Has anyone owning an SSD ever seen a benefit in gaming?

[mikeymikec]

I've always been a bit meh about hybrid drives, because what you've got there is a HDD and an SSD in one product, and I would be very surprised if the drive continued to work after say an SSD component failure, and the tech required to make the two work together effectively is likely only applicable to hybrid drives (which have hardly set the world alight with enthusiasm), so a pretty niche controller for a not-particularly mature tech that doesn't get a lot of real-world use is not an ideal recipe for success. If anything I would rather use something like Intel Rapid Start, so that if there are I/O issues then at least the 'clever' bit can be cut out of the loop during testing, then re-enabled.

 

[clok1966]

real late with a reply here, I noticed i load into any multiplayer game before almost anybody else so i just sit and wait (have had SSD drive for many years now) its not a bad nowdays as it was, but any mulitplayer games I load in quicker but have to wait anyways for the slow loaders to come in. As for single player games, its a mixed bag. it loads much faster, but after awhile it seems the same speed as it was. its just perception, its much faster, but eventually it seems the same. Opinion, if you got the cash, why not, but if i was on any budget, I would spend my cash elsewhere.

 

[Trsskatert63]

I 100% agree with mikeymikec about the the Intel Rapid Start being the superior option. Because it's like a create your own hybrid drive without the need of multiple storage drives. But I wouldn't say that hybrid drives are too weak or not mature. Any article I have read that have benchmarked hybrid drives shows their real world application are very good. But PC being the master race of all things make people say hybrid drives aren't good to defend their decisions but never used it to know. Kind of like AMD vs Nvidia fanboys fighting to defend their purchase. I feel that's very irresponsible statement because gamers on a budget will also buy into that when that money they save could go to a better graphics card while still giving them good performance, specially when I've never seen any one that tested them said they are no good. It is true some people will feel SSDs are important because it probably is for them since everyone uses their computers differently. But when you have some people buying an SSD that will only go on their computer to play CS:GO and nothing else because people tell them that you need an SSD, that wouldn't be true. They would be best with a hybrid drive. And if they do play more games get an SSD 2nd drive rather than a main drive if they want faster load times on some games.

 

[sweenish]

I like how you're going on about people bashing hybrid drives as a "defending their purchase" tactic, not realizing that's exactly what you're doing as well.

The idea of them is interesting, but I just see it as the worst of both worlds. Especially since they're tied together.

And then the idea of suggesting a secondary SSD just to install games is ludicrous. First and foremost, the OS should go on an SSD. If you then need more disks for games, and feel that an SSD is the way to go, I won't stop you.

But putting your OS on a hybrid drive, then using an additional SSD to hold games is the equivalent of crazy rims on a beater car.

 

[mikeymikec]

I 100% agree with mikeymikec about the the Intel Rapid Start being the superior option. Because it's like a create your own hybrid drive without the need of multiple storage drives. But I wouldn't say that hybrid drives are too weak or not mature. Any article I have read that have benchmarked hybrid drives shows their real world application are very good. But PC being the master race of all things make people say hybrid drives aren't good to defend their decisions but never used it to know.

I did not mention performance at all when I criticised hybrid drives, and for your information I have used a hybrid drive, but thanks for basically calling me an uninformed fanboy for no good reason. Btw, on some of the sub-forums here that would earn you an infraction.

The reason I did not mention performance at all is because my comments with regard to product maturity have nothing to do with performance; I was talking about reliability, I thought that was quite clear. The most distinct market for PCs today is people needing a device for productivity. Who wants an unreliable device when they're trying to work, and risking the data that they're working on? Hard drives are a mature technology, they've been in the mainstream for more than three decades. SSDs aren't quite as mature, they haven't been in the mainstream (and when I mainstream I mean the likelihood of an average user casually picking a computer with that device) even a decade yet, but they've been through the phase of immaturity and when people ask for system help, the foremost questions are not things like "which firmware do you have for that SSD?" most of the time. If HDD-equipped systems are being sold say 80% of the time, SSD systems are probably being sold up to 20% of the time, and SSHDs are probably being sold about 2% of the time. They've barely touched on the radar and a few models have hit the market. I wouldn't be surprised if they're even being outsold by M.2 drives. Issues ought to get spotted during QA but the fact of the matter is that many issues get spotted when the product goes mainstream because that's when it's being used by vastly more people than it ever would during testing phases, and being used and abused by people with many different usage and environmental scenarios.

