143 thoughts on “Comparison of HDD and SSD for World of Tanks”

1. Very interesting stuff. Thanks for sharing.
   WOT will stay on HDD, I just wait for WG to pull their fingers out when it comes to optimization.
   Months ago, they said they can’t do shit about it. Look at the situation now, most of the squad is working on optmization and they are releasing a patch only focus on this. That was another strong bullshit.

   • ” I just wait for WG to pull their fingers out when it comes to optimization.” ….. ha! good luck with that wait..

     i’ll just for SSD’s to become cheaper, which im sure will still be before WG pull their fingers out and hire qualified programming staff, as im quite sure at the moment they are using a combination and customer support staff and monkeys, to carry out the “optimization” tasks.

     ….mainly the monkeys

     • Are you implying that customer support isn’t “manned” by monkeys?

       • Hahaha. Made my day.

       • Yup, he is. They’re all bots, guessing from the replies you usually get when attempting to talk with the support. Well, except for the janitor.

         • hey, without the janitor we probably wouldn’t have game at all..
           considering his main skill is with a mop and bucket, he ain’t done too bad…
           SerB really needs to send him on a programming course tho ..smh

           bunch of Bots, monkeys and a janitor..sad sad situation IMO

2. Good stuff. I run WoT from two (64gb) SSD’s in RAID 0, but fancy just getting a single larger SSD to fit the OS on too. Just a note, though – the HDD’s are listed as SATA2 – I think you may get even better performance (but not as good as full SSD maybe?) with a SATA3 hybrid drive.

   • Are you running the raid 0 through your normal SATA3 controler of the mainboard or do you have a extra raid- controler connected to your pci-e slot? If the first, you have up to nothing from your raid 0: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-raid-benchmark,3485-13.html

     • Nice link, thank you for that. I’ve learnt something new.

   • It doesnt fucking matter, if you use SATA II or SATA III especially when using HDDs. Even the SSD used above isnt able to saturate SATA II with random read/writes.

     • Thankfully, not all my data transfer from the array is random read / writes, and throughput definitely exceeds SATA 2 bandwidth, so for me the point is an important one. And to answer the other question, yes definitely both drives are at SATA3 (at least according to Intel’s SSD tool) .

       • will there be big difference in loading os or WOT if ill have ssd connected to sata2?

         • prob not
           you need to try but would you go for SATAIII if its 0.5 sec faster then SATAII?
           if so you better go configurate what programs start on windows startup and wich programs are allowed to run in your background all the time makes much bigger difference and cheaper

         • Compared to what? A hard drive? A SSD on SATA 2 would definitively be faster then a hard drive.

   • running SSDs on RAID0 is completely and absolutely useless and a waste of a SSD

     • True, but if you have money to spend on nothing, then that’s one way of doing it.

     • To an extent I can understand why people would do it in certain circumstances.

       It’d allow you to use two older smaller SSDs to combine their storage capacity, it could be the difference between holding all your games in one partition or having them all over the place.

       There are of course the obvious downsides that if either fails your stuff is gone and in the SSD case almost no performance gain but still. It isn’t always a total waste :)

3. Wow WG should take not of this o_O

4. I’ve noticed that poor RAM management a couple of patches ago, when WG introduced a shitload of new and heavy assets to the game. Since my laptop has a slow 5400RPM HDD, I suffer from tons of lags. Usually the sound starts to stutter terribly and sometimes some textures are missing for a split-second. All this happens when the WOT process uses less than 1GB of RAM and I’ve got 1,5GB of free RAM visible in the task manager.
   The issue becomes worse when I open even one Chrome process in the background. The game is completely unplayable then.

   • you should get more RAM and maybe a sshd
     or new laptop (or go use PC)

     • What’s the point if I’ve got 4GB of RAM overall and the game does not use more than 1GB of RAM? The laptop is two-years old and not bad even today, it performs well even in a range of new games.

   • Same here, I can play wot normally in my laptop but when a I try to listen music o just opened chrome the HDD take 100% usage and the game gain 500 ping…this problem kill me since the 8.9.

     4GB RAM – 500GB HDD 5400rpm

     • try use firefox cus chrome opens multiple processes or dont listen music on same PC as u play wot on. dowload music and play with offline media player

       • Use of line-in could work as well and use an external device to play the music (would allow you to keep an eye on the songs and manipulate it without alt tabbing as well).

