I got my 1st SSD for home use a few days ago, a Crucial M4, and last night I got to play BFBC2 on it for the first time. I was expecting faster load times and I wasn't disappointed either, it loads allot more quickly now. But what I wasn't expecting was for the actual game play to be smoother as well. This is purely a subjective assessment, I haven't run any benchmarks yet so I don't claim my fps has improved... And I doubt it has, but its definitely smoother now. I run an i7 920 with a GTX580 so it was pretty smooth previously anyway, but still the SSD has added something on top of that, maybe smoothed out a bit of stutter? Its something that I've yet to quantify to be honest, but still I'm very pleased with.
So I'd recommend getting as large a drive as you can afford and putting your most often played games on it, it will make a difference, no doubt there at all. There are also a bunch of performance tweaks you can make in Windows after you've gotten everything up and running. One of which, if you have the RAM to support it, is to disable your pagefile altogether. It cuts down on some random read / writes that just dirty up the drive anyway.
I found a good post on some performance tweaks on another forum, which I'm re-posting here for posterity. I've implemented them all on my drive and it hasn't broken anything.
Disable indexing
Description: Indexing creates and maintains a database of file attributes. This can lead to multiple small writes when creating/deleting/modifying files. Searching for files will still work.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services - > Right-Click Windows Search -> Startup type: Disabled -> OK
Disable defragmentation
Description: Defragmenting a hard disk's used space is only useful on mechanical disks with multi-millisecond latencies. Free-space defragmentation may be useful to SSDs, but this feature is not available in the default Windows Defragmenter.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Services and Applications -> Services - > Right-Click Disk Defragmenter -> Startup type: Disabled -> OK
Disable Write Caching
Description: There is no cache on the SSD, so there are no benefits to write caching. There are conflicting reports on whether this gains speed or not.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Manage -> Device Manager -> Disk drives -> Right-Click STEC PATA -> Properties -> Policies Tab -> Uncheck Enable write caching -> OK
Firefox - Use memory cache instead of disk cache
Description: If you use Firefox, there's a way to write cached files to RAM instead of the hard disk. This is not only faster, but will significantly reduce writes to the SSD while using the browser.
Instructions: Open Firefox -> Type about:config into the address bar -> Enter -> double-click browser.cache.disk.enable to set the value to False -> Right-Click anywhere -> New -> Integer -> Preference Name "disk.cache.memory.capacity" -> value memory size in KB. Enter 32768 for 32MB, 65536 for 64MB, 131072 for 128MB, etc. -> restart Firefox
Free up extra drive space
Disable the Page File
Description: Eliminate writing memory to the SSD, free over 2GB of disk space. Warning - If you run out of memory the program you're using will crash.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> Settings (Performance) -> Advanced Tab -> Change -> Uncheck Automatically manage -> No paging file -> Set -> OK -> Restart your computer
Alternatively, if you want to play it safer, you can set a custom size of 200MB min and max.
Disable System Restore
Description: Don't write backup copies of files when installing new programs or making system changes. Can free up between a few hundred MB to a couple GB. Warning - Although unlikely, if a driver installation corrupts your system, there won't be an automatic way to recover.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Right-Click Computer -> Properties -> Advanced System Settings -> System Protection Tab -> Configure -> Turn off system protection -> Delete -> OK
I actually left the above one out, I prefer to have sys restore switched on and then manually manage the restore points so they don't C take up too much space. Ccleaner is your friend for this.
Disable Hibernate
Description: You may free up 1GB of space on the SSD if you have 1GB of memory, 2GB of space if you have 2GB memory. You will lose the hibernation feature which allows the equivalent of quick boots and shutdowns.
Instructions: Start Menu -> Type cmd -> Right-Click the cmd Icon -> Run as Administrator -> Type powercfg -h off -> Type exit
