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Does storage affect gaming performance?

laushik
By laushik
in Storage Devices
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I have an ssd but it got ful so I moved all of my games to my hdd. I haven't noticed any performance issues but do you suspect I lost at least 3-6 fps? Or does it not matter where the game is stored. The game I'm talking about is Gta v.

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Posted
4 minutes ago, laushik said:

I have an ssd but it got ful so I moved all of my games to my hdd. I haven't noticed any performance issues but do you suspect I lost at least 3-6 fps? Or does it not matter where the game is stored. The game I'm talking about is Gta v.

It will affect the amount of time you're sitting there doing nothing, waiting for the loading screen to finish :P

 

Otherwise no

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Unless the game is trying to load something, then no it won't make a difference.

 

That said, when I tried having GTA V on my HDD, it made it unplayable due to the lag caused by loading while I drove.

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1 minute ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Unless the game is trying to load something, then no it won't make a difference.

 

That said, when I tried having GTA V on my HDD, it made it unplayable due to the lag caused by loading while I drove.

So, what, did you chuck steam and gta v on an ssd? Same as your boot oone? I only have a 240gb ssd and 5 2tb hard drives, so I guess I could fit windows 10 AND gta v on there.

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13 minutes ago, EminentSun said:

No performance is never meaningfully affected by a slower storage device, however load times will be increased by a fair amount.

Depends. If the game requires loading textures while playing, and the storage drive is too slow, the system will need to wait for the drive, and you may get a frame rate drop as a result. 

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2 minutes ago, InsertName said:

So, what, did you chuck steam and gta v on an ssd? Same as your boot oone? I only have a 240gb ssd and 5 2tb hard drives, so I guess I could fit windows 10 AND gta v on there.

All programs (including Steam) are on my SSD (not that that matters here but, just disclosing everything :P)

However I have two separate steam libraries - one on my HDD and one on my SSD.  I initially had GTA V on the SSD, then moved it to the HDD at one point and then moved it back.  IT has always worked flawlessly on the SSD... the same cannot be said for the HDD.

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6 minutes ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

Unless the game is trying to load something, then no it won't make a difference.

 

That said, when I tried having GTA V on my HDD, it made it unplayable due to the lag caused by loading while I drove.

I had GTAV on my HDD for a while and I saw no problems at all with loading times. I ended up moving it to my SSD anyways but that was purely because It is my second most played game and I have room on my SSD

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Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

All programs (including Steam) are on my SSD (not that that matters here but, just disclosing everything :P)

However I have two separate steam libraries - one on my HDD and one on my SSD.  I initially had GTA V on the SSD, then moved it to the HDD at one point and then moved it back.  IT has always worked flawlessly on the SSD... the same cannot be said for the HDD.

 

Would you recommend steam and gta v sharing the os drive? or on a  hard drive?

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20 minutes ago, laushik said:

I have an ssd but it got ful so I moved all of my games to my hdd. I haven't noticed any performance issues but do you suspect I lost at least 3-6 fps? Or does it not matter where the game is stored. The game I'm talking about is Gta v.

Games tend load everything into memory, and as other people have said, this will simply take longer. Many competitive games take this into account and don't start the game officially until a certain amount of time has passed. The frame rate is otherwise the same.


Some games can't just load everything into memory, like certain open-world games (e.g. Fallout 4, GTA V, etc.), so you'll see loading screens pretty often when entering/exiting buildings and such, while in places where there aren't loading screens, there can be some macrostuttering. This can make things a bit annoying, and has been a pretty noticeable issue on consoles, as of late, since games are getting huge.

 

If you're concerned about space, 250 GB is great if you want to put one or two open world games on there while having a secondary hard drive for your other games. Otherwise, get 120 GB and just put all of your games on a secondary hard drive.

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Just now, InsertName said:

 

Would you recommend steam and gta v sharing the os drive? or on a  hard drive?

Based on my experience, I would say that it must be on an SSD simply to be playable.  However, I get the impression that I am in the minority, as many others have reported playing it without issues on a HDD, and also consider that it has to work on consoles which do not have SSDs, and it somehow does ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

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Just now, Ryan_Vickers said:

Based on my experience, I would say that it must be on an SSD simply to be playable.  However, I get the impression that I am in the minority, as many others have reported playing it without issues on a HDD, and also consider that it has to work on consoles which do not have SSDs, and it somehow does ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

OS drive it is :D.

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9 hours ago, laushik said:

~snip~

Hello :)

 

My two cents on this:

Games don't get affected by storage's performance for anything but the loading times. FPS and graphics generally aren't affected. In some cases in some open world and MMO games the surrounding textures need to be loaded off the storage drive during the game and if the demand is higher than what the drive can deliver you may notice some stuttering as that data isn't preloaded and is used off the storage drive itself. 

 

That being said, if you have a rather slow storage drive or if it's being used by another application or the OS you may notice some stuttering while in-game in this particular game in some cases. 

 

Let me know if you have any questions :)

 

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