Is your SSD REALLY faster than your hard drive? Or do you just assume so?

[Heat-Wave]

Folks, the Emperor has no clothes. Put another way, putting lipstick on a pig doesn't do anything. The idea that using an SSD instead of an HDD will significantly improve your game play is a myth. The seconds you save are not even enough to give you a potty break. If you THINK it's worth it, well, in your mind it clearly is, but not in any objective sense of the matter.

 

Everyone is welcome to their own opinion. Yours is not the majority, by a long shot...

 

From an objective point of view, a SSD is the single best upgrade you can make to most computers. It is akind to the improvement from a floppy drive only system to a system that adds a hard drive. The jump from floppies to hard drives was huge. Likewise, the jump from hard drives to SSDs is also huge.

 

If you're not seeing it, then other factors are at play, or perhaps cutting read/write times by a factor of a thousand isn't enough for you. Going from 2-3 seconds to opening a browser window to instant is a heck an improvement in my eyes. Being able to open 5 programs and have them all open in 3 seconds? Beats the crap out of taking 2 minutes on a hard drive.

[htoncic]

I challenge you all to do a test yourself. The only caveat I throw out is that it must be a "Real World" test. Laboratory results are virtually meaningless. Play the game using your SSD. Play your game using your HDD. Tell us how much time you saved and document your work. Just WHERE did you save the time? Don't worry about someone else jumping in complaining about your test protocol. Anyone can sit back in their armchair and point fingers, but they aren't doing any real work. THEN decide if it's really worth it.

 

Been there, done that. My Windows boots up in about a second. Zoning times in GW2 used to be about a minute on my HDD, I barely see the loading screen now. Gameplay will not improve with SSDs, no one sane has claimed that. Your loading times will, tho.

 

Like another poster said, if you don't mind waiting around, feel free to revert to floppy disks, I hear they're best buy these days.

[Kryand]

If you've ever upgraded a system to an SSD, you'd know that it makes the entire experience better by reducing OS, application, page file, and content load and store times.

 

An SSD also makes your computer quieter, lighter, more reliable, and more power-efficient. Perhaps that matters to you.

 

An SSD is usually the first upgrade I recommend for any computer that doesn't have one, if the computer is of recent enough vintage that it does not need to be completely replaced.

 

I'm actually kind of amazed that anyone smart enough to use a computer could read my post and not immediately realize that it was 100% sarcasm against the OP's suggestion that SSDs don't noticeably improve SWTOR performance.

[wainot-keel]

I challenge you all to do a test yourself. The only caveat I throw out is that it must be a "Real World" test. Laboratory results are virtually meaningless. Play the game using your SSD. Play your game using your HDD. Tell us how much time you saved and document your work. Just WHERE did you save the time? Don't worry about someone else jumping in complaining about your test protocol. Anyone can sit back in their armchair and point fingers, but they aren't doing any real work. THEN decide if it's really worth it.

 

nah.... not wasting time doing any tests...I already know my SSDs in raid 0 are faster, for pretty much everything I do with my PC

I played the game with HDDs. Now I play it with SSDs. I ain't going back. No way.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

http://www.swtor.com/community/showthread.php?t=774336

 

I think if anything the above proves all the OP is really doing is seeking attention. He could have continued in that thread ( where most had already started ignoring him and his flawed results ) but no, had to start another one.

 

My results in my rather simplistic testing more or less reiterate what I've always known about SSD's so I was fairly happy to take them and ignore the OPs results.

 

Of note in the testing here I do wonder ... did you ensure also had your O/S installed on a HDD for both rounds of testing and then again on an SSD?

 

I could be mistaken here as your mountain of text is rather hard to follow so I skipped most of it but seeing you have C:\ on the HDD is rather humourous if indeed that is your o/s / boot drive ( really, who has an SSD and DOESN'T boot their o/s off it? ).

 

I hope this is not the case anyway and I am mistaken because one could possibly argue that having the O/S on the HDD whilst booting a game from the SSD could somewhat bottleneck the SSD.

