Which drive is better for gaming — HDD or SSD

Now, many lap­tops and desk­tops are equipped with an SSD dri­ve on which the oper­at­ing sys­tem is installed. Thanks to this, Win­dows loads in sec­onds, pro­grams load instant­ly, and copy­ing files from a USB flash dri­ve takes very lit­tle time.

The SSD is real­ly fast, and its high speed has a pos­i­tive effect on the over­all per­for­mance of the com­put­er. And so many gamers are also switch­ing from out­dat­ed HDDs to new, more “nim­ble” dri­ves. But is it advis­able?

Let’s fig­ure out which dri­ve is bet­ter for gam­ing — HDD or SSD.

Some arguments in favor of SSD

SSD dri­ves are real­ly fast. The read and write speed in some mod­els exceeds the band­width of the SATA inter­face, so these dri­ves are put on a PCIe cable via an m.2 con­nec­tor. In com­put­ers with this con­fig­u­ra­tion, boot­ing the oper­at­ing sys­tem after switch­ing on takes 5–8 sec­onds!

And in com­put­er games, this also finds its appli­ca­tion.

First­ly, many games have a fair­ly frag­ment­ed struc­ture. That is, they are in the form of a bunch of small files scat­tered through­out the hard dri­ve. Such is, for exam­ple, World of Tanks, whose struc­ture includes about 100$ sep­a­rate libraries, cat­a­logs and resources.

It’s a lot. And the com­put­er dur­ing the game­play needs to read them all! As a result, the HDD head jumps from one seg­ment to anoth­er, the per­for­mance sags, the game starts to slow down … In gen­er­al, it’s incon­ve­nient. The SSD does not have this prob­lem, because it works well with both large and small files.

Sec­ond­ly, load­ing large resource packs from an SSD is faster than from an HDD. Lev­els, loca­tions, places and so on load faster. And in the seam­less game­play mode, it will not be clear at all when exact­ly your char­ac­ter man­aged to run from one place in the game to a com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent one.

So, SSDs show three to four times faster load­ing lev­els than HDDs. Accord­ing­ly, you will have to admire the load­ing screen less. And e‑sportsmen and fans of mul­ti­play­er games will get addi­tion­al ben­e­fits at all — they will have time to dis­cuss or think over tac­tics while the ene­my is just prepar­ing to enter the lev­el.

And final­ly, the third most impor­tant advan­tage — This is an increase in the sta­bil­i­ty of the FPS and the over­all game­play. Even if it seems that noth­ing is hap­pen­ing, the game still “pulls” infor­ma­tion from the disk and process­es it. And access to this data is desir­able fast.

The amount of this data can be very large. Small objects and tex­tures are loaded from the disk, such as foliage on trees and mod­els of in-game ani­mals. If they “pull up” quick­ly, the game will work sta­bly. Slow­ly? That will be small FPS draw­downs. It is self-evi­dent that SSD also out­per­forms HDD dri­ves here.

In addi­tion, an SSD is able to “pull out” an old com­put­er or lap­top. Due to its high speed, it can make full use of the so-called “pag­ing file” — a back­up stor­age for data from RAM. There­fore, a game that did not run on the HDD due to too high sys­tem require­ments may “start” on the SSD. Let not very quick­ly and smooth­ly, even if not with high graph­ics set­tings, but it can.

It is worth not­ing that on pow­er­ful com­put­ers, an SSD dri­ve will not increase the frame rate (FPS fre­quen­cy), but it will make it more sta­ble and help get rid of draw­downs.

And the last argu­ment in favor of SSD dri­ves is silence. This dri­ve does not emit a sin­gle sound or squeak dur­ing oper­a­tion, which can be very impor­tant for fans of qui­et con­fig­u­ra­tions.

Some arguments against SSD

Of course, an SSD is faster than an HDD, faster, more pro­duc­tive, and evens out the frame rate… but the main dis­ad­van­tage of such dri­ves is they are expen­sive.

No, not even that. For the price of a 120 GB m.2 SSD with high reli­a­bil­i­ty and speed, you can buy a ter­abyte HDD, which will also be quite fast. And the prob­lem is that 120 GB is not enough!

The aver­age mod­ern game like some kind of Metro Exo­dus takes up about 50 giga­bytes of hard dri­ve space. Plus, the Win­dows 10 oper­at­ing sys­tem will “take away” 20 giga­bytes. In total, there will be room on the SSD … well, maybe for one more game.

And what about users who have dozens of games in their library? Rein­stall every time because there is not enough space? Or fork out for a more expen­sive SSD-dri­ve, but also more capa­cious, when for the same mon­ey you could get a four-ter­abyte WD Blue…

SSD stor­age is real­ly expen­sive. And in some cas­es, it’s unjus­ti­fied. The high per­for­mance of this type of disk is revealed when they are con­nect­ed to the PCIe bus. For exam­ple, through the m.2 con­nec­tor. Old moth­er­boards are sim­ply not equipped with such, as a result, the dri­ve has to be con­nect­ed via SATA. Of course, with it the com­put­er will still be faster, but not as much as we would like.

An SSD does­n’t pro­vide much per­for­mance gain over an HDD in sin­gle play­er or co-op mul­ti­play­er games like Assas­s­in’s Creed: Ori­gins or Ghost Recon: Wild­lands. How­ev­er, he man­i­fests him­self in MMORPG or MOBA.

What is better to take for games — SSD or HDD?

Both! Orga­nize a sys­tem of two disks. The SSD will store the oper­at­ing sys­tem and desired mul­ti­play­er games, while the HDD will store sin­gle play­ers and pay­loads (like a com­plete Quentin Taran­ti­no movie col­lec­tion).

It is advis­able to pur­chase an SSD dri­ve for a rel­a­tive­ly weak com­put­er on which you plan to play sin­gle-play­er projects. In this case, it will be pos­si­ble to slight­ly raise the FPS, but you should not count on amaz­ing results.

In gen­er­al, an SSD dri­ve is a use­ful pur­chase. But if you plan to play main­ly sin­gle-play­er gen­res (RPGs, action games, strate­gies, and so on), then it’s bet­ter to take an HDD, and buy a more pro­duc­tive video card or a “faster” proces­sor with the mon­ey saved.

Or — as men­tioned ear­li­er — the ide­al option would be a bunch of 120–200 giga­byte SSDs and a ter­abyte HDD. Then both mul­ti­play­er bat­tles and sin­gle play­ers — every­thing will be fun.