SSD or hard disk?

[moustache]

Hello everyone,
I want to know if any of you have been switched from a normal disk to an SSD, and if it brought a real improvement to the game?

 

Apart from the loadings, do you get a better fluidity of the game?

Edited May 6, 2022 by moustache

[il2ulrichhose]

ja super

[THERION]

26 minutes ago, moustache said:

Hello everyone,
I want to know if any of you have been switched from a normal disk to an SSD, and if it brought a real improvement to the game?

 

Apart from the loadings, do you get a better fluidity of the game?

 

Yes, I changed my old HDD (1TB) and use now 2 SSDs (1TB & 500GB). Performance is much better for my OS, start up and work is much faster.

 

The second SSD is simply reserved for DCS, because this software gets much benefit on a SSD. IL2GB is installed on the first SSD with plenty

of free space. Loading is very quick now and performance in general is very good too.

 

BUT: Keep in mind, having a very fast SSD doesn't mean that all games/sims will perform better only because of this. If you have a weak CPU,

slow RAM or an old and weak GPU, performance will not be much enhanced. Loading times, yes, but the game/sim itself won't have a huge
performance boost (fluidity and smoothness), if you still have old components. These will most likely be your bottlenecks.

 

Cheers

[moustache]

I have a 6 core * 2 I 7 9750h processor with a 4.5Ghz boost and an nvidia 2060 RTX, I think that's enough. thank you for the answer, I'm doing my migration.

[JV44HeinzBar]

S!,

When I switched over from HHD to SSD, I didn't see much improvement in terms of IL2 loading....maybe 10% decreased loading time? However, Win10 does load significantly faster using the SSD vs HHD.  See my signature for rig stats.

 

HB

 

Hmm, for some reason I no longer see my signature. I tried to find it in edit profile, but it appears that signature no longer exist?

Edited May 6, 2022 by JV44HeinzBar
No signature??

[THERION]

2 hours ago, JV44HeinzBar said:

S!,

When I switched over from HHD to SSD, I didn't see much improvement in terms of IL2 loading....maybe 10% decreased loading time? However, Win10 does load significantly faster using the SSD vs HHD.  See my signature for rig stats.

 

HB

 

Hmm, for some reason I no longer see my signature. I tried to find it in edit profile, but it appears that signature no longer exist?

 

Maybe temporary blocked like your avatar too, because of some abuse with political statements concerning the actual situation in the east of EU?

[Dallas88B]

15 hours ago, THERION said:

BUT: Keep in mind, having a very fast SSD doesn't mean that all games/sims will perform better only because of this. If you have a weak CPU,

slow RAM or an old and weak GPU, performance will not be much enhanced. Loading times, yes, but the game/sim itself won't have a huge
performance boost (fluidity and smoothness), if you still have old components. These will most likely be your bottlenecks.

 

True !

Progressive upgrades are not a bad way to go compared to a the big replacement approach. One can assess whats likely to give the best return for the system and upgrade that bit. Even, ultimately, motherboard upgrades can make use of the existing SSDs and RAM of you have been careful in those choices.

[moustache]

thank you all for your replies...

 

I'm just going to give my impressions, if it can help some who would hesitate to migrate to SSD:

- indeed the loading times are shortened, not much, but it's a little more

- gaming performance level, it's actually more fluid, less micro freeze

- also a small gain in FPS, and these are more stable (for the idea, I'm into graphics all the way, some secondary improvement by the Nvidia configuration software, and all at 2K resolution forced on a 1080p screen: between 65 and 75 fps, depending on maps and number of entities/effects...)

 

(I specify that I am on a laptop, so it heats up faster than a "desktop PC", which explains the performance despite the gear...)

 

thank you again for your answers

[1Sascha]

SSD all the way.

 

Switching from HDDs to a non-m.2 one back in 2015 or so (Samsung 850 Evo, 500 MB/s IIRC) was like a revelation. Switching to an M.2 this year made things even faster, although the difference between the 500 and my current 3600 MB/s M.2, while impressive, didn't feel as sensational as going from HDD to the 500 MB/s SSD.

 

What convinced me back in 2015 were some videos I found on YT with side-by-side comparisons of Windows boot-up times (back in the days of Vista, IIRC). My own Vista-system booting from an HDD took literally minutes to be fully ready in the morning.

 

Plus SSDs are virtually maintenance-free, there are no mechanical bits that could break or malfunction and they even use less power. And M.2s don't clutter up your case and don't need any cables routed to them.

 

They're also very handy when you do in-game video-capturing. Depending on the game, its resolution and the tool you're using, with an SSD, you'll hardly notice when you start the capture. Whereas capturing to an HDD would give me huge lags/freezes when I first started my recording.

 

S.

Edited May 7, 2022 by 1Sascha

[moustache]

I'm taking advantage of this topic for another question:

have any of you tried games on an external SSD drive connected to USB 3. I've seen on my various searches that (apparently), the one doesn't restrict too much ( see almost no) writing / restoring the disk ...

is it a good choice for what has a limited internal SSD (250G for my part, the basic software being on it, and since it's a laptop, the 'upgrade is complicated/treasury/even impossible...)

[BeastyBaiter]

I switched to SSD's exclusively (except backup and media drives) back in 2014. Haven't used one in ages at this point.

 

Yes, it does generally reduce stuttering, that's the only in game effect I'd expect. The stuttering happens with an HDD whenever new objects are loaded into memory (new units, buildings, etc). An SSD can really smooth those over. Beyond that most of the difference is in loading time of various things.

