# Can an ssd speed up a mechanical hdd?



## stoggs1 (Mar 2, 2019)

So something I have noticed since I have started using an ssd is that my mechanical drive seems to load games and applications a bit faster now.

The increase isn't huge, but I noticed games take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds less to load than they did before,  this is from my 2 tb hybrid drive.

So can an ssd make your hard drive run a bit faster, or would it be because I have a paired with a faster cpu and better motherboard?


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## eidairaman1 (Mar 2, 2019)

stoggs1 said:


> So something I have noticed since I have started using an ssd is that my mechanical drive seems to load games and applications a bit faster now.
> 
> The increase isn't huge, but I noticed games take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds less to load than they did before,  this is from my 2 tb hybrid drive.
> 
> So can an ssd make your hard drive run a bit faster, or would it be because I have a paired with a faster cpu and better motherboard?



Os on ssd is best idea as with games head doesnt have to thrash with paging etc


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## timta2 (Mar 2, 2019)

stoggs1 said:


> So something I have noticed since I have started using an ssd is that my mechanical drive seems to load games and applications a bit faster now.
> 
> The increase isn't huge, but I noticed games take anywhere from 5 to 15 seconds less to load than they did before,  *this is from my 2 tb hybrid drive.*
> 
> So can an ssd make your hard drive run a bit faster, or would it be because I have a paired with a faster cpu and better motherboard?



That's not a mechanical drive (it's a combination of mechanical drive and SSD) and hybrid drives do caching.


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## stoggs1 (Mar 2, 2019)

eidairaman1 said:


> Os on ssd is best idea as with games head doesnt have to thrash with paging etc


I have my os on the ssd, I use the 2tb sshd for storage alongside a 1 tb hdd

I have noticed loading times on some games that I have installed on the 2 tb ssd load 5 to 15 seconds faster than what they did before when I was running it in my old pc which did not have an ssd and was running a slower cpu.


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## hat (Mar 2, 2019)

Assuming you had just the mechanical drive before, and you added the SSD and then installed your OS on that, and left your games on the mechanical drive, that alone could explain faster load times. An OS is quite a heavy application, and it's constantly reading and writing on that disc. Putting your OS on an SSD instead not only grants you the enormous benefits from having the OS on an SSD (with much faster reads/writes and nearly non-existent access times compared to a hard drive), but it also relieves the hard drive in question of that load, so when trying to load a game off of it, it could load faster.

That said, you've also mentioned you're comparing these load times between not only adding the SSD, but also on a completely different system "faster cpu and better motherboard", so it really comes as no surprise.

It's also worth noting that you can indeed use an SSD to make a mechanical drive run faster, by way of using it as a cache for the mechanical drive using something like Primocache. A traditional SSHD works in the same way, but with a much smaller SSD cache, on the order of 8GB or so. With Primocache, you could add a 512GB SSD, for example, to a large disk like an 8TB drive, if you wanted to. This gives you enough space to install all the games in the universe, but the SSD cache will still be large enough to intelligently store your most commonly used games in the faster SSD cache. That means it could be 6TB full, and then you install the new 70GB CoD game. It might be "slow" the first few times you launch it, but once you launch it enough, it will find its place in the SSD cache, and then things will speed up... until you get bored with the game and find a new favorite, which will then find itself in the SSD cache, ejecting whatever the least used data which currently exists in the cache, if it's full.


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## FordGT90Concept (Mar 2, 2019)

Bare in mind that a hard drive head can only read or write in a single place at any given time.  By having a dedicated hard drive for gaming, it is no longer being interrupted by other operations (e.g. writing log data for some driver) which results in more bandwidth being available to the game to load what it needs to load.  As eidairaman1 said, faster because of less thrashing.

Even in SSHD, the SSD component doesn't make the HDD faster; it just gives it a bigger buffer.  That said, having a bigger buffer can allow the HDD to optimize operations (e.g. reduce thrashing by waiting for full write operations to be completed to the SSD before writing the data to the HDD--many small writes SSDs love becomes one big write which HDDs love).


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## stoggs1 (Mar 2, 2019)

Thanks for the information I appreciate it.

This is my first ssd and I love it, and I love learning new information.


