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Moving from HDD to SSD


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With more and more large and huge PBEMs in progess I am getting increasingly annoyed with long loading times.

I have therefore a question to those who have moved their CM2 install from HDD to SSD. Does it bring any significant reduction of loading times? If so, how many percent approximately? Is it possible, like in the case of operating system, to just move the CM install from HDD to SSD, without reinstalling from scratch?

What other factors influence loading times and what are the other possibilities of reducing them?

Thanks in advance for any input..

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My experience with moving from a 7200 rpm regular drive to a SSD was that the SSD made very little difference in CM loading times. Perhaps 10%.

When I upgraded to a new MB/CPU/video card (I7 3.5 GHz and Nvidia 680) it probably cut my loading times in half.

So, if you want to cut CM loading times down, and you have an older generation CPU/video card, you will get much more improvement from a CPU/graphics upgrade.

On a side note, my SSD lasted less than a year before it "bricked". It was an Intel brand. I ****canned it, and bought a 2TB 7200 rpm regular drive for about $100.

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For what it's worth, my 3 year old laptop which is less powerful than my desktop (which has a 60GB "Pagefile" drive which the techies told me would speed up file transfers etc.) but which has an SSD seems to load faster than my desktop. It's been very reliable - it may matter that you get a good SSD brand rather than bargain basement. Next desktop, I plan to have an SSD (240GB+) for my OS and most demanding games and a 500GB-1TB 10K HD as a backup.

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I'm using HDD rather than SSD, but when loading large scenarios or saves, my disk drive is mostly idle. Which suggests that using an SSD will make no real difference to how long loading takes.

My admittedly sketchy understanding is a lot of the "loading" time isn't booting the game but rather setting up for the CPU calculations. In other words it isn't reading from the hard drive at that point.

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To clarify, a few months ago, the only thing I changed on my old core 2 quad system was removing the 7200 rpm hard drive and adding an Intel brand SSD. I noticed very little improvement in CM load times after doing this. I did notice a speed increase in boot up times and I noticed speed improvements in load times of other games.

This leads me to the conclusion (similar to sburke) that when you are watching the Loading bar in CM, the bottleneck is not your hard drive.

When I got a more modern CPU/video card, the CM load times were very noticeably reduced.

YMMV

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