How do I reduce loading times especially in games?

[Rafael Mestdag]

Apart from defragging and buying an SSD, what else can I do to reduce loading times, especially in games?

 

[Outlander_04]

Buy a faster SSD?

 

[Robert Cook]

not much else. even a cheap $50 60 GB SSD will make a huge boost ( perhaps 128 or more if you ahve tons of games to put on it). there are ways to make the disc store data on the outer edges of the platters, as the read/ write speed there is slightly faster, but that is not too easy, and an SSD will blow that away.

 

[Dark Lord of Tech]

[video="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FQpiZ44GyYU"][/video]

SSD will give you the best boost.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

RAID two SSDs or HDDs together?

 

[k1114]

As with helping performance of any pc, turn off any background stuff you don't need. But the bottleneck could be multiple things, like online games could be their server so can't do anything, hopefully not your own internet. If you can play it with good fps then your other specs are not it so storage is it and there's not much else you can do until faster ssds come out. You can always check usage of everything and see.

 

[Robert Cook]

RAID two SSDs or HDDs together?

well you could keep your current drive and get an identical one, and then make a RAID array, but it would still cost the same and be much slower than getting a new SSD and putting your games on it. obviously if you get two SSDs and put them in RAID you get even faster speed, but one big SSD is more useful than two small ones in RAID 0 most of the time.

 

[Rookie_MIB]

RAID two SSDs or HDDs together?

well you could keep your current drive and get an identical one, and then make a RAID array, but it would still cost the same and be much slower than getting a new SSD and putting your games on it. obviously if you get two SSDs and put them in RAID you get even faster speed, but one big SSD is more useful than two small ones in RAID 0 most of the time.

Very true, but RAIDing together two HDDs could make things faster than a small SSD, while providing more capacity. Generally where HDDs can perform near to SSD speeds is in sequential transfers - which is what loading a level in a game would generally be. RAIDing two HDDs would give you potentially upwards of 300MB/sec transfer speeds depending on the load (as long as they're 7200rpm drives...).

Larger SSDs get advantages of parallelism due to more channels/NAND dies - but I've seen some reviews of a few of the larger TLC drives and they're pretty darn slow. If anything, the general sweet spot for SSDs (if he bites the bullet and goes that route) are the 256GB MLC drives. One Crucial MX100 256GB is about $120.00 right now, and they're reliable and fast. A pair of them would be... very quick.

Or - he could get a pair of WD Blacks in 1TB size for about $75 each, and RAID0 them. That would be a performance improvement. Beyond that, if he's looking for 'free' performance, in this particular case, there isn't any.

 

[USAFRet]

Very true, but RAIDing together two HDDs could make things faster than a small SSD, while providing more capacity. Generally where HDDs can perform near to SSD speeds is in sequential transfers - which is what loading a level in a game would generally be. RAIDing two HDDs would give you potentially upwards of 300MB/sec transfer speeds depending on the load (as long as they're 7200rpm drives...).

RAID 0 + HDD + HDD will be slower than all but the absolute crappiest SSD.

RAID 0 + SSD + SSD is no 'faster' than 1 x SSD of the same size. (except in limited contrived circumstances and use cases)

 

[Robert Cook]

Very true, but RAIDing together two HDDs could make things faster than a small SSD, while providing more capacity. Generally where HDDs can perform near to SSD speeds is in sequential transfers - which is what loading a level in a game would generally be. RAIDing two HDDs would give you potentially upwards of 300MB/sec transfer speeds depending on the load (as long as they're 7200rpm drives...).

RAID 0 + HDD + HDD will be slower than all but the absolute crappiest SSD.

RAID 0 + SSD + SSD is no 'faster' than 1 x SSD of the same size. (except in limited contrived circumstances and use cases)

yes I agree with the HDD part, but raiding SSDs does make a decent boost. especially with larger files such as games. look at the three way m.2 raid of Samsung 950s, the speed does not go up too much ( not like it could much) , but the latency drops and the queue depth can run at much beter levels under higher loads.

 

[USAFRet]

Very true, but RAIDing together two HDDs could make things faster than a small SSD, while providing more capacity. Generally where HDDs can perform near to SSD speeds is in sequential transfers - which is what loading a level in a game would generally be. RAIDing two HDDs would give you potentially upwards of 300MB/sec transfer speeds depending on the load (as long as they're 7200rpm drives...).

RAID 0 + HDD + HDD will be slower than all but the absolute crappiest SSD.

RAID 0 + SSD + SSD is no 'faster' than 1 x SSD of the same size. (except in limited contrived circumstances and use cases)

yes I agree with the HDD part, but raiding SSDs does make a decent boost. especially with larger files such as games. look at the three way m.2 raid of Samsung 950s, the speed does not go up too much ( not like it could much) , but the latency drops and the queue depth can run at much beter levels under higher loads.

Here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/samsung-950-pro-256gb-raid-report,4449.html

And older here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485.html