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## hat (Mar 2, 2019)

Speaking from experience, an SSD doesn't help all that much with games. I already had a 128GB SSD for my OS, and that was great... but when I got _another_ SSD to put my games on, that was... not so great. I noticed no difference in games like Stalker, Borderlands 2, and Supreme Commander 2. That said, I'm also a bit of an oddball in that I don't play all the latest games that may well benefit from an SSD, so it may matter more than it did back in 2013 when I got that SSD to store my games on. At the time, I might have been upset about spending over $300 on it if I wasn't making serious money being slammed with 72+ hour work weeks...


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## Wavetrex (Mar 2, 2019)

It is possible to actually combine a HDD with a SSD (for example with AMD StoreMI, or Intel's RST, or a 3rd party solution like PrimoCache.
It varies in simplicity of installation and tech skill required, but the end result is quite significant gains in speed.

Until recently* I used such a solution to speedup my workflow, as large SSD's were simply too expensive, and I can say from first hand experience that this "caching" magic is simply amazing.
My personal solution was PrimoCache software, using two-tier (Level 1 cache = RAM, Level 2 cache = SSD).

After the software was trained a bit on my usage patterns (aka, putting on SSD the most commonly used blocks, and also preloading RAM cache after boot), everything became blazing fast, every program and game loaded as fast as it could, even if they were stored primarily on the HDD.
It literally results in "the best of all worlds", huge HDD storage capacity combined with amazing speeds of SSD and insane speeds of RAMdrive.

*Today I simply have only NVMe drives and have no need for multi-tier caching.
Still using RAM cache, because... well, I already have the license for that program, might as well use it. But the speed gains are not that visible anymore, as NVMe is simply ridiculously fast by default.


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## Shambles1980 (Mar 2, 2019)

rst does work, but it works better if you also have your mechanical drives in a raid array.


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## Vario (Mar 2, 2019)

@stoggs1 which games are you noticing improvement on?

In my experience, running games and OS on SSD makes a big difference for certain games such as Battlefield games or GTA V/Online.

If you are running games on a HDD and running an SSD for your OS, I would say you will get some improvement in load times for games that store large save files and downloaded online worlds to your SSD's C:\user despite the main game directory being on the HDD.  Examples might be FiveM, Skyrim, Rimworld.


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## newtekie1 (Mar 2, 2019)

stoggs1 said:


> I have noticed loading times on some games that I have installed on the 2 tb ssd load 5 to 15 seconds faster than what they did before when I was running it in my old pc which did not have an ssd and was running a slower cpu.



It is loading faster because you have a better computer.


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## stoggs1 (Mar 3, 2019)

Vario said:


> @stoggs1 which games are you noticing improvement on?
> 
> In my experience, running games and OS on SSD makes a big difference for certain games such as Battlefield games or GTA V/Online.
> 
> If you are running games on a HDD and running an SSD for your OS, I would say you will get some improvement in load times for games that store large save files and downloaded online worlds to your SSD's C:\user despite the main game directory being on the HDD.  Examples might be FiveM, Skyrim, Rimworld.


Doom, Far Cry 5 and Bat Man Arkham Knight all load a good amount faster than what they did on my old pc.


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## John Naylor (Mar 3, 2019)

An 7200 rpm SSHD test out at about 55% faster than a quality 7,200 rpm HD (i.e. WD Black) in Gaming.  Our 'standard' build includes at least 1 SSD and 1 SSHD.    On budget builds, we will install an SSHD with OS on it's own partition.  ... anticipating that user will add separate SSD when budget allows usually putting OS on SSD and keeping the old OS as an "emergency spare".

Of course how old ya HD is will make huge difference.

Boot Time....

SSD = 15.6 seconds
SSHD = 16.5 seconds
HD = 21.2 seconds

The impact on gaming depends on how you play.   

My 2nd oldest son mostly one game at a time .... after the 3rd load or so, all the "frequently used files" sit on the SSD portion of the hybrid drive at which time, the game will benefit from the SSD portion's extra speed.  Son No. 3 OTOH, plays 4 or 5 games every day  ... he benefits significantly less.    They both played on our test bed on which has (2) SSDs (2) SSHDs and (1) HD and can boot off of any of the three via BIOS setting.  We have 5 users for 6 weeks, we changed the boot drive  without anyone's knowledge ... no one noticed.  We played games off the SSD and the SSHD, no one noticed.  When ta sat down with a stop watch differeces were readily apparent ... but when not paying specific attention to it, was hard to notice mostly because the user is doing other things while game loads, (launching discord, taking headphones off charger and putting on head, loading game related web sites, etc)


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