Gaming SSD?

[slumbarr]

I need to replace my HDD with SSD for playing some games. Not sure what the difference is, but I read on OCZ that Radeon R7 is for gaming and Vector 150 is for enthusiasts. Anyone can help? And does this mean its better for the AMD platform?

 

[Charlie98]

I don't think it makes a difference... it's all about the read and write stats for the drive itself.

In this day and age, any reasonable, current SSD will perform well.

 

[Soulkeeper]

charlie is right
"gaming" and "enthusiasts" would mostly be used for marketing here.
Some review sites like storagereview do gaming benchmarks on their SSD tests.
Just get one that's the right price and has reasonable performance on the reviews

 

[therealnickdanger]

There is very little writing that is done to the game itself or its directory while playing. Assuming your Windows install is on a different drive, all game saves will happen there instead.

Reads (random and sequential) are most important. Even your most basic POS can manage to saturate SATA with reads, so you're unlikely to notice the difference between an old Intel X25M and a new Samsung 850 Pro. You can probably just pick the SSD with the best $/GB. Nearly all SSDs today have TRIM support, so no worries there.

 

[slumbarr]

But it makes a difference when you start up the games and reading the player profiles no?

 

[leedreamer189]

For starting up the games yes, but not during game play.

 

[Charlie98]

But it makes a difference when you start up the games and reading the player profiles no?

This... (my emphasis added)

Even your most basic POS can manage to saturate SATA with reads, so you're unlikely to notice the difference between an old Intel X25M and a new Samsung 850 Pro.

 

[lukart]

I think both R7 and Vector are pretty similar, but if you compare with lets said a more budget MX 100 unid, then yes... I think the read and write times would be noticeable faster on the R7 n Vector.

Obviously we are talking about load times and not in game performance

 

[Puffnstuff]

Any ssd is an improvement over a hd so you won't go wrong either way. I've been hearing that ocz has transformed itself under new leadership and I hope that it's true. If their quality keeps improving it's a great boon for all of us and keeps more competition in the marketplace. We don't need more limited suppliers like we have with cpu's.

 

[therealnickdanger]

Seriously though, the MX100 512GB SSD is on sale at Newegg today for $180. $0.35/GB is hard to beat. 512GB is also a lot of games.

 

[Cerb]

But it makes a difference when you start up the games and reading the player profiles no?

Yes. For single-player games, it will speed up the save game load lists, too, since every game these days has to read 1000 files' metadata. An SSD over an HDD is nice to have, if you're up for the cost (which is not unreasonable, these days).

Don't put much stock in the marketing, though. An MX100, Ultra Plus/X110, Ultra II, 850 Evo, Vector 100, and any other with good GB/$ and a decent reputation, will be plenty fast enough. Gaming use cases, without local video recording, anyway, are not sufficiently bottlenecked by storage for a faster SSD to really mean anything. If you want to spend more than the cheapest for potential added value, make sure it's sync MLC, not async MLC, or TLC (IE, not a V300, 840 Evo, 850 Evo, or Ultra II). But, with Crucial's pricing, that means no or little added cost, so far.

 

[therealnickdanger]

With single-player games and many multiplayer games you typically load a level and all assets into memory at once, so that initial load time is greatly reduced. Assuming you have enough memory (GPU+System), you'll rarely ping the storage drive again.

However I've found that MMOs are extremely dependant on storage IOPS in order to perform consistently over time. For starters, MMOs are usually built to the lowest common denominator, so they usually only load chunks of assets at a time. Some MMOs can be optimized for high-RAM configurations, but most can't, so they frequently swap data from storage to RAM. Since there is so much content that can change dynamically based upon the actions and assets of so many other players, you'll get huge frame rate dips/stutter without an SSD. Having those super fast random reads makes a massive difference in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

 

[lukart]

With single-player games and many multiplayer games you typically load a level and all assets into memory at once, so that initial load time is greatly reduced. Assuming you have enough memory (GPU+System), you'll rarely ping the storage drive again.

However I've found that MMOs are extremely dependant on storage IOPS in order to perform consistently over time. For starters, MMOs are usually built to the lowest common denominator, so they usually only load chunks of assets at a time. Some MMOs can be optimized for high-RAM configurations, but most can't, so they frequently swap data from storage to RAM. Since there is so much content that can change dynamically based upon the actions and assets of so many other players, you'll get huge frame rate dips/stutter without an SSD. Having those super fast random reads makes a massive difference in the moment-to-moment gameplay.

I actually read somewhere, no sure where that SSDs have lower performance after 30~1 hr of running and OCZ was the drive that had less performance loss overall..

Need to find that page where I've seen this ()

 

[ssamhouu]

That's an interesting point...older HDDs would start to wear down, if there is a review that shows which one runs better over the long run, that'd be really important. You say OCZ, but which model?

 

[Cerb]

I actually read somewhere, no sure where that SSDs have lower performance after 30~1 hr of running and OCZ was the drive that had less performance loss overall..

Need to find that page where I've seen this ()

Overall, the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro are among the best in those regards, today, though are just reaching what the LAMD-based Corsair Neutron was doing some time back.

When an SSD is new, it can do basically all writes sequentially to the flash. Once you have it filled over, it has pockets of used and free space,and has to shuffle data round to make room for new writes (it might erase in 1-3MB chunks, but write in 4-16KB ones; so any still in use in that 1-3MB block needs to get copied to a new location, to make room, then the block can be erased in full, then written incrementally). In general, though, except for very low end controllers, like Phison, newer drives handle that better than older ones, due to software improvements, and more powerful controllers.

 

[lukart]

Overall, the 850 Pro and Extreme Pro are among the best in those regards, today, though are just reaching what the LAMD-based Corsair Neutron was doing some time back.

When an SSD is new, it can do basically all writes sequentially to the flash. Once you have it filled over, it has pockets of used and free space,and has to shuffle data round to make room for new writes (it might erase in 1-3MB chunks, but write in 4-16KB ones; so any still in use in that 1-3MB block needs to get copied to a new location, to make room, then the block can be erased in full, then written incrementally). In general, though, except for very low end controllers, like Phison, newer drives handle that better than older ones, due to software improvements, and more powerful controllers.

Seems that some Samsung Drives have some unresolved issues D:
http://www.overclock.net/t/1507897/...d-drops-on-old-written-data-in-the-drive/1500

Give me a bit more time to run some more tests, but it looks like older folders on my 840 EVO are slowing down (this is after running the refresh tool and installing new firmware). I am getting reads of ~300MB/s on older folders vs. ~500MB/s on newer folders on FileBench.

SSD Read Speed Tester is also showing drops to nearly 100MB/s in certain sectors.

 

[Cerb]

I didn't say anything about the Evo, or any other TLC drive . Samsung's 850 Pro is MLC, as is Sandisk's Extreme Pro.