SSD vs HDD

Cmdr Nemo

Cmdr Nemo
I as far from being a computer geek as one can be. I've owned various pc's all of which had window's installed as the OS. Prior to the one I purchased 7 months ago which is supposed to be a gaming pc, I only had one drive which was an HDD. My new pc came with two hard drives, one is a 250 gig SSD and the other is a terra Byte HDD.

I've heard and read that the loading of games is considerably faster on an SSD than the HDD and installed a couple of games on it. However, because of the lack of space and the fact that I never had issues with the speeds on my HDD when I played ED, installed ED on the HDD.

Reckon it's only me, but it seems as if the SSD isn't actually any faster than the HDD use to be, but the HDD is considerably slower when loading games. Is it possible that the SSD isn't actually faster, but there's an logarithm or other such terms that actually slows down the HDD, making the SSD seem to be faster?
 

GroG79

G
I can not agree with that advice; here is why

  • A game is loaded into memory. If memory is big enough few will need to be loaded from a drive. So it seems performance on ssh/hdd is about the same
  • startup times of games will increase a lot if started from hdd. need to load 4 gb of data.. In that case a ssd is way faster.
 

Deleted member 257907

D
ssd have much faster reading & write speeds.
you notice if you install windows on ssd it boots much faster and games load levels faster but during gameplay i dont think there is much difference at least with ED. Star Citizen i heard is unplayable on a HDD.

edit: here is an example of performance difference in Star Citizen.
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ejMHHr_Km4Q
 
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Morbad

Morbad
In objective terms, a typical SATA SSD is twice as fast at sequential transfers as a fast HDD, and about two orders of magnitude faster at random transfers. SSDs are also nearly immune to performance loss from fragmentation. How much this will matter in games depends on the game and how often one maintains their data that's stored on an HDD. Most games run from an SSD will be CPU or GPU limited in their loading times, but are still noticeably faster than an HDD. HDD loading performance is generally much more variable as it never reaches that point of deminishing returns and physical data location matters...a game installed at the beginning of an HDD and kept defragmented will load much faster than a game installed to thousands of gaps spread over a mostly full drive/

Anyway, ED isn't as sensitive to drive performance as many titles, but it still access assets from the drive relatively frequently, no matter how much memory you have and I wouldn't run it off a mechanical HDD, except as a last resort. ED is also not very large at ~20 gigs and should be easy to fit on your 250GB SSD.
 

Cmdr Nemo

Cmdr Nemo
I only ask because I've noticed a significant difference when I click on ED now with my new pc than my old pc, even though ED was on an HDD both times. Because my SSD is almost full, I can't compare ED launch and play-ability on it to that of the HDD. Thanks for all the input, everyone.
 

MickyG1982

M
The only thing improved by placing the game on an SSD as opposed to a hdd is initial loading times.

Other than that, I've seen no difference, other than what comes with a newer laptop and better GPU.
 

Deleted member 257907

D
I found an old post mentioning ED uses swap file.
swap file (virtual memory) on ssd would be faster than hdd.
maybe if after you installed ssd also changed the paging file drive.

Game crashing very frequently

Is there a crashlog I can vew to see why my game is continually crashing for some reason. I took a break from the game for about a month and have experienced maybe 3 crashes in over 2
forums.frontier.co.uk forums.frontier.co.uk
 

STRONTIUM DOG

STRONTIUM DOG
I did not notice much difference with this game tbh
I think its down to the initial connection with the servers that there is very little difference with this game...………….
 

wrmiller

W
Spent a few years at Micron in Colorado, bashing their SSDs in my labs. Speeds aside, I have always been leery of the inherent instability of the SSD's storage medium. I've been in the firmware (I was a firmware engineer/designer for decades), and the error recovery algorithms and spare storage needed on a SSD just to keep your data safe is an order of magnitude larger/more complex than that required for spinning media.

We had hundreds of servers in the lab simulating all kinds of Enterprise configurations and traffic.

Having said that, I do have a SSD as a boot drive that houses the OS. Most of my important applications/data are stored on spinners though. Call me old fashioned. ;)
 

alexzk

A
SSD has faster access times. Meaning, if some game downloads particular updated then those files will be scattered on surface and such files will be loaded faster by SSD.

I keep on SSD swtor (which do particular update). All other games, including Elite are on HDD.
 

STRONTIUM DOG

STRONTIUM DOG
if he were old fashioned he would probably backup the game to 3.5 floppies and mark said floppy disk storage wardrobe elite dangerous
I did it the other way my os is on hdd and my games on ssd (buy the time ive poured a cool one its up an running)
as ssd have a limited no of writes before failing to read only
 
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SMcA

SMcA
STRONTIUM DOG said:
if he were old fashioned he would probably backup the game to 3.5 floppies and mark said floppy disk storage wardrobe elite dangerous
I did it the other way my os is on hdd and my games on ssd (buy the time ive poured a cool one its up an running)
as ssd have a limited no of writes before failing to read only
Click to expand...

I guess I am old fashioned. I still have backups on a Zip Drive. :)
Not that I've used it in decades.
 

STRONTIUM DOG

STRONTIUM DOG
I still have a working zx spectrum and load via tape lunar jetman on an old ratio field input television which I use for old playstaion1 light gun games too occasionally(die hard)
if that aint old fashioned I dunno what is (I am a total retro freak)
 
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wrmiller

W
I worked on the original 4mm DAT design (firmware) and mine worked great until it died recently. Gonna miss that thing for backups.

Never had a Zip drive, but I did have a couple of Syquest drives (yea, worked on that firmware too...).
 
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