With the recent price drops for NAND Flash-based disks, the euro / gigabyte ratio is getting closer and closer. We know that the difference in performance between this type of disk and a traditional HDD is very wide, but how does this affect loading times in games? And above all, what difference will there be in loading times?

M.2 NVME vs SSD vs SSHD vs HDD: substantial time differences

When choosing a disk we always have the question of whether to go for capacity or for performance. In many cases virtue is in the middle, but it may be that at the moment of truth what on paper pointed as a sensible option, in practice is not at the same level.

Therefore, what better way to compare the loading times in real and demanding environments such as games, where not only the performance in MB / s prevails, but also the access times and the interface used.

For this, 4 contenders have been compared: Samsung 970 EVO, Kingston V 300, Seagate Firecuda SSHD ST1000DX002 and Seagate Barracuda ST500DM002, all of them under three games such as Watch Dogs 2, Rust and GTA V.

Watch Dogs 2

In Watch Dogs 2 there is a moderately short difference between the first 3 candidates for the title, since the Samsung 970 EVO achieves a figure of 13,444 seconds, while the Seagate SSHD rises to 18,865 seconds, a difference of 5,421 seconds that seems be narrow.

If we look at the percentages we will see that there is a world, since between these candidates there is a 40.32% difference in loading time. If we make the same comparison between the Samsung 970 EVO and the Barracuda the difference amounts to 214.76%, a world.

Comparing the two SSDs, the difference is reduced to 7.44%.

Rust

In a game like Rust, due to its optimization, we can expect the figures to be much higher and where a good album can and should make a palpable difference.

In this case, the Samsung 970 EVO achieves a time of 1 minute and 4 seconds, being six seconds faster than the Kingston SSD, 1 minute and 42 seconds faster than the SSHD and 2 minutes and 8 seconds faster than the HDD traditional Seagate.

Percentually speaking, the M.2 is 5.76% faster than the SSD, 236.53% faster than the SSHD, and 300% faster than the Seagate Barracuda HDD.

GTA V

One of the best-selling games of all time is undoubtedly GTA V, which after years of its staging both on console and on PC continues to collect at levels that other games and studios would like.

Your great optimization and good work should reduce the gap to lower levels, right? let's see.

Again the Samsung 970 EVO manages to rise with the crown of speed, but in this case by a narrow margin over the Kingston V 300, although it again takes advantage of the two Seagate drives, where curiously between them the differences are minimal.

Thus, the M.2 NVMe achieves a percentage difference of 4.04% compared to the Kingston SSD, a surprising 187.64% difference compared to the Seagate Firecuda and 193.27% compared to the Barracuda.

Conclution

There is a more than palpable difference between an M.2 NVMe and a traditional HDD, and although this is not surprising if it can be revealing when purchasing a disc for our games, since these tests are a simple example of what happens while we play.

Let's not forget that most games use technology derived from RAMCaché, exporting textures to RAM memory and in some cases to disk, so speed and access times can be decisive for certain settings such as post-processing.

If we focus on the comparison between SSD and M.2, the differences do not reach 10% in any case, hovering around 6% on average.

In this case we will have to look at the specific models to choose from and above all their GB / performance / price ratio, since it will be the determining factor to decide.

With the price drop suffered in these two types of disk, the choice of an HDD or SSHD to play every day is less justified based on the data seen, so if we do not need a large space that triggers the price of disks based In NAND Flash, it is more than advisable to opt for the latter based on what we have seen.