• Some users have recently had their accounts hijacked. It seems that the now defunct EVGA forums might have compromised your password there and seems many are using the same PW here. We would suggest you UPDATE YOUR PASSWORD and TURN ON 2FA for your account here to further secure it. None of the compromised accounts had 2FA turned on.
    Once you have enabled 2FA, your account will be updated soon to show a badge, letting other members know that you use 2FA to protect your account. This should be beneficial for everyone that uses FSFT.

Any performance difference by installing a game to a second drive?

S

spaceman

[H]F Junkie
2FA
Joined
Jan 7, 2005
Messages
14,959
I have an old 74gb raptor as C: and a 1tb WD Black drive as E:. I just installed the Witcher 2 onto the E: and it works fine.

I want to install BFBC2 onto the E: also but am afraid of losing ANY performance for multiplayer. Is it safe?
 
I have a 250GB SSD as my OS Drive and all my games are on a 1TB 7200rpm drive. Run just fine.
 
Your load times depend on the speed of the drive the game is installed on, not on whether or not it's installed to the same drive as your OS. Realistically, you probably won't see a difference between your two drives.
 
You'll be ok.

As I understand it, games are rather sequentially written/read. A blazing fast drive just isn't going to be appreciably faster at loading games/maps because of how they are written to the drive, simply not room for improvement as it's being read nearly as fast as possible.

Something like the operating system, temporary files, etc. that are heavily fragmented across the drive see a huge boost in performance on an SSD or Raptor.

Even on a meager rig (Q6600, 4GB, and a 5850) I'm usually in the top 2 or 3 people first in a game, and that's using a 640GB Caviar Black drive. When loading games from my SSD, the results are the same, usually 2nd or 3rd in.

The only way I could see using some SSD RAID array and appreciate the few % performance gain would be if you play professionally or just have assloads of cash to blow. If the latter is the case, send me some.
 
That is great. The raptor loads faster and is easier to keep nice and clean.

I actually do play for cash and prizes. Not often but yeah. I actually have made money and won parts playing the BF series. This old raptor has served me well enough but if getting another one for some cheap raid action would help even 5%, I might bite. As is, the system runs great. I got a 2500K and a nice galaxy 480gtx soc ($235 new! ty galaxy). With my latest install, Witcher 2 runs butter as does bfbc2 at 2048X1536.

No complaints then. If there is anything I can do to tweak the OS or anything else to get my latency down in bfbc2, please point me there. I have done all of the things I can think of but there is always something else right?
 
If your raptor loads faster but you're worried about space, you could try installing to the secondary drive and then moving game folders onto the raptor and use symbolic links, then when you're done with the game move the files back to the secondary drive and delete the symlinks.

That's what I did with TW1, installed to my HDD but copied the game files to my SSD and used symlinks, massively dropped load times.

The other thing you can do, if you have enough RAM, is create a RAMdisk and do the same, install to a HDD, copy some files to the RAMdisk and create symbolic links. I also tried this with TW1 and it further improved load times... but it wasn't really worth the effort as I typically switch off my computer so had to reload the RAMdisk too often.

That'll most likely just improve your load times and not actual in game performance (I can't say for sure in BFBC2 as I've never tried it... some games definitely smooth out when installed to a RAMdisk or SSD, others it makes no real difference, others it improves load times but doesn't help in game itself).

I suppose you could do it the other way as well, install the game to the raptor then when you need extra space, cut/paste the game folder to your secondary drive and leave a symlink on the raptor to point to secondary drive so you can continue playing the game, but its not taking up any space on your raptor.
 
Last edited:
I have all of my games except for BFBC2 installed on the 1TB. Well, I am in the process of doing so anyway. I never knew how easy this was. Works like a charm so far.
 
Nope, no performance issues here. Load times for me haven't had any noticeable change when I switched to an exclusive game hdd. All games are installed in a separate hdd from that of the OS and Steam Installation.
 
Last edited:
Hmmm interesting. I have a 40GB Intel SSD and a 250GB WD SATA drive. I have the OS and a favorite FPS game on the SSD and all other games and files on the secondary. I don't notice any differences. RAMdisk sounds interesting but much of a hassle.
 
The only way you would see any difference is if your system doesnt make the requirements and you have HD trashing from Windows or anything else in the background, then installing to another drive would make a difference.
I haven't seen this issue in years. 4GB of ram or more makes this more or less, non issue.
Load time is subjective, you should worry about the performance DURING the game.
 
You should be fine. I do this on both of my gaming machines. My desktop has an SSD for Windows and a 1TB WD for games while my Laptop has one 500GB for OS/Data and a 750GB for games. I never have any problems. This was actually easier anyway since I recently upgraded to the 750GB from a 500GB drive and all I had to do was copy the Steam directory and re-download a few files.
 
Yeah. I have steam running on my secondary drive. Works fine. Very cool bc my raptor is way easier to keep nice and clean for speed.r
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top