Are SSD'S good for gaming?

Go to youtube and check for videos of SSD vs Velociraptors etc. You will see that SSDs take say 18 seconds for a screen load in wow and then the competition is up to 57seconds.

Past the load screens you are not going to see some magical difference in game play.

Are you sure this is true for all games? I know that a game world that is constantly loading information based on movement and other things. Wouldn't this kind of game situation benefit from faster loading?

I just want to know if SSD's suffer in any way from this kind of gameplay.

SSD's are expensive, spend more on a Graphics Card, that will make much more of a difference in gaming.

with an ssd, you will only see an improvement in load times

if you want to make a big performance impact on gaming get a new gpu

Good information on SSDs is so hard to find... I bought a Kingston 128gb which is quite highly reviewed on newegg and amazon. Windows and game load times are great, but any time a game loads anything from the disk during gameplay, like driving across town in an open world game (mafia 2, gtaiv), the game starts stuttering. This also often causes problems during in-game movies which tend to be loaded from disk (big problem in sc2, though they mostly use cut-scenes and not movies). Also typically takes 30 seconds or so when you first enter any game for it to finish loading things up, so it is unplayably slow during that time (happens every time in splinter cell: conviction). I have found just one review on newegg reporting this same exact issue, and have found some hints that it might be caused by the lack of a cache in this drive.

However, the reviews are so positive for this drive and I have found no mention of a cache in other SSDs, so now I can't know what other SSDs might or might not have the same problem.


Sure you will get more benefit from a great GPU, but some people already have a great GPU. Also, an SSD provides benefit to game load times, but also benefits OS and application load times, which wouldn't benefit at all from a better GPU. However, given the problems I've had, I would say hold off on buying an SSD for gaming, unless the one you are buying has been specifically recommended by a trustworthy source as being good for gaming.

Just my two cents...