Even with SSDs we're still learning new things about them in the real world such as how temperature can affect data integrity on SSDs that are switched off for long periods of time.

All storage devices should be looked at as something that could fail and so therefore backups are essential for essential data, but there's a world of difference between "my HDD will probably die some day", "my SSD might die before I replace it", and "I sent my storage device back on warranty three times and all the replacements have been iffy".

And in case I need to underline several more times that performance has little to do with this - from what I've read, NVMe SSDs outperform SATA SSDs, however I have not bought any for my customers because they haven't been mainstream for that long, and just how much storage performance do my customers need? I haven't had a single one say that their SATA-SSD-equipped system performs slowly. Stability is essential for my reputation, with performance coming a close second, and so the first SSDs I bought were after the whole SandForce farce and after I felt that I knew where I stood with regard to knowing about garbage collection and TRIM. I don't adopt the latest generation of Intel or AMD hardware for stability reasons; I've been using Skylake until my first Kaby Lake build a week ago, and that's a pretty minimal advancement in hardware. If another Samsung PRO SATA SSD came out, I'd wait a few months before thinking of using it.

 

[Trsskatert63]

I like how you're going on about people bashing hybrid drives as a "defending their purchase" tactic, not realizing that's exactly what you're doing as well.

The idea of them is interesting, but I just see it as the worst of both worlds. Especially since they're tied together.

And then the idea of suggesting a secondary SSD just to install games is ludicrous. First and foremost, the OS should go on an SSD. If you then need more disks for games, and feel that an SSD is the way to go, I won't stop you.

But putting your OS on a hybrid drive, then using an additional SSD to hold games is the equivalent of crazy rims on a beater car.

I'm not trying to defend a purchase. I have bought an M.2 SSD for a main drive and still use it in my current system and I have a 2nd drive that's a hybrid drive. I really got this SSD instead of a sata connected SSD because it was new and my mother board supported it and I saw how fast it was supposed to be. And I got the hybrid drive to see if it was true I could get the extra storage space with extra speed. And I'm not entirely impressed with the SSD compared to the hybrid drive. The SSD is great for big programs like Sony Vegas and Guitar Pro or other programs that normally take forever to open. But for most other things I don't see much of a difference to defend the SSD purchase which at the time was about 3 times the cost of my 4TB at the hybrid drive for only 256GBs. I just want to bring awareness to hybrid drives because they are much more affordable and are never talked about.

I did not mention performance at all when I criticised hybrid drives, and for your information I have used a hybrid drive, but thanks for basically calling me an uninformed fanboy for no good reason. Btw, on some of the sub-forums here that would earn you an infraction.

The reason I did not mention performance at all is because my comments with regard to product maturity have nothing to do with performance; I was talking about reliability, I thought that was quite clear. The most distinct market for PCs today is people needing a device for productivity. Who wants an unreliable device when they're trying to work, and risking the data that they're working on? Hard drives are a mature technology, they've been in the mainstream for more than three decades. SSDs aren't quite as mature, they haven't been in the mainstream (and when I mainstream I mean the likelihood of an average user casually picking a computer with that device) even a decade yet, but they've been through the phase of immaturity and when people ask for system help, the foremost questions are not things like "which firmware do you have for that SSD?" most of the time. If HDD-equipped systems are being sold say 80% of the time, SSD systems are probably being sold up to 20% of the time, and SSHDs are probably being sold about 2% of the time. They've barely touched on the radar and a few models have hit the market. I wouldn't be surprised if they're even being outsold by M.2 drives. Issues ought to get spotted during QA but the fact of the matter is that many issues get spotted when the product goes mainstream because that's when it's being used by vastly more people than it ever would during testing phases, and being used and abused by people with many different usage and environmental scenarios.

Even with SSDs we're still learning new things about them in the real world such as how temperature can affect data integrity on SSDs that are switched off for long periods of time.

All storage devices should be looked at as something that could fail and so therefore backups are essential for essential data, but there's a world of difference between "my HDD will probably die some day", "my SSD might die before I replace it", and "I sent my storage device back on warranty three times and all the replacements have been iffy".

