SSD/HDD advice for gaming PC

Drums_88

Drums_88

Drums_88

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United Kingom
Hi there!

I have both a smaller (500MB) SSD and larger (2TB) HDD and am wondering whether I should change over the HDD to SSD to improve general PC/gaming performance.

Is this even possible? I've read about cloning the drive.

Specs (let me know if I should include other info in this and I can edit):
  • AMD Ryzen 7 3700X 8-Core Processor - 3.60 GHz
  • RAM - 16.0 GB
  • Windows 10 64 bit
  • Graphics - NVIDIA GeForce RTX 2080 SUPER
  • Drives: 1x 500GB SSD, 1x 2TB HDD
Any other tips on improving performance for gaming much appreciated!

Thanks for your help!
 
Drums_88 said:
Is this even possible? I've read about cloning the drive.
Click to expand...

Sure, but if it isn't your OS, then you don't even need to clone it, you can just copy and paste the files.

Games are easy to move if they're on Steam, but if they're manual installs then it might be more complicated (due to registry entries).

The performance benefit depends on the game, if they have long loading times, or stream assets, then you'll notice an improvement, but if they're smaller/older games then it will be more limited.

Drums_88 said:
Any other tips on improving performance for gaming much appreciated!
Click to expand...

There's nothing wrong there really, all I can think of is adding more RAM, but if you're not using it then it won't help anything.
 
Drums_88 said:
Thanks again for your reply, Tetris.

If I install a large/new game onto the HDD, will that run slower than if I install it onto the smaller SSD?
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For the price of things like the Crucial MX500 sata 3d tlc nand ssd's, which can come in upto 4tb very cheap sold elsewhere if you look, you'd be mad not... You can even get a 8tb samsung qvo 870 for £359.99 if you look around ;)
 
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Drums_88 said:
If I install a large/new game onto the HDD, will that run slower than if I install it onto the smaller SSD?
Click to expand...

The size of the SSD is generally not relevant, unless the SSD is very near to capacity (e.g. something like 450+GB, for a 500GB SSD). It used to be a common issue, but it's not usually a problem anymore, except for budget/low-end models.
 
SSD will be faster than HDD for load times, the rest of the performance is mostly down to your other components.

If you have an M.2 slot you can get something significantly faster than both HDD and sata SSD and they're rapidly coming down in price.
 
lemming3k said:
SSD will be faster than HDD for load times, the rest of the performance is mostly down to your other components.

If you have an M.2 slot you can get something significantly faster than both HDD and sata SSD and they're rapidly coming down in price.
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I can't remember who it was but one of the bigh tech you tubers tested and the difference between a sata ssd and NVME ssd in real world usage like gamaing isn't as big as you might think. Certainly nowhere near the difference between a spinning hard drive and a sata ssd (which is weird considering you are talking in some cases 10 x faster data transfer rates with NVME over SATA SSD, but other factors seems to be limiting rather than the drives).

I'd still go NVME if you have the option and can afford the slight premium, but a good quality normal Sata SSD is fine and will be significantly quicker/ more responsive than good old spinning metal.
 
Evil-I said:
I can't remember who it was but one of the bigh tech you tubers tested and the difference between a sata ssd and NVME ssd in real world usage like gamaing isn't as big as you might think. Certainly nowhere near the difference between a spinning hard drive and a sata ssd (which is weird considering you are talking in some cases 10 x faster data transfer rates with NVME over SATA SSD, but other factors seems to be limiting rather than the drives).

I'd still go NVME if you have the option and can afford the slight premium, but a good quality normal Sata SSD is fine and will be significantly quicker/ more responsive than good old spinning metal.
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Yeah I noticed no difference from a sata ssd to a pci-e 4.0 silly fast m.2. it's just nice to be able to mount it so compactly/out of the way vs sata power and data leads.
 
Evil-I said:
I can't remember who it was but one of the bigh tech you tubers tested and the difference between a sata ssd and NVME ssd in real world usage like gamaing isn't as big as you might think. Certainly nowhere near the difference between a spinning hard drive and a sata ssd (which is weird considering you are talking in some cases 10 x faster data transfer rates with NVME over SATA SSD, but other factors seems to be limiting rather than the drives).

I'd still go NVME if you have the option and can afford the slight premium, but a good quality normal Sata SSD is fine and will be significantly quicker/ more responsive than good old spinning metal.
Click to expand...
If I recall what I heard correctly it's because most games pre-load into cached memory and such so you don't always see the benefit of the drive speed. They do boot faster and there will be some cases where it's better, but we probably can't always perceive it when it happens anyway.
Tbf, there's hardly any price difference anymore, and it saves the sata slots for data storage.
 
2xNVMe 500G or 1Tb Gen3 drives.

If your mobo supports it and you have a free x8 slot you can use a "Dual NVMe riser card".

In windows, create a "new striped volume" and add both drives to it.

You will get one drive in Windows which is the size of both drives, however, data will read and write to both drives at the same time.

In my 5800X (Cross hair hero 8) setup I got this basic stats.

(Crystal disk mark)
Basic Samsung 3D SSD = 550MB/s
Crucial P4 Gen 4 NVMe = 5480MB/s
Seagate Firecuda Gen4 = 6200MB/s (it's in the primary NVMe slot too!)

Pair of Crucial P4s in striped volume (RAID0) = 10860MB/s.

Yes, that does make steam loading times shorter. Not "that much" shorter, maybe 50% faster. Depends on the game. Games with large "OBJ" or "DAT" files that it opens in memory will load fast. Games which decompress stuff into memory are CPU bound. Games which load 100s of thousands of small files will always be slow.
 
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