Hard Drive Performance Comparison
There is no debating that SSDs help improve performance. However, we've received many requests asking us to provide clearer benchmarks highlighting the precise difference between solid-state and conventional storage in games.
Unfortunately, we include the time it takes to navigate menus and watch cut scenes when we record the trace for each game. As a result, the storage analysis benchmarks that covered the past several pages don't give us a good way to directly compare hard drives.
However, when we factor out menu navigation and skip over the cut scenes, the contrast between hard drives and SSDs becomes clearer. Any performance delta reflected in the charts above and below is the result of the storage workload. For example, there's a huge difference in Rift due to the random nature of the data access patterns. In comparison, F1 2011 sees a very small performance boost due to its low queue depth sequential workload.