And in case I need to underline several more times that performance has little to do with this - from what I've read, NVMe SSDs outperform SATA SSDs, however I have not bought any for my customers because they haven't been mainstream for that long, and just how much storage performance do my customers need? I haven't had a single one say that their SATA-SSD-equipped system performs slowly. Stability is essential for my reputation, with performance coming a close second, and so the first SSDs I bought were after the whole SandForce farce and after I felt that I knew where I stood with regard to knowing about garbage collection and TRIM. I don't adopt the latest generation of Intel or AMD hardware for stability reasons; I've been using Skylake until my first Kaby Lake build a week ago, and that's a pretty minimal advancement in hardware. If another Samsung PRO SATA SSD came out, I'd wait a few months before thinking of using it.

I didn't mean to insult your intelligence. I just wanted to say I agree with but also add some points I wasn't sure if you were aware of to just let people know about. I just see so many people promoting SSD for gaming computers online all the time. Every prebuilt gaming computer has an SSD and every custom build budget gaming computer also has one as if it's the only option for gaming.

I see what you mean about the technology being immature now. And again I agree with your new post as well. I think if more people knew about hybrid drives and wanted them there would be more effort put into making them better since there would be more money in it for companies to do it.

Sent from my SM-G930V using Tapatalk

 

[mikeymikec]

I didn't mean to insult your intelligence. I just wanted to say I agree with but also add some points I wasn't sure if you were aware of to just let people know about. I just see so many people promoting SSD for gaming computers online all the time. Every prebuilt gaming computer has an SSD and every custom build budget gaming computer also has one as if it's the only option for gaming.

I see what you mean about the technology being immature now. And again I agree with your new post as well. I think if more people knew about hybrid drives and wanted them there would be more effort put into making them better since there would be more money in it for companies to do it.

People promote SSDs because it has such a clear usage scenario: In terms of general usage, it doesn't matter what you use your computer for, SSDs will make some or most of the process perform better. You can put two otherwise identical systems in front of any customer, tell them that one has an SSD in which will make it much quicker than the other, and they'll be able to spot the difference easily even by just watching Windows load. Aside from USB and the Internet connection, the storage device is the slowest part of the system, so it's an obvious choice to spend a bit more to get something significantly faster than a HDD. In the context of gaming, levels will load much faster. The only scenario that I don't recommend SSDs in is when a customer is either so cash-strapped that only a HDD will do, or if the amount of data necessitates a HDD.

The ideal usage scenario for an SSHD is comparatively not clear at all: Not as fast as an SSD, sometimes faster than a HDD. It's sometimes fast and sometimes not. It's solid 'meh' territory. Given the choice between very mature HDDs and "may perform a bit better in the real world than a good HDD" but nowhere near as mature SSHD, I'd choose the HDD for myself every time, especially since capacity is a solid reason to consider something that isn't a pure SSD.

Also bear in mind that SSHDs are still in their infancy compared to the competition and any tech in its infancy is always going to show a greater variation in quality and performance from the cheapest to the most expensive, it makes choosing an SSHD an even murkier business: When buying tech in its infancy, chances are that the most expensive products are going to be the better ones, yet if you're looking to spend a lot on an SSHD, doesn't it make more sense to either just go for an SSD or get an SSD and HDD together?

As far as selling is concerned, I build desktop PCs as well as ordering laptops for customers. I consider myself to be pretty good at selling things based on their technical merits and explaining concepts to novices so that they understand the key implications of what they're buying, and I'm honest about it. I think I would have difficulty selling an SSHD in most circumstances.

 

[guskline]

I have been using ssds for OS for quite sometime and as the price of them has come down, I'm slowly moving to all ssds.

 

[desura]

I honestly have never noticed. The only place I really notice SSD is in bootup and occasionally startup times. Not even startup times so much. And it isn't like I have something to compare it against. I only use one computer at a time.

There is a reason why the PS4 and xbox have spinning hard drives.

 

[JujuFish]

There is a reason why the PS4 and xbox have spinning hard drives.

Because they're cheaper.

 

[you2]

And generally less reliable; esp seagate.

Because they're cheaper.

 

[Rifter]

There is a reason why the PS4 and xbox have spinning hard drives.

Yeah, due to price, a good 500GB SSD will cost you as much as a PS or Xbox.

I just moved my steam folder to a 2TB SSD with my new build, it used to reside on a RAID 0 array with 2 2TB WD blacks.

For the most part it is close to the same performance but some games the increase in load times is noticeable. And the stutter from open world games like oblivion or skyrim that you got sometimes when it was loading new data/textures/areas is gone.

 

[ImpulsE69]

I definitely notice it in loadtimes. If you don't, that is probably just the particular game you are playing. LoL was a good example of where SSD definitely made getting back into the game from a DC or reboot way more quick. And honestly those type scenarios are where it counts most.

