Will load times improve if I keep my games on an external SSD vs my windows drive?
I have an Acer nitro 5 gaming laptop, and it came with windows on the hard drive . But I had an m.2 ssd at home and I attached it to my laptop. So now I have windows on my hard drive and an unused ssd as well. So thinking as per performance (fastness ,loading speed) I was wondering to put my games on my ssd rather than my windows installed hard drive
- Will it load faster on my separate ssd rather than my windows installed hard drive?
- Do you think putting my programmes on the ssd as well will give higher speeds (programmes such as winrar and Corel draw, photoshop etc.)? Thanks in advance .
Solution 1:
The basic idea that you get better load times on an SSD than on the main HDD has a kernel of truth to it. I do this on my laptop: I have a hybrid drive that has both an HDD and SSD, and the SSD is reserved for Blizzard and Steam games, while everything goes on the HDD. I see load times in Skyrim go from minutes to a handful of seconds, which is awesome.
However, we can't possibly tell you whether you'll achieve this result. There are bunch of unknowns here that can change the answer:
- Exact motherboard version
- Version of motherboard firmware
- Exact SSD
- Version of SSD drivers
- How many things are running concurrently with your game
- How complicated the game is (Example: for some small indie game with very little art, you'll see negligible increases in performance, but for very large AAA games you'll likely see an improvement).
- Your GPU (your load times might not see an improvement if the GPU doesn't allow textures and models to be sent to it quickly enough)
- And much more....
In the end, you just need to try it. With the information here, none of us can possibly know the answer.
P.S. Your second question is off topic here, but the answer will likely be similar to whatever result you achieve from the first question.