Games installed on SSD vs HDD

Hey guys!

In my new setup, I have a 64GB SSD drive with a 260gig HDD (plus external drives for general storage).

My question is:

How much does it affect my performance to INSTALL games on the 260 gig 7200 rpm drive rather than straight onto the SSD (the SSD has the OS installed on it).

Will games still perform better than having the OS installed on the HDD? I'm guessing they would since the OS is on the SSD and general operations (going from memory to hard drive, etc) are going through the solid state drives. Is that correct logic?

The thing that would slow me down would be when the game had to access files from the HDD only?

I know this might all sound newb, so please bear with me

anything on the ssd will load faster than on the hdd. if you play any games that load anything during game play, a ssd would improve gameplay. otherwise your just looking at faster initial loads and saves.

Awesome thanks! I did buy the ADATA S599 because the write speed was important and it was quite a bit faster than their other model they had. 270Mb/s which I don't know how to compare to a HDD since they measure in latency generally. Thanks for the quick answer!

Bascotie said:

Awesome thanks! I did buy the ADATA S599 because the write speed was important and it was quite a bit faster than their other model they had. 270Mb/s which I don't know how to compare to a HDD since they measure in latency generally. Thanks for the quick answer!

Click to expand...

HDD do measure speed . I believe any decent desktop model is 100 MB/s, while lappies are 70 MB/s

Remember, it varies across benchmarks. Sandforce based SSD's typically post the numbers they get with ATTO disk benchmark. However, run AS SSD and you'll get completely different numbers. ATTO seems to report really high numbers due to the way the Sandforce controllers work.
I have a vertex 2, and in ATTO its pretty much right on the rating...275MB write, 285MB read. However in AS SSD its 200MB read 130MB write...

Anyways, to answer your question...yes things will generally load faster with SSDs. But for gaming, it doesn't make much of an impact except faster level loads and saves. Once things get paged to ram, the game works from there. Now if you don't have enough ram and are constantly in the swap file...that's a different scenario. But if you are using an SSD, chances are you have enough ram.

i just reinstalled oblivion onto my ssd and it improved gameplay significantly. it doesnt slow down to load any areas and the loading screen for going through doors is about 1 second. it is noticeably smoother without the longer seek times of an hdd. i am still impressed by what a beautiful game it is even though its almost 5 years old. i'm playing it 3d which really draws me in to the experience.

BC2 on my SSD loads maps instantaneous compared to my WD Black