[BuriDogshin]

I could be mistaken here as your mountain of text is rather hard to follow so I skipped most of it but seeing you have C:\ on the HDD is rather humourous if indeed that is your o/s / boot drive ( really, who has an SSD and DOESN'T boot their o/s off it? ).

 

I hope this is not the case anyway and I am mistaken because one could possibly argue that having the O/S on the HDD whilst booting a game from the SSD could somewhat bottleneck the SSD.

Similarly, if his pagefile is on the HDD, that may slow things down as well.

 

As a thought experiment, imagine all the ways you could bottleneck a system to "prove" that SSDs do not provide any benefit. We can start with plugging the SSD into a USB-to-SATA converter ... and plug that into a USB 1.2 port.

 

The OP did not do that, BUT he did:

• use a REALLY SMALL offbrand SSD, and small-capacitty SSDs are almost always slower than higher-capacity ones
  
• lists it as "SCSI" which is weird, and not the recommended way to hook an SATA drive up.
  
• is connected via WiFi, which no one who cares about online game performance would do,
  

 

So just with that, he's taken a good start at stacking the deck against the SSD.

Edited November 15, 2014 by BuriDogshin

[Malastare]

No, will concede I got my info swapped on the random read/writes, for some reason (don't ask me why) I thought a slow moving head was faster at accessing data than a hashtable/offset, chalk it up to brain fart.

 

I would, but it's still happening.

 

The point of SSDs has always been, to me at least, fast access of data, slow(er) writing of data. They have improved significantly over the years, but reading data quickly has been their forte.

 

No. You're still completely backward and horribly out of date. The most obvious and drastic improvements granted by SSDs was drive latency, and that affects reads and writes. After that, the biggest improvement is in write speed. Spinning disks have very slow write speeds, and even slower random write speeds. Even early SSDs had drastically faster write speeds which degraded only slightly for random access.

 

Sequential reads of static data was never the most impressive stat for an SSD. SSDs are fast, but even now, they are only about 3-4x the speed of a good hard drive on sequential reads. On sequential writes they are 150x faster (or more).

 

I really don't know where you got this information that SSDs were ever slower than HDDs for writing. The first generations were still far faster than HDDs. Not 150x faster, but significantly faster.

 

The bit about the CD/DVD-rw was more if you are writing the entire disk every time, vs reading the entire thing every time.

 

That still makes no sense. The best analogue to SSDs are non-volatile RAM. RAM is still far faster than an SSD, but it shares the same behavior: Negligible latency, no latency variation based on sector location, roughly equivalent read and write times, performance improvements on sequential access are based on implementation optimization rather than being based on physical arrangement.

 

CDs are almost the exact opposite. Write speeds are drastically slower than read. Latencies are high. Latency varies greatly based on the location of the sector on the disk, the only efficient reads are sequential because the physical medium is arranged to support it; random reads are shockingly slower.

 

I guess a better example would have been DB that is large and fairly static that is accessed multiple times is better on an SSD. A Database that is constantly being updated and modified is probably better on an HDD long term.

 

No, its not. HDDs have much, much slower random read and write times. An SSD has over 100x faster random writes.

 

A database that is constantly being updated is actually perfectly suited to an SSD. It plays into the strength of the SSD, and avoids one of the HDD's biggest weaknesses: Random write speed.

[Malastare]

The ISSUE is how much time you REALLY SAVE by using an SSD.

 

It's actually not, because I've never seen anyone ask that question. People are interested in how much faster the load times are, not how much more playing they can get into a 4 hour session. You've constructed your real world test around a scenario that there is very little interest in.

 

What most people are interested in is limiting the amount of null space that interjects into their play time.

 

I SHOWED you how a nearly FOUR HOUR game session saved less than TWO MINUTES in all that time and that the ONLY difference between the two was using an SSD instead of an HDD.

 

Now you've mixed your data, blending an observation of your dependent variable with data that has no correlation with your conclusion.