 

[seagate_surfer]

SSDs have a lot of advantages, they're frankly unbeatable for performance, especially when it comes to load times. They also don't have moving mechanical parts, so less things in the drive that can potentially fail. They're just mainly prohibitively expensive for a lot of people. The benefit of SSHD is in trying to combine the biggest advantages of both SSD (by having an SSD cache that the drive places the most frequently used data on), and HDD by also having a larger storage capacity with the spinning hard disk portion, and keeping the cost from going through the roof.

There's a lot of anecdotal experience on tech forums about these drives and whether they're worth it or not, the general consensus seems to be that they're not as good as SSD, but better than traditional spinning disks an an effective way to bridge the gap between performance and cost between SSDs and HDDs. If you'd like to check it out, we have a couple charts which compare the load times and storage utilization across several popular gaming titles.

The first one compares startup times across several popular games across a traditional spinning 7200 RPM HDD, our SSHD, and an M.2 SSD (128GB). The white is for SSD, the orange for our SSHD, and the grey for the 7200 spinning HDD.

Startup Times

The next one compares the first 3 days of gaming storage utilization across several popular titles, and SYSmark ratings from various drive types and combinations. First of the grays is 7200 RPM 1TB spinning HDD, second (lightest gray) is our SSHD, third (darkest gray) is an SSD + 7200 RPM HDD combo, purple is SSD + our SSHD combo, and lastly blue is SSD.

First 3 Days Gaming Storage Utilization

 

[Chapbass]

That said, SSDs are extremely reasonable today and except for the very lowest budgets or lightest uses, I don't see why anyone would choose to run apps from a Winchester-type spindle drive of any speed, which will be the choke point of virtually any system.

Digital Hipsters.

 

[IronWing]

I definitely notice it in loadtimes. If you don't, that is probably just the particular game you are playing. LoL was a good example of where SSD definitely made getting back into the game from a DC or reboot way more quick. And honestly those type scenarios are where it counts most.

On my machine the load times for Doom and Obduction were day and night between the SSD and HDD. I had my steam directory on an SSD originally but moved it to a HDD to save space on the SSD. I wish I hadn't. Doom takes several minutes to start from the HDD and Obduction takes a couple minutes to load between levels. If it wasn't such a pain to move the steam directory, I'd put it back on the SSD. I might do it anyway.

 

[Ranulf]

Steam lets you move individual games between drives pretty easily these days. Under "local files", the move install folder option.

 

[alcoholbob]

Generally if the game you are playing streams a lot of assets, there should be quite a benefit in minimum framerate. In an old Anandtech review in 2008 they showed Crysis benefited quite a bit from SSDs, at least the ones with a decent memory controller (like the Intel X25-M).

Also it's been known for quite a while now in console games, (Skyrim most notably), replacing the HDD in your console with an SSD has a marked improvement in framerate.

 

[Carfax83]

Outside of loading times, SSDs had more impact on gaming performance during the 32 bit era. That graph that alcoholbob posted is a good example of how the faster streaming of an SSD could affect minimum framerates on the first run through of an area.

But now that 64 bit gaming is in full swing, you don't really see that anymore unless the game engine is poorly coded and doesn't utilize RAM properly. That's because 64 bit games can load far more assets into memory and read from RAM which is much faster, rather than loading directly from storage. That's not to say that asset loading from storage doesn't occur, it still does. It's just that the assets are that are streamed from storage are loaded well away from the player camera.

 

[IronWing]

Steam lets you move individual games between drives pretty easily these days. Under "local files", the move install folder option.

Thanks, moved Doom back to the SSD last night, much better again.

 

[disappoint]

i like not having to wait for shit to load

LOAD "*",8,1

 

[IronWing]

LOAD "*",8,1

If I busted an aneurysm pulling that memory I'm holding you liable.

 

[disappoint]

If I busted an aneurysm pulling that memory I'm holding you liable.

I plead not guilty by reason of insanity.

 

[KMFJD]

LOAD "*",8,1

(i actually had a final cartridge 3 which was kinda similar)

 

[XSoldier77X]

Most modern games have seamless transition. The only time you'll get suspicious of something or anything is when the game first loads up, and when you're entering a new area. consider GTA where it loads during the title screen and there's a little void you'll stare at as you're driving into a new area. haven't played skyrim though. B-list titles do have bad loading optimization but i get that, they're b-list