Secondary SSD for Gaming

chriscshunter · Sep 1, 2014

I currently have an 840 pro 256gb, which runs my OS and everything I do. I'm considering getting another smaller SSD specifically to decrease my load time even more. I'm wondering would getting a 2nd SSD specifically for my primary game would decrease load screens by 5-10 more seconds just because it doesn't have OS running on it.

I'm looking at maybe get an 840 pro 128gb or an 850 pro 128gb... but I see an increase on numbers for the 850 pro 256gb, but I don't need that kinda space. What kind of differences would I see in load times between these? Or is there a better option out there in terms of load speeds?

ronintexas · Sep 1, 2014

Having a separate SSD drive for gaming wouldn't give you any dramatic difference in load speeds. If the games were on a hard drive (non SSD), the load times would be dramatically different.

M0j0jojo · Sep 1, 2014

Honestly, you wont see a significant amount of decrease in loading times, I suggest saving the money and putting it towards something else. Also why not put some of your work stuff on a HDD, and give some space for 1 or 2 games on the current SSD?

nukemaster · Sep 1, 2014

Due to the higher performance of SSD's today I do not think you will see a difference with or without Windows on the same drive.

With a hard drive, many things would cause slowdowns because the hard drive had to move the head to the position of each data set it wanted to read. This increased latency making programs wait for the previous requests to finish.

SSD's have reduced this latency substantially.

Getting another SSD for games is still not a bad idea if you want the extra space anyway. If you have steam, you can create a game library on the other drive allowing you to pick an install location whenever you install a new game as well.

chriscshunter · Sep 1, 2014

Its not about space. It's about speed even if 5-10 seconds per load screen in a game. I've been told that having my OS on my SSD is slowing down my load time, and having a separate SSD for gaming would give me better load time.

nukemaster · Sep 1, 2014

I think you may have been lied to. The OS load is nothing for SSD's.

You can get VERY fast PCI-E drives at a premium price if you need speed that much.

ronintexas · Sep 1, 2014

Separate SSDs (one for OS, one for programs) will not speed up the system by any noticeable difference. Once a program is on the SSD, this is about the best performance you will get.

In lab experiments, utilizing multiple SSDs in RAID, for the purpose of file transfers (large files greater than 25GB), you will notice maybe a 5% - 10% boost at max - and this is with a very complicated setup.

If you game takes 10 seconds to load now, even in the most extreme setup, the 2nd SSD would maybe cut 1 second off your load times.....

nukemaster · Sep 1, 2014

I would also like to point out that some online games will make users wait until all others are loaded anyway. Starcraft II is painful for this.

Delroy Monjo · Sep 1, 2014

I tried Shogun2 which has notoriously long load times between screens during the game on a Crucial M500 240GB drive, made no difference at all that I could detect.

nukemaster · Sep 1, 2014

Some games are just poorly optimized OR use heavy compression.

In the case of heavy compression, your cpu may actually hold things back while it decompresses the textures to load them into memory.

You will actually come across some games that load almost the same on HDD and SSD. Hard drives are not bad at sequential reads, but awful when it comes to random.

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Secondary SSD for Gaming

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Delroy Monjo

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