I assume I’m not the only one who has played the same games on different type of storage: commonly HDDs and SSDs, but I also set up two RAID 0 filesystems (one on two HDDs, one on two SSDs), and I even installed Deep Rock Galactic on RAM.

However, more often than not loading times have been too similar across storage media.

Personal experience (tl;dr):
  • Deep Rock Galactic is so small it easily fits in your system’s memory, so you probably won’t be surprised to read that in my tests its loading times have been the same between HDD, SSD and RAM; any big chunk of data on disk is cached by the OS after being loaded for the first time, and it’s not like ALL data needs to be read at once in the first place.
    Quantitatively: loading times range from 2s to 40s (~15s on average), presumably because world generation and netcode hijinks take most of the time.
    All of this makes sense to me so far.
  • On the opposite side, Project Zomboid greatly benefits from faster storage if you’re using lots of mods.
    I haven’t measured world loading times, because it takes much more time to load and unload mods (it’s a Java game) than reading a bunch of jpegs and some kilobyte-sized files deciding where to place them: the former process takes ~ twice the time to complete if the game’s installed on an HDD rather than a SSD, haven’t tested it on RAID0/SSD; it’s a somewhat CPU intensive process, but some mods are BIG - my game’s workshop directory weighs 24GB.
    All of this still makes sense to me so far.
  • Then there’s Baldur’s Gate 3: the game is so chonky and I play it so infrequently that I have to keep it on my RAID0/HDD filesystem for logistic reasons, but at some point I had it on an SSD; I haven’t timed loading screens, but they are very long and I barely noticed an improvement on the SSD.
  • Helldivers 2: same as above, but netcode hijinks make metrics less reliable; besides, considering all the spaghetti code in it, that game is more Italian than me.
  • BeamNG: same as BG3, but less chonky and currently on RAID0/SSD.

Some other games I’ve played on several media matched the usual “SSD faster” expectations, namely Satisfactory, X3, X4, Abiotic Factor (or as I like to call it, “Antibiotic Factory”), Halo:MCC.

I’m asking this mostly because I’m considering getting two SSDs dedicated to a RAID0 setup, as of now my RAID0/SSD filesystem is “only” 200GiB wide and it’s sharing its drives with the OS and other things, but since I’m not short on space it may or may not be worth the price to set up a reasonably large FS with fast I/O.
I also suspect that my game loading times may be limited by the fact that I’m running most of them on Linux via proton, if everyone’s experience contradicts mine then that’s probably why; in fact, I’m pretty sure VKDX shader compilation adds some CPU-bound time.

    • brsrklf@jlai.lu
      2·
      10 hours ago

      Part of it might be applying the many patches of definitions and stuff, but it’s probably mostly just loading a shitload of png files in memory.

      Even worse, even after years of updates, the several literal minutes of loading on a HDD happen on a completely unresponsive, static screen (Windows even prompts you with that “kill the app or wait for it to respond” pop-up if you alt-tab out of it).

      There’s a mod to add a progress bar to that initial mod loading. Yeaaah.