         Alternatively you could try a music player that plays songs on a local harddrive (preferably not the same your OS and games are installed on, but given that it’s a laptop probably no options). Regarding the music player, I personally prefer foobar2000 (it’s both good and has a very small resource usage but that isn’t really an issue anymore in this day and age)

5. >“res/awesomium” renamed

   This does nothing according to my own testing. It’s just more “advice” by idiots that know better, the same kind of idiots that tell you to run without swap.

   Please do not perpetuate myths from the retard cesspool that is the official forum.

   • It did help me before the last hotfix with loading times. I even took time to measure it. We have no idea what it does within the game and how it interacts with other software, it’s completely possible that computer 1 will see nothing and computer 2 will see some effect.

   • This helped tremendously for me on the fps stutters.

     You assuming that because it doesn’t help you means it doesn’t help anyone would put you in the “idiots that know better” category.

6. Useful, thank you : D

7. Using SSD will make sure that you get 1st on the map (load times are fckin fast) and have a lot more than 30 seconds to troll people :)

   But, make sure to put replays folder on HDD, dont waste space on SSD. Use some program to make symbolic link

   • using SSD and i actually hate to be ingame already while noone is in yet… its such long wait if u see a timer on ur screen saying 0:46 when get ingame

8. My OS is on a SSD, but I’ve got WoT on a 10000 RPM Raptor and have never had any significant problems with lag. Maybe the RPM speed of the HDD could play a factor?

   As an aside, I have another 64GB SSD that has become “freeze locked” and I can’t reformat it. Does anyone know how to do it?

   • I have a similar issue with my OS- ssd. Can’t make a virus- scan or a backup without crashing the PC. Seems to be due to damaged sectors on the disc No idea what to do other than exchanging it. Perhaps try some emergency- OS based on linux. There are a couple of them out there with already prepared disc- tools. You can even boot from an USB- stick.

     • https://communities.intel.com/thread/29424
       I think they described the solution quite briefly

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10. RAM is much easier to upgrade compare to HDD or SSD, so player will probably have more RAM for their PC. WG should make the change to make WoT have increasing FPS

    • You can herpa derp RAM into your machine for WoT as much as you like…the game still will not use more than 1.5GB of it unless you make it LARGEADDRESSAWARE….. :P

      • Well, you could always patch it if you need to

    • I can see WoT process go up to 1.2Mb but not much larger, does anyone know if the client is 32 or 64 bit?
      If it is 32bit, they have a problem and thus they cannot cache anymore in memory. So buying more memory does not help, likewise having 4 CPUs does not help when playing this game.
      It is probably not easy job but they may have plenty room for performance improvements.

      • Of course WoT is a 32 bit program.

11. SS, you have lost such bissuness opportunity. You should make contract with one of SSD vendors to place their brend in this topic!

    Now I’ll buy something I’ll find by myself.

12. I’ve got a 1TB SSHD Hybrid from Seagate, 8GB cache, loads Windows and WoT with ease.

    I’m always in the battle with the “Awaiting other players” message before the 30 seconds countdown.

    Helps that I only ever play WoT, have an overclocked i5 3570K and 8GB RAM too.

13. thank god i have ssd :D

14. I agree, WG should try to make a 64-bit client instead and push more things to RAM, 8GB is standard todays, WoT rarely uses more than 800MB and i play at 2560×1600, im guessing just because non 64-bit programs have a bit of an issue to use a lot of ram without crashing.

    • More than half of Russian playerbase plays on computers, that are very poor (dualcores or even singlecores, 2GB RAM, old GPU’s), by doing that you are cutting them off. Noone in their right mind would do this.

      • SS: Are these players paying? Or, without money for hardware in the first place are they NOT paying for stuff ingame? I understand it is about popularity and PR, but the definition of “right mind” in this circumstances is, well…
        It’s time to slowly rise requirements, step by step, not looking back.

        • Adding new graphics, HD tanks, sound and Havok can’t be made with the current system requirements.
          Sooner or later WoT will increase the requirements in the official way. Right now it does it with apparently botched patches.

      • Even if they do have weak computers, 64-bit processors are a standard for over 6 years now. All of the AMD Phenoms/Athlons and Intel Core2Duo and Quad and all the later models are 64-bit.

        But than again, if they are using WinXP, which is 32-bit, 64-bit application is useless to them.

        • Well, if M$ themselves decided to push Windows7 on 32bit and support this platform as mainstream, it’s quite obvious that everyone would follow…

15. Where does World of Tanks cache too? Does it have a cache (other than the Dossier cache files)? Its possible that if it does you could speed up the game by putting said cache on a RAMdisk. Even putting the Dossier cache files on a RAMdisk may have an appreciable effect.

