Yeah, ssd is definitely faster, I’ve noticed that myself. But i think you have another bottleneck somewhere as it takes me less than 10s to load regardless of area or server load. My rig is not top of the line, I have a 3.4ghz Intel 15 processor with 8gb of ram and a gtx600 video card. I have all my settings on max.
I assure you I dont have a bottle neck of any kind, my rig is also pretty much top of the line 3770k @ 4.5 GHz / Nvidia 680 / MSI z77a-gd65 / 16gb ram etc etc…..
It was amazing how much an SSD effected the loading times in gw2 ive never really appreciated it till when I saw the results haha.
10s for a HDD to load any part of the game regardless or server load ?? Are you sure ?? Thats one dam fine HDD you got there son
No it’s an ssd and my rig is behind yours so I’m not sure why you’re getting longer load times than me, I was even thinking about upgrading to the i7 from my i5. My only other thought is maybe I’m closer to the server than you, or am getting better routing? Do you know your ping times? I get 20-30ms for the most part.
i7 BARELY performs better than i5. Stick with it.
Good to know, thanks.
I 7 has 4 cores plus 4 part cores. Unfortunately GW2 seems to be single threaded. That means the only performance gain is the difference in clock speed. If it was fully multi-threaded then there would be a performance boost.
Did they mention that defragging an SSD will kill it?
No it won’t. What it will do is cause extra wear for no advantage.
Old HDs use a disk that has to turn to read the next piece of information, if the data is scattered across the disk then the time taken to move between pieces builds up significantly.
Older SSDs do have an issue with writes ‘wearing’ locations, but not with reads. Each location on an SSD can only take so many writes before there is a chance it will be damaged, although this is many thousands of reads per sector. To stop this modern drives have an integral routine to mark sectors that have been written to when freed. It will then assign a new sector to the reference the OS thinks it is writing to. This massively reduces the issue but means that the computer isn’t writing to where it thinks it is. There is no way for the defrag program to make files continuous like it can on a disk. Nor is there any way to compact the programs to the fastest part of the disk, there isn’t one anyway. Because of this defragging is effectively useless and can be detrimental to the life of an SSD.
I would suggest anyone getting an SSD also switch off indexing in windows and move things like swap files to a second, normal HD. If you have enough real memory then this can be switched off completely too.
For that matter deleting data from an SSD is problematic, even with a specialist program. It will write over where it thinks the data is stored but is more than likely to miss it completely.