 

Think of this analogous experiment: Which is better, taking the highway or taking surface roads? To test this, on Thursday I take surface roads to and from work. It takes 15 minutes to get to work, and 20 minutes to get home. On Friday, I take the highway. I takes 10 minutes to get to work, but 45 minutes to get home.

 

Conclusion: It doesn't matter which way you take, because the slower method only took 20 more minutes, and that's only 4% of the time I spent going to work, working, and driving home.

 

Better Conclusion: It does matter. The amount of time working is constant and unrelated to the commute strategy. Normal humans accept the work portion as separate and seek to minimize the time spent driving.

 

Actual Conclusion: It's inconclusive. There was only one measurement, with no attempt to normalize for different events happening on the two different days. Maybe Friday night normally has more traffic. Maybe there was no school on Thursday. The measurements are meaningless because they weren't controlled, normalized, or averaged.

 

All other variables were as equal as they could be.

 

Data doesn't have validity just because you had good intentions. "As equal as they could be" is still "not nearly equal enough to support my conclusion".

 

You save less than TWO MINUTES!

 

Yeah, people get that. Now ask them the other question: For $120, you can buy a 250GB SSD to run SWTOR on. Which would you choose: A) Pay $120 for an SSD. B) Spend two minutes looking at a blank screen every night you want to play SWTOR. I'm sure there are people who'd pick B. And there are plenty of people who'd pick A.

 

And you are telling me with a straight face, without falling down on the floor clutching your stomach laughing at the absurdity of it, that THIS amount of "saved time" means we all ought to rush out and install an SSD and everything will be all better and the game and your PC will run SIGNIFICANTLY faster?

 

1) No one said you should rush out and buy an SSD. If you have to use hyperbole to make a point, your argument isn't very good.

2) Yes. SSDs do make your PC run drastically faster. For a standard pre-SSD system, there is no other way to spend $100 that will get you anywhere close to the performance improvements that an enthusiast-grade SSD will give you. However, that benefit will only help with some small part of gaming.

 

Folks, the Emperor has no clothes. Put another way, putting lipstick on a pig doesn't do anything. The idea that using an SSD instead of an HDD will significantly improve your game play is a myth

 

It's a myth that you created. No one (intelligent) has said that an SSD will increase your FPS, or make it so that you can finish quests faster, or that you'll save hours of play time. They said that planets will load faster. They do. Much faster.

[Malastare]

I challenge you all to do a test yourself. The only caveat I throw out is that it must be a "Real World" test. Laboratory results are virtually meaningless. Play the game using your SSD. Play your game using your HDD. Tell us how much time you saved and document your work. Just WHERE did you save the time? Don't worry about someone else jumping in complaining about your test protocol. Anyone can sit back in their armchair and point fingers, but they aren't doing any real work. THEN decide if it's really worth it.

 

How about this, I improved your experiment:

 

I just played through Quesh and Hoth with my wife. She's got an HDD. I've got an SSD. Loading Quesh, I was loaded and ready to go about 15 seconds before she was. After I loaded Hoth, I went to get her a drink and returned when she finished loading the planet. She went to the Fleet and then back to Hoth. I jumped to my Stronghold on Nar Shaddaa, grabbed some items from my Legacy Cargo and went back to Hoth in the time it took her load Hoth.

 

That's your real world test. Two computers. Same time. Same location. Same data to load. Two different storage mediums. I was routinely waiting for her for 15-30 seconds. We see this all the time.

 

That's what an SSD does. And that's all an SSD does. And that's all anyone knowledgeable has ever said that they do. Some people are willing to pay for that. Some aren't.

 

The biggest improvement from an SSD is not in gaming, and certainly not with this game.

[Transcendent]

What most people are interested in is limiting the amount of null space that interjects into their play time.

 

This.

 

Data doesn't have validity just because you had good intentions. "As equal as they could be" is still "not nearly equal enough to support my conclusion".

 

This.

 

It's already proven in independent controlled testing environments that an SSD will alleviate the bottleneck in a PC build. I don't need to go test anything myself (even though i've run benchmarks on a fresh install).

