Lineage II - Hard Drive vs. Solid-State Drive

[Rob Williams]

When I installed a solid-state drive into my personal PC this past spring, it was magical. All of a sudden, I booted into my OS faster, applications opened quicker, and there wasn't ever a time when I encountered OS lag due to a slow I/O. It goes without saying that games also stand to see a nice benefit when moved to an SSD as well, but given the limited storage size along with the growing size of games, it's not always easy to dedicated a good chunk of your drive for a single purpose.

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Read the rest of our post and then discuss it here!

 

[Kougar]

That's pretty astonishing the disk alone would be a bottleneck for the game! How about load times and game launch times, were those as appreciably affected as the actual gameplay when you tried out the SSD?

Regarding Civ V, the game bogs down from the processor overhead involved from all the AI unit movements regardless of storage. And save game load times weren't affected much by switching to an SSD either. It's a mostly CPU bottlenecked game, should've been more multi-threaded.

 

[Rob Williams]

Game load times happened about twice as fast on average on the SSD vs. the HDD. On a boot where I was loading the game over and over, the best I could do on a hard drive was about 52s, while on the SSD I had it load once at 18s. On a fresh boot, the HDD did it in about 1m 12s, while the SSD did it in 47s. It's random, but the SSD does show a considerable benefit there also.

I agree on Civ V also.... it's a game perfect for being as multi-threaded as possible.