 

As for external drives, I have little experience with that but it should work. Just be aware that not all USB 3 is created equal. The morons who name it decided to retroactively name every USB standard ever made to USB 3, so realistically it can be anything from 0.18 MB/s to  2400 MB/s.

[Bonnot]

I have the same problem than Moustache : 250 internal SSD , Windows etc... taking about half;

IL2 takes now some 75 ga, after removing Mods, screenshots and records;

remains about 50go free ... so I wonder how much BoN can take and if remaining space will be enough to run normally ???

any help welcome ?

 

[1Sascha]

9 hours ago, Bonnot said:

I have the same problem than Moustache : 250 internal SSD , Windows etc... taking about half;

IL2 takes now some 75 ga, after removing Mods, screenshots and records;

remains about 50go free ... so I wonder how much BoN can take and if remaining space will be enough to run normally ???

any help welcome ?

I assume you're on a laptop?

 

I had the same issues with my own laptop, whose usable SSD-space is rather limited. Usually, about half of the space is "blocked" for a Windows backup/installation partition, then you have the actual Windows installation plus perhaps some bloatware and only what's left after all that is actually "free space" for you to use. I've long since removed all games from my laptop's SSD and copied them to its HDD (super easy with Steam-games). Perhaps check if your laptop has an easy way to put an additional drive in there? If you do decide to open it up "all the way", do be careful. In my experience, these things are quite a bit more fragile on the inside than desktop PCs. I bricked my last one when I tried to clean/dust its insides.

 

S.

[Bonnot]

Sascha,

Thanks for help, I'm on a desktop PC with 1ssd 250 and one bigger (slower) HD...

I'm not really able to carry complicate manipulations , so if a external SSD could be used for gaming it'ld solve the problem...advices seems mixed here

with pro and cons... so I question players of IL2 as it is the bigest  storage space eater -  when requiring  speed...

 

Did you try it ?  also does 75 go for IL2 +TC  looks very large ??  , then how more space BoN will requires ???

Thanks ?

 

[1Sascha]

I wouldn't dream of trying IL-2 on my laptop (I5- 7200, GF 935M, lol!), the most demanding stuff I ever played on there was Civ V + VI and CK III... My Steam version of IL-2 with all available modules and a few collector's planes installed is 56.67 GB (all LW planes minus Ju 52 plus Mc202 plus Hurri II).

 

An external SSD will be limited by the interface's bandwidth. In this case USB 3.0? So I'm not sure it'd be worth it - if it would even work (never tried gaming from an external hard-drive myself). If I'm understanding things right, 3.0's "Super Speed" mode supports up to 500 MB/s, which is a common speed for SATA SSDs, so it might make sense, speed-wise. But AFAIK, these drives are primarily meant as data-dumping-grounds, not to be used as "active", working drives. So... *shrug*

 

I think your best bet is to see if your laptop can be expanded with an additional (internal) SSD. And if that's not possible, just use the HDD for your games.

 

S.

[Bonnot]

Thanks for infos !

That gives me more insight... I'm not on Steam for IL2, think the size is about the same ?

I'll wait  for subscribing BoN....

Thanks again,

[Voyager]

@Bonnot Having Normandy or not won't impact the game size; the install has everything on it as is. 

 

If you are needing to migrate between a HDD and an SSD in the laptop form factor, if you can open the computer, you should be able to use a USB to SATA adapter to clone the HDD onto a much larger 2.5" SATA SSD, and then simply swap the HDD with the SSD. 

 

Basically, get the SSD and the adapter, plug the SSD into the laptop with the adapter, clone the drive (depends on method) and swap drives. Most SSDs come with cloning tools too. 

 

I moved my Steam library to a SATA QVO drive, and my flight sims to an nVME drive, and it works quite nice. Access to files is just faster than on my old HDD. 

 

That said, most of Il-2's load time is in CPU processing and UI stuff (start, wait, click, wait, click, rather than a one-button to load/log-in) so you probably won't notice a big improvement, but everything else is so much faster, starting from turning on the machine. 

[Jaws2002]

Yep. SSD's are more compact and faster. I'm on the second generation of SSD's. I had a pair of Crucial M4's for quite a while, but 512GB+256GB was no longer enough, so about two years ago I swapped them for two M.2 NVMe drives. A 1TB 870 Evo plus and a 2TB Gen4 Aorus. 

They take little to no space in the case and had no storage issues since I got them,.....No matter how many 50GB patches DCS throws at me. ?

[Bonnot]

16 hours ago, Voyager said:

 Having Normandy or not won't impact the game size; the install has everything on it as is.

Thanks for your help,  I'm puzzled by the size of the games and how they grow or retract...I didn't worry for that  before because on HDD there was room for all and RoF or Arma 2 were running well...

Looking at the last upgrade with Mossie, Arado etc.... it effectively not take more space , but records and screenshots does : by moving all to HDD archive I managed to get 63 go free _ which looks enough to wait before migration and hardware changes  - what WIN 11 and IL3 will require is another story...I hope !

Thanks to all friendly advices  ?

[Bonnot]

Thanks to Sasha, Voyager, Jaws.....

I downloaded this morning and effectively it had no effect  ( after the big last update )

All those birds are wonderful , just wait for the DDay fleet, balloons etc... I wonder were are all those maps, monuments, airfield etc...  Cloud ???