 

Also, a note about noise for Heal-To-Full. I've always run Raid 0, data redundancy isn't an issue as i've got a decent internet connection and can use Dropbox to backup files (so no need for any other storage array locally). 4 x Velociraptors was noticeable in terms of noise, 4 x SSD adds nothing to the noise of my PC. Is it much? Not really, however it is a difference that is welcome.

[cyrusramsey]

Was a bit baffled by the first post, and not just the wall of text. I've played swtor on an HDD for a year before switching to an SSD and the difference is not small. Obviously a device that is meant to read and write data isn't going to suddenly make CPU intensive actions go twice as fast, but there had been times, with my HDD that I had missed a flashpoint queue popup while loading tatooine and these stay up for two minutes. My loading times on tatooine are usually less than 30 seconds now. Unless some other part of your hardware is a major bottleneck as well, an SSD will make a huge difference in loading large amounts of data, no matter how big your wall of text is. Edited November 15, 2014 by cyrusramsey

[htoncic]

[Heal-To-Full]

4 x SSD adds nothing to the noise of my PC. Is it much? Not really, however it is a difference that is welcome.

The point about noise was that only a very small minority of people who will buy a SSD are going to get rid of their HDD rather than use them together. Not enough space, need for a backup, just because. Everyone who can afford to get rid of HDD altogether almost certainly has at least one SSD by now.

 

Using a SSD in a desktop makes things faster, there's no need to oversell it by adding advantages that will affect very few desktop users.

[BuriDogshin]

The point about noise was that only a very small minority of people who will buy a SSD are going to get rid of their HDD rather than use them together. Not enough space, need for a backup, just because.

Once again you demonstrate a lack of understanding.

 

HDDs make noise when they spin up and down, and when they change tracks. So even if you leave it plugged in and active, it won't make noise unless you actually read or write data to it (the noise from just spinning is practically zero). If you have a clue and put the right things on your SSD (OS, pagefile, Office, SWTOR ...) , leaving the HDD for, say, pictures from your Australia vacation and periodic file backup, your PC will be quieter because you installed an SSD.

 

This is especially an issue with Home Theater PCs (HTPCs), where the chatter of a HDD can ruin movies that make effective use of quiet.

 

And what makes you believe that "only a very small minority of people who will buy a SSD are going to get rid of their HDD" ? And once again you appear to pull "facts" out of nowhere. Where did you get that statistic from? Your nether backside region?

 

And what about people who build a new PC and don't bother to get an HDD in the first place? While I am not necessarily representative, I've stopped putting HDDs in new builds: I'd rather spend the money on getting more SSD capacity. At current prices, the cheapest HDD you can buy costs about as much as 128GB more SSD capacity. I'd rather have the larger SSD.

 

And if you are backing up your stuff to the Cloud (which has pros and cons, I just use a NAS myself) you don't need an HDD for bulk storage, do you?

 

You've demonstrated your neo-luddite hatred of SSDs, and your ignorance about a range of issues related to PC hardware and statistics. But that's all you are demonstrating.

Edited November 15, 2014 by BuriDogshin

[Heal-To-Full]

HDDs make noise when they spin up and down, and when they change tracks. So even if you leave it plugged in and active, it won't make noise unless you actually read or write data to it

Incorrect. Windows will have all your HDD make noises just for its own stupid windows $hit. Indexing crap you'll never search, backing up crap you'll never need, in some cases defragging $hit that's not fragmented.

 

The very few users who would ever bother turning any of that off and who know where to place what don't need either of ours advice.

 

 

And what makes you believe that "only a very small minority of people who will buy a SSD are going to get rid of their HDD" ?

Reality.

 

I don't live in your world of pristine white walls and shiny paper studies, I live in the real world of real people.

Which don't give 1/10 the damn they'd have to give to ever bother. I've advised so many people not to buy a HDD and I still only personally know one person with a HDD-free gaming desktop.

 

So in this reality, installing a SSD won't make your PC any quieter, any lighter, or any more reliable.

Building a new PC with no HDD in it at all might make it a bit lighter and a bit quieter and a lot faster. That's it. Few people will do it, and those few who will, already have, so don't care about this thread.

