, but in days were everything is fast as hell maybe we are talking milliseconds.

The imaging is a better argument. Creating an image and restoring when you have data spread over drives is a hassle.
 
roaf85 said:
I had the same results as you....only I went from 2 gb of ram to 4 gb of ram.

Like I said hard drive is so hard to pinpoint. I was using a old as hell 8 mb 120 gb western digital drive from 2001 and yea I noticed a difference going to a WD 320 gb sata drive, but not like you described. Basically for something like WoW which throughout the years has scaled well I would spend my money into something like Ram vs buying and SSD.
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I already had 6gbs of ram when I upgraded to my SSD. Ram helps a lot in WoW but it doesn't fully take advantage of the amount I could potentially throw at it. The SSD helped with the fast loading of new areas that are being cached on the HD. Being able to have the SSD load those cached files to the RAM or vid memory faster gave me a nice improvement. Not as nice as say getting a brand new high end video card, but a boost nonetheless
 
Langly said:
I already had 6gbs of ram when I upgraded to my SSD. Ram helps a lot in WoW but it doesn't fully take advantage of the amount I could potentially throw at it. The SSD helped with the fast loading of new areas that are being cached on the HD. Being able to have the SSD load those cached files to the RAM or vid memory faster gave me a nice improvement. Not as nice as say getting a brand new high end video card, but a boost nonetheless
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Yea I will agree with that, but the price to performance ratio is probably the worst in favor of the HD in this situation. So much so that I wouldn't recommend it. But SSDs are coming down in price so...
 
roaf85 said:
Yea I will agree with that, but the price to performance ratio is probably the worst in favor of the HD in this situation. So much so that I wouldn't recommend it. But SSDs are coming down in price so...
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$120 for a good SSD with 120gb of space on special atm. Its an upgrade that affects MORE than just games so its worth it IMO. I upgraded to a 256gb ssd and gave my wife the 120gb I had from a long time ago. Her response was HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO FAST. That was just when she was installing programs and opening things. If you can afford $1/gb for an OS/games drive, do it IMO.
 
Langly said:
$120 for a good SSD with 120gb of space on special atm. Its an upgrade that affects MORE than just games so its worth it IMO. I upgraded to a 256gb ssd and gave my wife the 120gb I had from a long time ago. Her response was HOLY SHIT THIS IS SO FAST. That was just when she was installing programs and opening things. If you can afford $1/gb for an OS/games drive, do it IMO.
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No it isn't worth it. I couldn't survive on 120 gb of hard drive space. Even if I offloaded my media files to another 1 TB drive I would still have to then buy a third drive just to back up that media files on the 1 TB drive.
 
SSDs aren't for storing media anyway. Why would that even be a consideration?

You use SSDs for speed and not for storage. That is all.
 
Eisenblut said:
SSDs aren't for storing media anyway. Why would that even be a consideration?

You use SSDs for speed and not for storage. That is all.
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Ok, but you still need to store data on them or is it my assumption is that everyone is just uninstalling and reinstalling games every time they want to play them? SSDs are awesome for storage. They aren't subjected to failures that make hard drives so shitty.

If I had 1 SSD drive for 120 gb and 1 1TB drive for storage then what happens when the storage drive fails?

I would need a 3rd drive to store the storage from my 1TB drive vs just waiting for the price on bigger drives of SSDs to come down.
 
Eisenblut said:
SSDs aren't for storing media anyway. Why would that even be a consideration?

You use SSDs for speed and not for storage. That is all.
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Well it's more like this out of practicality and cost than anything else, some of us have a lot of media we need to store, I have 8Tb of archive space right now which is about 75% full and there's simply no option to put that on SSD, as much as I'd like to.

My 120Gb SSD is for the OS, for apps, game and anything else that benefits from the fast access times. Doing something like watching a bluray image doesn't need a SSD just watch from a regular spindle drive, so that can sit in the archive array.

It's funny, with the hefty price of some SSDs, it can cost more to actually store a whole game of something like 22Gb for rage, than it actually does to buy the game in the first place :)
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Well it's more like this out of practicality and cost than anything else, some of us have a lot of media we need to store, I have 8Tb of archive space right now which is about 75% full and there's simply no option to put that on SSD, as much as I'd like to.

My 120Gb SSD is for the OS, for apps, game and anything else that benefits from the fast access times. Doing something like watching a bluray image doesn't need a SSD just watch from a regular spindle drive, so that can sit in the archive array.

It's funny, with the hefty price of some SSDs, it can cost more to actually store a whole game of something like 22Gb for rage, than it actually does to buy the game in the first place :)
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+1 agree with all points.
 
PrincessFrosty said:
Well it's more like this out of practicality and cost than anything else, some of us have a lot of media we need to store, I have 8Tb of archive space right now which is about 75% full and there's simply no option to put that on SSD, as much as I'd like to.

My 120Gb SSD is for the OS, for apps, game and anything else that benefits from the fast access times. Doing something like watching a bluray image doesn't need a SSD just watch from a regular spindle drive, so that can sit in the archive array.

It's funny, with the hefty price of some SSDs, it can cost more to actually store a whole game of something like 22Gb for rage, than it actually does to buy the game in the first place :)
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Yep +1 again completely agree with you.

I have a 2tb raid 5 array on my HTPC I store important things on. I have a 2 tb drive en route to backup that array and put in a safety deposit box as well as uploading the important documents to Amazon's cloud. They will be fully encrypted though when I send them to amazon.

Needless to say, I am a firm believer that SSD drives are AMAZING for an OS/Game drive. I was a skeptic before I made the upgrade and now I am a believer. PRAISE TEBOW... I mean... Cthulu!
 
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