Very long loading times in Mass Effect 2 on 840

[Deadboy90]

I have a Samsung 840 250 gb that replaced a Samsung 470 128 gb ssd. On the 470 my loading times were next to nothing, 4 seconds max when moving on the elevator on the Normandy. On this new one (Thats sata 3 as opposed to the 470 which is sata 2) My loading times are ridiculous, upwards of a minute and even longer than on the Xbox. Whats going on?

 

[Susejchristo]

Do you have SATA3 Drivers installed?

 

[Deadboy90]

no, its a sata 2 interface on my laptop but even so by saturating the controller with the sata 2 ssd I found that the 840 does twice as well in benchmarks.

 

[photonboy]

In case you're still there...

I bought a Samsung 840 Pro but my advice is the same (The regular 840 just wears out quicker and has slower WRITE speeds).

1. Install the Samsung Magician Software
2. Update the SSD Firmware (they recommend backing up, but that's rarely problematic)
3. Apply the "over provisioning" at the recommended value (approx 20%). They normally recommend using only 80% to prevent slow-downs; over provisioning simply blocks this off for you thus you can use 100% of what remains (after formatting and overprovisioning it's roughly 200GB).

Other tips:
- consider disabling Hibernation to minimize WEAR and save some space
- consider making your Pagefile min/max 3GB.

*It's also important to note that LOAD TIMES aren't solely due to the drive. The CPU, GPU also play a role and are affected by your quality settings as well. The XBOX 360 version is designed a little differently than the PC. On a good PC the XBOX 360 hasn't got the same quality.

In some cases, the XBOX360/PS3 games have textures that aren't loaded at the start but may be STREAMED via the hard drive or DVD instead because the onboard RAM is not high enough.

*Note: Many PC games use far more System RAM than an XBOX 360. I've recorded 5x the amount of usage for SKYRIM on a PC version for the initial load (about 250MB on the XBOX360 version and 1.25GB on the PC)