 

 

I've stopped putting HDDs in new builds: I'd rather spend the money on getting more SSD capacity. At current prices, the cheapest HDD you can buy costs about as much as 128GB more SSD capacity. I'd rather have the larger SSD.

Good for you. I figure I need about 40TB of storage today to be all flush. I have probably 30TB of storage, 25+ of it in my old-desktop-turned-NAS (2x4TB Hitachi, 2x3TB Hitachi, 2x2TB Spinpoint, and a few older drives I don't remember), a little in my even-older-desktop-turned-NAS, laptops I don't count, and the rest in my PC (Revo 3 X2, Revo X2, 830, M500, M4, 320, X25-M, OCZ Craptex, and 2xDHTZ). The new Revo and the Craptex I got to keep after testing, all the rest I paid for with my own money.

 

Care to name a web storage plans that will give me 30+TB for the price of my current setup which is, what, like $5 per month in power bills and $500 one-time if I were to sell it off? I'm not being sarcastic. Please, I want my 30TB for $5 a month.

 

Oh, and I want access to it at enough speed that I can run software right off it, that would be about 30+MB/s, but Google Fiber isn't offered where I am. No, I'm not super rich and can't pull my own fiber. Care to suggest a solution?

Edited November 15, 2014 by Heal-To-Full

[Heat-Wave]

Care to name a web storage plans that will give me 30+TB for the price of my current setup which is, what, like $5 per month in power bills and $500 one-time if I were to sell it off? I'm not being sarcastic. Please, I want my 30TB for $5 a month.

 

There are very, very few people who actually have 30TB of data, much less those who say they need it.

 

It is either ripped movies (which is illegal most places, even if you own the movie), or downloaded files (which are unlikely to be legal either).

 

If you actually need that much space, you likely use it for work (software development can easily eat that up). In which case, you don't have it in your desktop (or shouldn't), and it can be located away from you and noise isn't much of an issue.

 

As far as web storage plans, give Microsoft a try, they now offer unlimited storage for $100 a year (sub to Office 365).

[BuriDogshin]

HDDs make noise when they spin up and down, and when they change tracks. So even if you leave it plugged in and active, it won't make noise unless you actually read or write data to it

Incorrect. Windows will have all your HDD make noises just for its own stupid windows $hit. Indexing crap you'll never search, backing up crap you'll never need, in some cases defragging $hit that's not fragmented.

So, you don't think indexing or defragging a drive involves reading or writing to it? REALLY???

Stop embarrassing yourself.

I've advised so many people not to buy a HDD and I still only personally know one person with a HDD-free gaming desktop.

Given your demonstrated propensity to spout unsupported nonsense, like the OP in this thread, it comes as no shock to me that people do not follow your advice. OTOH, people who know me seek my advice on PC issues pretty often, and usually follow it. That's why four people I know have HDD-free desktop gaming systems.

 

But then, maybe that's because I spent 15 years designing computers for a living at Intel Corporation.

Edited November 15, 2014 by BuriDogshin

[Heal-To-Full]

But then, maybe that's because I spent 15 years designing computers for a living at Intel Corporation.

So far that's been the gist of every argument you've made in this thread. Do you have it tattooed on your forehead or do you make sure to mention it while introducing yourself to everyone you meet?

 

So, you don't think indexing or defragging a drive involves reading or writing to it?

Don't put up strawmen.

It won't work, burn them in your own backyard, not on the forum.

Of course it involves reading and writing to the drive - and Windows will do it whether you ask it to or not.

So yes, a HDD in your system will still make noises unless you manually disable everything.

 

like the OP in this thread, it comes as no shock to me that people do not follow your advice.

"My advice"? Please elaborate.

Because I'm not the OP.

What advice have I supposedly given that people supposedly don't follow?

Edited November 15, 2014 by Heal-To-Full

[Defecter]

Just for the sake of SW:ToR it's silly to install an SSD. A decent GFX card and a decent 5400 RPM hdd will be smooth sailing.

