settle an argument

[JimmyHackers]

i gave my friend an old pc....it only has hdds, i said get an ssd for the OS and use hdd for games.....but cost etc means he wont get an ssd....however

 

my viewpoint is that having your operating system on one hdd and your game on another should help/increase performance.

 

my friends viewpoint is that having the game on the same hdd that his OS is installed on will help/increase performance. (also states games will be less prone to bugs)

 

i know i shouldnt have to ask but can "the internet" settle this for me please?

[RONOTHAN##]

2 minutes ago, JimmyHackers said:

(also states games will be less prone to bugs)

This might be true with some more obscure indy games (I've never seen it happen, but theoretically it could), but overall your friend is wrong. 

 

The reason you want an SSD for a system is random performance. HDD random performance is terrible, but having two drives in the system means effectively double the random performance if both are being used. Putting the games on the 2nd HDD will put less stress one the OS drive, making it run better. 

 

That said, get an SSD. There's one on Amazon right now for $12, and I've gotten one on the second hand market for $5. It's well worth the cost. 

[Dedayog]

Having them split vs on one drive... no difference in performance.   The bug thing is not true either, there's no logical basis for that thought as well.

 

Having OS on an SSD and games on HDD... only good for Windows performance and redoing the OS without affecting games.  There isn't a performance benefit, as the game is still running off the HDD and not the SSD.

 

You really want the entire PC being on SSD by this point, just helps everything be much faster and reduce stuttering from texture loading, etc.

 

 

[BondiBlue]

11 minutes ago, JimmyHackers said:

but cost etc means he wont get an ssd

Are they on a very strict budget? SSDs have come down in price dramatically over the past few years. You can occasionally pick up a 1TB Crucial MX500 (a very good SATA III drive with cache) for around $75 brand new. Or you can get a lower end 2TB SSD for around $100. 

[Thaldor]

That kind of depends how much there's multi-processing as in how much OS and possibly other programs want to read the storage. At the best there isn't any notable change but if he runs a lot of programs on the background the games will load longer and those with seemless design (no loading screens) will run worse.

 

Less bugs? Just no. Unless there's data corruption or malfunction (as massive read problems) all the bugs come from the developer, none from the storage media. Or have you ever heard about self-coding HDDs?

[GeorgeMKane]

16 minutes ago, JimmyHackers said:

i gave my friend an old pc....it only has hdds, i said get an ssd for the OS and use hdd for games.....but cost etc means he wont get an ssd....however

 

my viewpoint is that having your operating system on one hdd and your game on another should help/increase performance.

 

my friends viewpoint is that having the game on the same hdd that his OS is installed on will help/increase performance. (also states games will be less prone to bugs)

 

i know i shouldnt have to ask but can "the internet" settle this for me please?

I always have my games on my other drives. I have a nvme ssd for my boot drive, and my games are spread out across 3 other drives. They all load about the same, and have no performance difference.

[Heliian]

6 minutes ago, JimmyHackers said:

cost etc means he wont get an ssd

A cheap 240gb ssd is about $30 CAD

480GB Kingston ssd is regular $70, now on sale for $50 at bestbuy Canada.  

Just a small investment for a much snappier experience.

 

I wouldn't bother migrating the os from one hdd to another but I'd be curious if there was a difference. 

[Sarra]

17 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

Having them split vs on one drive... no difference in performance.   The bug thing is not true either, there's no logical basis for that thought as well.

This is absolutely untrue. First, having OS and games on the same hard drive can make the drive into a massive performance leech, since a hard drive typically cannot read both OS/swap/whatever files at the same time as game files, so especially with slow drives, having the OS and games on separate drives can improve performance, and reduce problems such as frame drops, reduce load times, etc.

 

The bug thing is also ABSOLUTELY true. Right now, I have my OS on the C drive, steam is on my E drive, and Snowrunner is on my G drive. All 3 drives are SSD's, with the OS being on an NVME SSD. Snowrunner absolutely shits the bed every time it does an autosave, and I go from 55-65FS to 12FPS. This is on a 5950X/6800XT/32GB 3600 RAM system. Edit: My research shows that 'fixing' this requires me to move both Steam AND Snowrunner to my OS drive. Planning on moving my gaming over to a new system, and leaving my rendering on the 5950X, so I can game and render at the same time.

[Dedayog]

1 minute ago, Sarra said:

This is absolutely untrue. First, having OS and games on the same hard drive can make the drive into a massive performance leech, since a hard drive typically cannot read both OS/swap/whatever files at the same time as game files, so especially with slow drives, having the OS and games on separate drives can improve performance, and reduce problems such as frame drops, reduce load times, etc.

 

The bug thing is also ABSOLUTELY true. Right now, I have my OS on the C drive, steam is on my E drive, and Snowrunner is on my G drive. All 3 drives are SSD's, with the OS being on an NVME SSD. Snowrunner absolutely shits the bed every time it does an autosave, and I go from 55-65FS to 12FPS. This is on a 5950X/6800XT/32GB 3600 RAM system.

I can't see how that really improves performance much, I'd have to look up some testing to see if it's impactful at all.

 

Bugs tho... no reason for it, as it directly contradicts your point before it.  Having them separate reduces bugs since the same drive doesn't have to do so many things, which can cause files to truncate or corrupt.  Separate should have LESS bugs due to cleaner writes to a drive that isn't handling the OS as well.

[JimmyHackers]

the game we play is dayz SA. (in all is gloriously modded buggy glory)

 

ive noticed a distinct performance improvement in dayz ingame (less stutter/ better fps) going from hdd to ssd and again from ssd to m.2 pcie ssd.....

(my OS remaining on the ssd for all three game loaction changes)

 

most other games it seems to only help loading times.....but with dayz its a definate performance boost in game.

[Erioch]

Man, I can't remember the last time I installed a game on my OS drive.  I've never had a problem with my games this way.

[Sarra]

59 minutes ago, Dedayog said:

I can't see how that really improves performance much, I'd have to look up some testing to see if it's impactful at all.

I lived through the era of the IDE and EIDE hard drives, so, yes, it can. Modern hardware and software is better, but it still has a negative impact, especially on low end systems.

 

1 hour ago, Dedayog said:

Bugs tho... no reason for it, as it directly contradicts your point before it.  Having them separate reduces bugs since the same drive doesn't have to do so many things, which can cause files to truncate or corrupt.  Separate should have LESS bugs due to cleaner writes to a drive that isn't handling the OS as well.

No, it doesn't. The performance hit from trying to read both cached data (pagefile) and game files is not a bug, but a direct limitation of a spinning rust hard drive.

 

Having a game that freaks the hell out because the OS, Steam, and the game itself are on different drives has nothing to do with the type of drives being used, but is a bug in the game's software. The one read head/drive issue isn't a bug, it's a limitation; having crap code that shits bricks when things aren't on the C drive is a bug, and totally independent from anything else.

[Middcore]

Your friend is totally wrong and it sounds like he's making shit up to rationalize being cheap. 

[thrasher_565]

games on a ssd will load faster but its meh like 10-2 seconds difference. maybe using the fastest hdd and slowest ssd might lower the gap but that's the theory behind it. i no games played on cd drive can load slow and cause stutters so probably same thing on a hdd.

 

on a budget thoe 1 hdd will be fine for games and os thow ssd are much faster for other things like install the os but you only do that once in a while so...

 

if you dont have unlimited internet then installing the games on a different drive can be good so you dont have to re download them when it comes to reinstalling the os.

Edited October 6, 2022 by thrasher_565