Learn how to play games on a solid-state drive (SSD) to reduce loading times and improve your gaming experience.

When building or buying a new gaming PC, storage choices are important. But judging the performance impact of different drives isn’t as simple as checking benchmarks on a new CPU and GPU.

It’s easy to wonder: Is “SSD gaming” noticeably faster than “HDD gaming”? Are there other benefits to SSDs besides faster boot times?

To answer these and other questions, let’s look at some storage basics and explore the impact storage has on gaming.

Why Capacity Matters

Capacity is the first spec you see when looking at a storage drive, so let's start there.

You need a lot of space to play modern PC games. Install sizes have been increasing in recent years, with recent games like Call of Duty: Modern Warfare taking up over 200GB on its own.

Why are game install sizes increasing? Part of the reason is that they have more high-resolution assets, such as 4K textures, which take up more memory. Although developers use image compression algorithms to reduce the size of stored assets, more high-resolution textures still means more space is used. For example, the Unreal 4 engine specifies that a single 4K texture can take up 10.6-20.3MB of space when using supported compression.

Games vary in how they compress art assets, video, and audio. Because decompressing assets like audio files puts more work on the CPU, developers sometimes choose to use uncompressed assets (increasing install size) so that their games run smoother on less powerful machines.

While not every game takes up as much space as Modern Warfare or Red Dead Redemption 2 (150GB), AAA game install sizes will likely continue to grow as asset quality and complexity increase.

Given that Windows 10 requires 20GB of space, it’s easy to see how some smaller drives (such as a 256GB SSD) might be nearly full after installing a single AAA game. Regardless of which storage solution you choose, you’ll probably want at least 500GB of primary drive space if you want to install multiple new releases at once.

Beyond that, it comes down to personal preference. Some gamers only want to install a few games on their gaming PC at a time, while others need several terabytes of space to manage their game library and save their gaming highlights.

HDDs, SSDs, and Gaming

SSDs generally outperform HDDs for gaming because they excel in key performance metrics like random read and write speeds and overall reliability. We'll explore some of the reasons for this performance gap below.

HDDs

HDDs use moving parts. Inside an HDD, an actuator arm moves in a circular track on a spinning platter to retrieve or save data.

HDDs have slower random read and write times than SSDs due to the arm's seek time and the platters' rotational delays. When playing games, these delays can mean longer waits for individual levels or assets to load, as well as brief stutters and freezes while the game pulls new assets from disk.

SSDs
SSDs are integrated circuits with no moving parts. Instead of using magnetic media, most SSDs use NAND flash memory, which has higher read and write speeds and lower latency than HDDs.

When you upgrade from an HDD to a high-performance SSD, the benefits are immediate. Your PC boots faster, games launch and levels load faster, and games experience fewer glitches when pulling assets from storage.

If you want to learn more about the specific differences between HDDs and SSDs, check out the full guide.

Benefits of Using an SSD for Gaming

SSDs are becoming more common in gaming PCs and will be standard on the next generation of consoles. The reasons for their widespread adoption are obvious:

• Faster OS boot times. Installing an SSD means less time waiting for the OS to boot before playing games or doing anything else. New PCs with SSDs typically boot up in a fraction of the time compared to HDDs. The superior data transfer speeds of an SSD can save you minutes of waiting time.
• Faster loading times. The most notable difference between an SSD and an HDD is the time you wait for a game to load. The benefits are clear: an SSD can save you minutes of loading time per game, which can save hours of waiting time in the long run.
• Smoother gaming. Many games perform thousands of tiny read and write operations as you play, which can result in hundreds of megabytes of data being transferred. Upgrading to an SSD won't boost your FPS, but it can improve some open-world games where the game engine loads new areas and textures as you play. On an HDD, the seek time of the read/write arm and the rotational latency of the disk beneath it are responsible for the lag that causes these glitches. In contrast, SSDs have greater bandwidth and lower latency, helping to quickly access requested data and avoid failures.

In the past, game developers were often limited by the capabilities of HDDs. Since cross-platform games also had to run on HDD-bound consoles, developers were unable to fully exploit SSD speeds.

The next generation of consoles will change this — both of which use NVMe SSDs. In addition, technologies like Microsoft's DirectStorage API let games make more I/O requests. This means creators can now finally scale their games to the capabilities of NVMe drives, rather than building around I/O bottlenecks caused by slow storage.

This means open game worlds will see more objects, thanks to larger asset streaming budgets. Parts of levels designed to slow players down — like narrow hallways or elevators — may no longer need to hide the loading of new textures and areas.

These technologies portend a future where the benefits of NVMe are fully exploited, which will have a significant impact on the gaming experience.

How to Choose the Right SSD for Gaming

As developers begin to take advantage of new I/O pipeline technologies to harness the bandwidth of NVMe devices, installing a new NVMe drive will have a noticeable impact on gaming performance. Upgrading will also ensure compatibility with new technologies, further enhancing the experience.

While finding the right CPU and GPU is key to any PC build, SSD selection is becoming increasingly important as well.