 

That said, an SSD brings so much more to the table then just this game's performance. Basing your choice of hardware on a single game is just silly beyond words. Actually, it's not beyond words. There is one word to describe it; stupid.

[Vashgud]

Just for the sake of SW:ToR it's silly to install an SSD. A decent GFX card and a decent 5400 RPM hdd will be smooth sailing.

 

That said, an SSD brings so much more to the table then just this game's performance. Basing your choice of hardware on a single game is just silly beyond words. Actually, it's not beyond words. There is one word to describe it; stupid.

 

Why not build a system around a game? 5400 rpm is not "smooth sailing" if you like a slower zone loading bar. It works yes but it's never going to be like a sweet ssd. It's End of 2014 SSD's are Common and Inexpensive now. So the OP should go for SSD.

[Defecter]

Why not build a system around a game?

Because unless you actually only play that single game for years, it's just stupid. You have to take more into account then just the game.

 

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of having an SSD as my system disk, but sure as hell the few seconds that it shaves off my loading times in SWToR didn't even come into consideration when setting up my rig.

 

5400 rpm is not "smooth sailing" if you like a slower zone loading bar. It works yes but it's never going to be like a sweet ssd. It's End of 2014 SSD's are Common and Inexpensive now. So the OP should go for SSD.

First off, a few extra seconds on a loading screen does not affect that game in itself. Graphically, an SSD has little to no impact on a game. As such, it is smooth sailing.

 

And there are so many crappy SSDs on the market that barely outperform a 5400 RPM hdd, let alone a 7200 RPM hdd. And usually it's the inexpensive kind that does just that. Just because it's an SSD, doesn't mean it'll be any good in terms of performance. Hell, often times they are marketed as SSDs but are in reality a hdd/ssd hybrid, which isn't that big of an upgrade to begin with.

 

As for the price, for a decently sized SSD, say 1TB, you're still looking at a price tag of €300-400. Even a 512GB ssd will cost you roughly €200. That while a decent 1TB 7200 RPM hdd is ~€60-75. Note that I'm talking actually decent pieces of hardware here. Not outdated and/or malperforming crap from the bargain bin.

 

If you're descision to buy an SSD for purely this game, you're basically paying several hundred euros more for a few seconds per loading screen.

 

That all being said, if someone does want those few seconds and doesn't have an issue with spending more money for that single issue, more power to them. I just think it's stupid to base a descision like this on a single game, which is pretty much what the OP tried to portray. Again, I'm a big fan of SSDs to use as a system disk along with a regular hdd for file storage and fully support the use of SSDs. But the whole premise of this thread is stupid, because you should never, ever base your descision on a single application unless you are building it for proffesional use.

Edited November 16, 2014 by Defecter

[BuriDogshin]

And there are so many crappy SSDs on the market that barely outperform a 5400 RPM hdd, ...

Really? Citation to a benchmark please. I do not believe it.

[cyrusramsey]

Misconceptions I can understand, difference in opinions and preferences I can understand also, but the attitude of 'something is not important to me so it cannot and must not be important to others' is what gets me.

 

If I cared about graphics I would not be playing this game. I like to play this game and not sit around waiting to play the game. I will not claim that other things I do on my pc don't also benefit from having an SSD, but not having to wait 2 to 3 minutes when I go to Tatooine or Hoth are worth a lot more to me than slightly more shiny graphics.

 

I understand that this is not the same for everyone, but calling people stupid for it is just sad.

[MeNaCe-NZ]

So in this reality, installing a SSD won't make your PC any quieter, any lighter, or any more reliable.

Building a new PC with no HDD in it at all might make it a bit lighter and a bit quieter and a lot faster. That's it. Few people will do it, and those few who will, already have, so don't care about this thread.

 

Strange you see because when I installed a couple of SSD's ( one for games/programs and one solely for my operating system ) my PC became quieter ( still have 2 HDD's in it also ), noticeably so in fact, though I certainly didn't buy these for this reason, never even occurred to me to be honest. And that I took out a couple of HDD's ( built another media PC out of them ) to achieve this would indicate that yes the PC is lighter though this could be considered being pedantic.

