I have a 1 TB Samsung EVO 850 boot SSD with Windows 10 Pro v1703 installed on it plus four 7,200rpm SATAIII hard drives totalling 9 TB; three for games (2x 3 TB + 1x 2 TB) and one 1 TB drive for internal backups. I also have 3x USB 3.0 hard drives (4.5 TB in total) connected for external backups but I do not install games on them. I have noticed that some games that are installed to the hard drives seem to take an agonisingly long time to load; I'm taking about 2-3 minutes or more here. For example, The Surge can take around 1 to 2 minutes to resume a save game or when going to a new area but literally seconds when moving between areas that I'd already been to during that game session. Restarts after dying are about 2 seconds too. DOOM is another game that took 2-3 minutes just to load to the menu then that again to resume a save game. I moved this game to my boot SSD and the loading times to the main menu were under 15 seconds and it loads a level in less than 10 seconds! A huge difference for sure. Quern: Undying Thoughts is another Steam game that takes 2-3 minutes at least to resume a save game. Most other games though have loading times that are under a minute. My question is, not having access to another PC whether these loading times are normal for the games or if there's an issue with the way my PC is set up. The only comparison I can make is with my Xbox One and PS4 Pro, which both have 5,400rpm laptop drives but I haven't come across any game on those systems that had loading times as long as the ones I mentioned. I even have DOOM on PS4 Pro and its loading times (from a 5,400rpm hard drive, remember) were much quicker than those of my PC when I had the game located on my 3 TB 7,200rpm hard drive. Is there something amiss with my setup or is it just the nature of mechanical hard drives these days when dealing with games that are 30-50 GB in size? Obviously, installing games to an SSD gives the quickest loading times but it isn't practical for me to install everything there even on a 1 TB SSD. How can I check if the loading speeds of my hard drives are normal?
Disk benchmarks? Sometimes games work without certain features like cache files. For example "Wolfenstein: The new order" can use cache files but it can`t create folder for them, and users can help by creating folder manually. Games should load so many info at the start - rendering stuff, maps, scripts... I often see that HDD indicator is not lit whole time while games start.
Run atto 3.05 to check performance across different file sizes.. But it's probably 'ok'. I have all my games on SSDs as game loads can be atrocious on HDD
Yeah as Agent-A01 said, just put the games you are currently playing on the SSD. The loading times are SOOO MUCH BETTER it's unbelievable sometimes. Remember, no moving parts in an SSD so it's quicker to access what it needs
