**The Impact of Storage on Gaming Performance: A Test**
In today's video, we're going to explore the impact of different storage configurations on gaming performance. We'll start with a hard drive, which is considered the slowest option, and work our way up to a high-end NVMe Lexar drive.
Starting with the hard drive, we measured its read and write speeds at around 130 megabytes per second. This is a relatively slow speed compared to other storage options. To put this into perspective, let's consider how long it takes for different drives to load games.
First, we loaded The Last of Us on a SATA SSD, which took 22 seconds. While not an eternity, this shows that even with faster storage, game loading times can still be significant. Next, we moved on to a PCIe NVMe drive, which reduced the load time by half, taking only 11 seconds.
Things got even better when we switched to the high-end Lexar Drive. We measured its speed at around 12.63 seconds, which is incredibly fast compared to other options. Forza also benefitted from this super-fast storage, with a significant reduction in load times.
However, there was an unexpected issue with the Lexar drive. Despite its incredible speed, it performed slightly worse than the normal NVMe drive. This was likely due to the heat generated by the graphics card, which affected the performance of the drive. To test this theory, we installed Windows on a separate drive and re-tested the Lexar drive. Unfortunately, the results were identical.
To confirm our findings, we purchased another high-end NVMe drive from WD and tested it against the Lexar drive. The results showed that the WD drive loaded faster than the Samsung NVMe drive, which further solidified the benefits of using a super-fast NVMe drive.
Finally, we took the super-fast NVMe drive and put it in an external USB-C dock to see how it would perform. Unfortunately, this resulted in one of the slowest load times, even slower than the hard drive. This was likely due to the limitations of the dock, which was only PCIe Gen 3, whereas the drive was Gen 4.
In conclusion, our test shows that using a super-fast NVMe drive can significantly improve game loading times and overall performance. However, it's essential to consider the limitations of other storage options and devices, such as hard drives and external docks, which can impact performance.
WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enin terms of storage's impact on gaming performance going from an old hard drive like this one to an SSD like this gives you some fat reductions in load times but these days even one of these sat ssds is a pretty sad lowly pathetic loser little storage configuration in 2024 storage like this Beast Lexar drive that has speeds measured in the kind of number an anime protagonist would shout at their enemies is relatively accessible for now but to what extent do our game loading times benefit from that accessibility well I guess we'll find outtoday in terms of storage we're going to slowly work our way up the drive totem in today's video starting with hard drives at the bottom some SATA SSD action a common God an nvme thrown in there as well before we get to the Big Daddy nvme Lexar drive and I'm also going to throw in some external SSD caddies for that high-end nvme Drive which I get comments about a lot and it's honestly one of the main reasons I'm doing this video now on paper there is a huge amount separating these drives the hard drive that I'm using for this test measures reads and writes about 130 megabytes per second all the way up to the Lexar drive that hovers around 7,000 which is more than 50 times as fast so I'm curious to see how much that translates into real world performance and then finally before we get into the tests the test system I'm using is the EP nimron back here I just wanted to give the drives the maximum Headroom possible in terms of CPU I've got a 13900 KF we've got an RTX 4090 in here and 32 gigs of ddr5 running at 6,000 MHz but with that let's connect our hard drive and do somewaiting so let's see how long the Last of Us takes to launch off a mechanical Drive 3 2 1start stop okay about 28 seconds that's not too bad in terms of Graphics I'm going to use an ultra preset at 1440p for whatever that's worth uh so with that let's see how long it takes the Oldtimer to load into the game World 3 2 1 startwhoa 2 and 1 half minutes this is clearly the storage configuration for you if you get some kind of sick pleasure of making strangers wait for you to load into online lobbies and I'm also going to do a benchmark run to see if it impacts our in-game performance I'm pretty sure it won't considering that the loading is the game going from the SSD to the Ram I think um but we'll do it we'll do it just in case oh damn the 4090 does really Clap the cheeks of this game at 1440p Ultra we're getting well over 120 frames per second even though it did just dip below that once I mentioned it uh but this is buttery smoothness I then moved over to Forza Horizon 5 to see how the H handled a massive open world game 3 2 1 startwho just shy of 2 minutes which is actually faster than the last of us weirdly but that's so long next I swapped the old hard drive out for a SATA SSD long understood is the sweet spot for game load times 3 2 1start ooh look at you Mr Speedy Gonzalez that's fast test 3 two onestart wa it took less than a tenth as long damn you really shouldn't be messing with hard drives anymore that's outrageous now not that I was expecting to but in terms of gaming performance once we've loaded in it's exactly the same which why wouldn't it be but but still let's see if Forza benefits as massively well I mean this time it's not quite a 10th to the speed so you know that's a win for the hard drive I guess next I'm going to drop this common Garden PCI gen 3 Samsung nvme drive that's a real mouthful into the m.2 slot on the motherboard here and see if we get any additional gains on top of what we got from the SSD I'm kind of thinking it's going to be the same but we'll see 3 2 1 start ooh half a second faster launch time nvme you spoil us although when it comes to game load times we did get a pretty big reduction in load time but again if you have a SATA drive it's not like 22 seconds is an entire lifetime but you know faster is always better and then of course in terms of frame rate margin of error type stuff going on here and then when it comes to Forza load times on the normal nvme okay not as big an improvement as the last of us but it's something next we're going to try the big boy Lexar Drive which is currently hiding under the 490 and also has the windows install on it which I don't think is a problem a few moments later wait a second why is the super fast nvme slower than the slower one is it cuz of the windows install oh and the other disadvantage the super fast nvme drive has is that it was right under the 4090 which was just dumping a bunch of heat onto it like it's kind of hot to the touch okay so it's been a while and now we have a fresh Windows install on an impartial third party and the Lexar Drive in the same slot we had the slower nvme in before so hopefully this time it's at least the same speed as that other Drive wait the retests on both the results are identical that is kind of weird being very confused as to why the two results aren't at least the same I went out and bought another super fast nvme drive to see what it does okay so the WD drive loads faster than that normal Samsung nvme which means I I don't know what's wrong with that Lexar drive but there does seem to be some benefit going from normal nvme to Super nvme 12.63 seconds wow so Forza also likes the crazy speed of that WD drive so now that we've established that there is some benefit going to one of these super fast nvme drives let's drop it in an external USB caddy and see how much damage that does to its brittle little knees now now the cad in question is this Silverstone ms12 which as far as I understand it is at least a mediumBeast now I'm going to start off by plugging it into the fastest Square USB port on the motherboard two onestart stop well that gave us the second slowest result behind only the mechanical drive and not even by that much I then tried three different Square USB to USBC cables which all gave that same result but then I decided to try USB C to C 2 1go oh okay that's way better now it's similar to The Standard nvme Drive which makes sense considering that I think this dock is just pcie gen 3 as opposed to the Gen Gen 4 of the drive we plugged into it so the moral of the story is don't use hard drives or Square USB because Life's too short and going to super fast nvme drives actually kind of helps depending on the drive which brings me to the end of the video thank you for watching until the next videobyeyeah