 

I wonder what reality you live in where putting in lighter, quieter parts don't actually make something lighter and quieter? I love how you made that part bold as though it was a fact also when the actual fact is that's EXACTLY what putting an SSD in will do. Sure people may not do it as the SOLE REASON for putting in an SSD but this is a benefit they will get.

 

(which has pros and cons, I just use a NAS myself)

 

I have been considering a NAS ( purpose built as opposed to a file server that some people like to call a NAS ) myself for bulk storage and backup. Are you using this for backup of everything off your desktops/laptops or only certain data? Is this then being serviced over Wifi? Most importantly is there much improvement for say end user bulk storage over just using a PC as a file server that would justify using a NAS? For example for what I would generally use it for is I kind of want to just have 'forget about it' backup running and also setup to have media automatically moved to the server for streaming access to PC's that need it.

 

A decent GFX card and a decent 5400 RPM hdd will be smooth sailing.

 

5400 RPM? Geez that's really starting to go backward a bit. Aren't most hard drvies like 7200 RPM by default these days?

 

That said, an SSD brings so much more to the table then just this game's performance. Basing your choice of hardware on a single game is just silly beyond words. Actually, it's not beyond words. There is one word to describe it; stupid.

 

What if all you do is play SWToR? Maybe browse the net ( about SWToR ) and check emails etc.? Since an SSd isn't going to give you much boost for web browsing or email then you would be basing your SSD upgrade solely on SWToR. The QoL improvements from an SSD are quite nice so I think it a bit "stupid" to be calling other people stupid one what they may or may not base their decision on since there is a clear benefit to SWToR from an SSD which at the end of the day is a fairly inexpensive upgrade ( a few people really seem to be forgetting this point in this thread, it's like a $1500 Titan GPU upgrade ).

 

And there are so many crappy SSDs on the market that barely outperform a 5400 RPM hdd, let alone a 7200 RPM hdd. And usually it's the inexpensive kind that does just that. Just because it's an SSD, doesn't mean it'll be any good in terms of performance. Hell, often times they are marketed as SSDs but are in reality a hdd/ssd hybrid, which isn't that big of an upgrade to begin with.

 

Where on earth are you getting these facts from? In my own testing ( on a common, cheapest yet still quite new SSD I could get that still had a reasonable rating - my AData drives, forget the model, it's listed in that other thread, can't be bothered looking ). The SSD practically halved all loading time in SWToR and this is far from a top of the line SSD and was up against a 7200 RPM drive. Infact in my testing I actually laughed to myself in the testing on the HDD at how I don't have to put up with those annoying load times any more on my SSD.

 

You really do notice how annoying it is once you go BACK to a HDD ( assuming you have your SSD setup done correctly to begin with ).

 

If you're descision to buy an SSD for purely this game, you're basically paying several hundred euros more for a few seconds per loading screen.

 

Please don't contradict yourself. Being that if you are ONLY playing SWToR you then don't need to spend several hundred euros on a drive. 1 x 256Gig drive will do nicely ( maybe even 128 gig but Windows has this lovely habit of growing and growing and growing in size ).

 

There are very, very few people who actually have 30TB of data, much less those who say they need it.

 

It is either ripped movies (which is illegal most places, even if you own the movie), or downloaded files (which are unlikely to be legal either).

 

I had thought this also but I guess we shouldn't jump to conclusions. I remember though way back when ( pre p2p sharing ) that people were chewing through tons of data on their internet plans and attempting to justify it as they were always keeping up with the latest distro of every iteration of Linux .. turned out most of the time they were just running FTP ( or IRC bots ) servers for less than legal content.

[Heat-Wave]

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-recommendation-benchmark,3269.html

 

"As CPU performance hits new and unforeseen heights, processors increasingly spend time waiting on data from hard drives. This is what makes storage today's most glaring bottleneck, and overcoming it requires an SSD."

 

"The most noticeable performance increase occurs when you go from a hard disk to just about any solid state drive."