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