Test participants

HDD Seagate BarraCuda Compute is one of the most popular hard drives, which does not lose ground even under the pressure of constantly falling in price SSD drives. Designed for home and gaming PCs, as well as office systems. Memory capacities range from 500 GB to 8 TB, in this case we chose the 4 TB model with a 256 MB memory buffer. For recording, BarraCuda Compute uses SMR technology, which at one time caused a lot of criticism, but still proved its reliability in the HDD segment.

SATA3 SSD Kingston A400 has gone through several upgrades. It was released back in 2017 at the dawn of SSD development and has been on sale ever since. It's a classic 2.5-inch SSD with universal SATA3 connectivity. On the plus side, the drive will make friends even with severely outdated PCs and laptops. The downside is the slow SATA3 bus speed (550-500 MB/s).

HDD versus classic 2.5-inch SSD and compact M.2 SSD.

PCI-E 3.0 Patriot Memory P300 is one of the most popular M.2 SSDs with support for the PCI-E 3.0 interface. Inexpensive, moderately fast with a solid IOPS indicator and a sensible dual-core controller by the standards of the budget segment. The maximum read speed significantly exceeds classic HDD and SSD drives, reaching 2100 MB/s.

PCI-E 4.0 SSD GOODRAM PX700 is one of the most popular M.2 SSDs with a fourth generation bus. Equipped with an advanced four-channel controller from Maxiotek, which got rid of most of the chronic diseases of the first SSDs with PCI-E 4.0. In particular, it relies on Host Memory Buffer technology to use system memory instead of expensive DRAM. Because of this, it is not so susceptible to speed drops when transferring large amounts of data.

Test bench

All tests were conducted on a high-performance system with a separate system drive from Kingston KC3000, which will not limit the performance of the drives, but will be used as a system drive. It is assembled on the basis of a brand new 16-core Core i9-14900F with an advanced, but far from the most expensive motherboard ROG Strix on the Z790 chipset and a flagship cooler Deepcool Assassin 4th revision. A pair of DDR5-6200 modules from Patriot was used as RAM. Efficient graphics processing is provided by GeForce RTX 4070 Ti SUPER with 16 GB of video memory.

Internal hard drives

Loading times in games

How much faster will an SSD with PCI-E 4.0 be than its competitors in games?

As last time, 10 popular games of recent years will take part in the test, including Alan Wake 2, Baldur's Gate 3, Cyberpunk 2077, Diablo 4 and Forza Horizon 5. The main thing is that the games are resource-demanding and belong to different genres, from RPGs to shooters and adventure games.

Below you can see the table with the average game loading time. In it we will see significant differences in game loading times between different types of drives. In some cases the difference is especially impressive. Overall, PCI-E 4.0 SSD provides the fastest loading times, highlighting the significant improvement in data transfer speeds compared to previous generations of SSDs and traditional HDDs.

From the general analysis of loading speed, the results in The Last of Us, Starfield, Forza Horizon 5 and Alan Wake 2 especially stand out. These games clearly benefit from the use of fast modern drives and, on the contrary, suffer from the sluggishness of classic hard drives. In Starfield, the difference in the loading time of textures into a regular HDD and a PCI-E 4.0 SSD is about 70 seconds, and Last Of Us generally takes almost 4 times longer to load on an HDD. In Alan Wake 2, the difference of more than 70 seconds highlights how using more modern SSDs can improve the overall gaming experience through faster loading times.

If all the results are averaged, it turns out that HDD takes 44.25 seconds longer to load games on average than a regular SATA3 SSD. Compared to PCI-E 3.0 SSD and PCI-E 4.0 SSD, the difference in loading time is even more significant: 46.42 seconds and 48.45 seconds respectively. Note that PCI-E 4.0 SSDs offer the best performance, reducing game load times to a minimum compared to other types of drives. This makes them an ideal choice for gamers looking for the fastest game loading times and overall system performance.

SSD M.2

How does the drive affect the smoothness of gameplay and FPS?

In addition to loading speed, the drive also slightly affects the average FPS.

The initial purpose of the test was to measure game loading speeds. However, during tests we found that in some games a faster drive can have a beneficial effect on FPS, so we decided to measure this indicator as well.

In short, an SSD with PCI-E 4.0 can add a few more FPS compared to conventional hard drives and legacy SSDs with SATA3 interface. For example, in A Plague Tale: Requiem at maximum settings in Full HD resolution the advantage of a top SSD over the base model can reach 10%. However, when the resolution is increased to 2K and 4K, the difference decreases. An even bigger difference in FPS is observed in the game Hogwarts Legacy. And in Cyberpunk 2077 HDD, on the contrary, was 2% faster than all test SSDs.

In general, the situation changes noticeably from game to game and largely depends on the novelty of the game driver and its ability to work with modern technologies. However, the difference in FPS between PCI-E 3.0 and PCI-E 4.0 drives in most games is insignificant, making detailed analysis and conclusions difficult. To simplify, gameplay will be a bit smoother with a faster drive. And this will only increase in the future.

2.5-inch SSD

Conclusion

On the one hand, the results are quite clear: HDD is noticeably behind in loading time compared to modern SSDs. To make matters worse, in some cases HDD can lead to small stuttering, slowdowns and freezes, reducing the smoothness of gameplay and overall FPS. On the other hand, in many games the average FPS does not change in any way, but the average loading time of the game itself increases, plus more time is required to load safes, but we are not talking about hours or tens of minutes, but about an extra 40 – 50 seconds. At the same time, high-capacity hard drives are many times cheaper than NVMe SSDs of the same capacity. For example, the test Seagate 4 TB costs around $100 hryvnias, that is about $50 per terabyte. In Kingston A400 and Patriot Memory P300 one terabyte of data costs a little above $50, and for 1 TB of memory in the advanced GOODRAM PX700 you will have to pay almost $100.