HDD vs SSDs – Gen 5 vs Gen 4 vs Gen 3 vs SATA vs HDD

Now I’ve got my hands on a PCIe Gen 5 SSD – review of this Crucial T710 in the cards above by the way – I thought it was time to answer the question: does SSD speed even matter? I mean, I hope we all know that the speed of your drive doesn’t affect in-game performance like FPS, save for maybe some stuttering in open world games on like hard drives, so all that’s really left is loading times, so let’s test one of each speed out. First, let’s meet our contenders, starting with the old fogie, the hard drive. This is actually the first drive I bought for my PC back in 2012 – and I was an idiot about it. I bought two mismatched 500GB drives USED on ebay, this WD Caviar Blue and a Seagate Pipeline drive, and ran them in RAID 0 AS MY BOOT DRIVE. Young and dumb, I swear. Anyway, moving up in the world we have a SATA SSD from Gigabyte, also 500GB. For a Gen 3 drive we have an Intel 600P – also 512GB. Gen 4 is a Sabrent Rocket 4 Plus, this time 2TB, and for Gen 5 we have the Crucial T710, also a 2TB. 

Just so you know where these drives sit in terms of speed, I ran Crystal Disk Mark on all five drives. I’ll flash the full results up on screen briefly so feel free to pause if you want to look at the complete results, but I’ll give you the key points. The hard drive, as you might expect, isn’t amazing. While some HDDs can peak up to near 200MB/s, this one is on the slower side at 126MB/s on reads and 123MB/s on writes. The SATA SSD is a lot faster at 562MB/s on reads and 519MB/s on writes, which isn’t too far off the max a SATA SSD can generally offer. The Gen 3 drive isn’t amazing though, at 1.8GB/s it seems great, but Gen 3 drives can do up to 3GB/s so this is on the slower side, and the writes at just 545MB/s is equally poor. You’ll see why I didn’t swap this drive out soon. The Gen 4 drive though, that’s full-fat. It’s running 6.9GB/s on reads (nice) and 6.7GB/s on writes, and the Gen 5… corr… It’s rapid. 14GB/s on reads and 13.2GB/s on writes. For context, the Gen 5 drive is 110 times faster than the hard drive. 110 times! Tech moves fast, huh?

So, when it comes to the games I picked, these are games that I actually play, that have noticeable loading times that might actually affect your experience, and that fit on the 500GB drives – which turns out is a challenge these days. Cyberpunk, which is what we’ll start with here, is like 90GB! Anyway, I’m gonna start off simple here with the hard drive and the SATA SSD. These two are a straight replacement, as in you can replace a hard drive with a SATA SSD directly, so let’s see. These two clips are lined up, so let’s load in and… oh, the SSD is already done! That took just 7.3 seconds, but the hard drive? Yeah that’s still going. In fact I’m gonna need to keep talking for another five seconds, because that took a whopping 34.7 seconds! That’s a very significant difference, and that sort of loading time happens fairly regularly within Cyberpunk. Loading in to cutscenes, lifts, new buildings. Gaming on a hard drive would suck here. Now seeing as how dreadful that hard drive is, and five videos don’t fit on a screen nicely, I’m gonna drop that to show you the four SSDs together. And go! If I’m honest, you’re going to struggle to see much of a difference here. The SATA SSD was maybe one second slower, but there wasn’t exactly much in it. In fact, to put those results on a graph, while the drives all do line up as expected, there is just 100 milliseconds between the Gen 4 and Gen 5 drive, only 300 milliseconds from the Gen 4 to Gen 3 – and remember it’s a very middling Gen 3 drive – with only one extra second added from the SATA SSD. Just 1.3 seconds between the slowest SSD and the fastest. Hardly game-changing.

For loading simulator – sorry Starfield – I can’t, in good conscience, show you the entire HDD loading time clip. It took over three minutes to load, so once the SATA SSD has loaded – that took 18.8 seconds in total – I’ll speed up the clip so you can at least get an idea. I think it’s safe to say I know which drive I’d rather be playing from here, as loading in to Starfield is just unmanageably long on the hard drive, especially when you have to face loading screens every five seconds in Starfield. Alright, that’s enough of that, let’s look at the usable drives. Thanks to the loading times being a little on the longer side the spread is at least just about noticeable. The Gen 4 and 5 drives finish functionally at the same time, with the mid-tier Gen 3 drive coming in like two seconds slower, and the SATA SSD taking another two seconds. We’re only talking between 14.5 and 18.8 seconds here, so it still isn’t a night and day difference like the hard drive to solid state jump is. But, seeing as how Starfield is very much a loading simulator, I thought I’d throw in a mid-game load. A fast travel from New Atlantis to space, and that’s a lot faster. The hard drive crashed when I tried to do that, so I’ll skip that one and focus on the SSDs. But, like, blink and you miss it. All three M.2’s are functionally identical, with on the SATA SSD being a tiny bit behind – but I do mean a tiny bit. Here are those results in graph form. Like I said, the initial load-in is just a 4 second spread, with the Gen 4 and Gen 5 drives being for all intents and purposes identical, and even the mid-tier Gen 3 drive taking just two seconds longer. As for the mid-game loading, well that’s again functionally identical across the board. Maybe the SATA drive’s extra 0.9 seconds might add up over the thousand loading screens you’ll see in Starfield, but otherwise? Any of those will do just fine.

Lastly there’s Helldivers. I’ve had a bunch of stuttering and loading time differences loading into a new world and mission even on my main system, so I figured this’d be a good one to test out, and amazingly even the hard drive did kind of alright here. I mean sure, it’s 10 seconds slower than the rest of them, but only 10 seconds is quite the record here. We’re talking 33 seconds of loading time, versus 24, from pressing ready to being in control of the drop pod. That’s not horrendous – I mean SSDs are cheap enough that you really ought to not be gaming from a hard drive these days, but it sure looks like SSDs don’t offer the same incredulous advantage they do in Starfield and even Cyberpunk. Now let’s look at the SSDs, and here you are really, really going to struggle to notice a difference. In fact, there is just 0.7 seconds spread between all of these results. Seriously, that’s it. Less than a second! It sure seems like so long as it’s solid state, Helldivers really doesn’t care what drive speed you’ve got. I think that’s all the drives done now, so let’s look at that in graph form. See, they all may as well be running on the same drive – save for the spinning rust anyway. 

As a bit of fun and interest, I’ve got the totals here, and again the hard drive is terrible, but between SATA, Gen 3, Gen 4 and Gen 5, there’s under 10 seconds across three games and four tests. There’s a little jump from SATA to the middling Gen 3 drive, but after that you really are getting diminishing returns. While time is money, considering you often double the price of the drive going a generation up, I don’t know that these results would make me spend all that extra cash on a Gen 5 drive, or hell even a Gen 4 drive if a good Gen 3 drive was considerably cheaper. Happily it does look like Gen 4 drives are about the same price as Gen 3 now – a 2TB drive is around £100, with some closer to £80 – so I think that’s the sweet spot right now. But if you are still gaming on a hard drive, well it might be time to think about switching over to solid state. It’s more reliable, quieter, and a hell of a lot faster. I’ll leave some links in the description below if you do fancy an upgrade.