Can someone clarify why the fastest SSD don't have impact on gaming load time ?
I and my wife play Sims 3 with all expansions pack (33.5GB) plus tons of custom contents (56.6GB) So that is already close to 100GB. Will NVME SSD really improve experience from normal SATA SSD in these kind of game ? because my SSD in the sig still take around 3 minute to load very large house (HDD can take 5-7 minute).
I have been test with i7-3770K @ 5.3Ghz 4 years ago and try to measure scaling from 2.5Ghz , 3Ghz , 3.5Ghz , 4Ghz , 4.5Ghz , 5Ghz , 5.3Ghz and found good scaling (higher Ghz = Shorter loading time). Not sure if this proof that CPU is a bottleneck rather than storage.
There are two variables in data transfer: throughput, and latency. Throughput is how fast a storage device (memory, SDD, HDD) can transfer data, the higher the better; latency is how quickly a device can respond to requests to transfer data (in other words, how long other parts of the system have to wait before the device begins sending the requested data) - the lower the better.
Hard drives have poor throughput and terrible latency. Comparably, SSDs have many more times throughput, but orders of magnitude lower latency. This is why going from an HDD to an SSD is such a noticeable change. On the other hand, an NVMe SSD's throughput is again many times that of its SATA brethren, but its latency is almost the same.
Why does this matter? Because the majority of data transfer workloads that occur on consumer PCs involve large numbers of small files. That means latency, not throughput, is the limiting factor, and is why going from a SATA to NVMe SSD is not going to make much of a difference to the average consumer.
The reason that you saw better loading times with higher CPU clocks is due to the fact that a program never just "loads" data - it loads and processes it into the format it needs. When you were using a HDD, the loading took far longer because the HDD's high latency was the bottleneck; the CPU probably spent as much time waiting for the HDD to serve up the data, as it did processing that data. With an SSD's lower latency, the CPU was now able to get the data it needed far more quickly, which means it can spend all its time processing instead of some of its time waiting - and thanks to the SSD, that processing time is now the bottleneck.