16. Please tell me which i can upgrade, ssd or ram?? I have 4gb of ram and no ssd now. plz. What upgrade is best for fps :)

    • It depends on the rest of the system too. An SSD will speed up things immensely.
      Right now it seems an SSD for WoT and RAM for everything else regarding the FPS.

    • SSD, with putting swap on SSD. You will see huge difference, not only when playing.

      • I will buy a 128gb ssd and put windows and shit WOT in ssd or just OS? Idk plz tell me.?

        • Everything, including swap file. SSD has virtually same latency for every sector and multiple reads won’t slow it down with transfer increase you get.

          • Never! Put the swap partition on your SSD. You have limited read/write cycles and it will slowly decrease the available memory.

            • On older SSD this was a problem, but not anymore. This have been testet, and even if you load and delete files in a hige pace over a loong time it’s still no big effect on the memory of the SSD because the read/write cycles are much larger now than before. It’s still not as durable as a HDD, but a new SSD has no problem of 10 years of hard use. I have used SSD from the “early” days and some stil works, other dont. I got one that i bought for 5 years ago 128gb, and it’s still 128gb after hard use.

17. I’m pretty sure that the lag spike when being hit the first time is because of “lazy loading”: To save RAM, not all data is loaded into RAM at the beginning of a round, just a minimum to get started.
    On certain events (like being hit and a sound is needed or something happens on minimap and another graphics is needed), this and only this resource gets loaded into RAM and stays there (meaning: it doesnt have to be loaded into RAM again, its availalable at once from now on).

    The reason why programmers to this: The resources might not be actually needed by everyone, so preloading them into RAM would be a waste of space. Imagine a scout hiding into some bushes the whole round … he would not need any hit sounds at all.

    BTW, buying an SSD was the biggest speedup my pc received in years (not just gaming). I’m running Windows 7 64b and WOT from SSD, I can really recommend this: It WILL speed things up (in my case mainly loading time of WOT and maps, my fps stayed almost the same because of my ol GFX card …).

18. What graphic settings Am3r1knu used during testing?

    • Resolution: 1920×1080, full screen, Vertical sync Off, FOV 105, Saturated color filter at 50%.
      Details: Graphics: improved, Texture quality: maximum, lightning quality: medium, Shadow quality: low, Additional effects quality: high, Sniper mode effects quality: high, Flora density: no, Postprocessing: no, Terrain quality: medium, water quality: medium, vegetation quality: maximum, render distance: high.

19. another very useful solution is to make virtual links to SD card.
    literally get a 64GB sd card, copy wot data (not the exe.) to sd card and make virtual links in wot folder.
    game will load those files from SD card. since sd card is not mechanic, random access time is much much better. the SD card will act as mini SSD disk. its cheap and effective. the only problem is that you need memory card reader and you need some basics from command line to create the links. google it.

    also.. this helps only for random access of small files like effects in the test example. loading something big will take more time. depends on the SD card speed.
    for example it will take 5 seconds more to load the máp, but there will be no stuttering at all.

    • Then the flash memory must have good reliability and read/write speeds. Otherwise it would have barely any effect.

      • its not abot read write speed, its about random access times.

        read write speed will affect when loading HD model for example. its a single file of 50megs. then yes, slow sd card is not a good thing.

        but if we look at explosion effect or a sound effect, that file is really small, but it takes ages for HDD to find it and access it.
        it all has pros and cons, but worth trying.

        I had about 50 fps all max but sometimes it dropped to 30 or even less for a second when something exploded. this fixed it. I dont get more than 50, but it doesnt drop that much anymore.

    • its called symbolic link.

      if interested, heres quick how to
      us.battle.net/d3/en/forum/topic/5149178443

      its guide for diablo game, but the principle is the same for WOT.
      it really works, but it only eliminates fps drops and stuttering. it will not increase maximum fps you get when the game runs smooth, it will only eliminate sharp fps drops.

      • Also, make sure the SD card is not getting hot as it might get damaged or the card reader to fail.
        I have experience with SD cards and they get hot during data transfer so running a game from one might not be ok for a lot of memory cards.

      • OK, sounds fair. I could try it at one point.

        Tnx for the heads up and clarification :)

    • You’d be better off buying a SSD, moving your OS + WoT on the SSD and launch it from there.
      It’s much faster than SD Cards and considering the size (120 GB+) they are almost the same price.

      • If its only for WoT it is enough to move the packages folder to the SD/SSD. In the current patch thats around 12GB. I have a old 32GB SSD in my system, since I did this in my system the microlags were completely gone.

20. Well, it’s no brainer that SSD will help a lot. I adivsed one to a friend of mine and the difference was even greater – the weaker and older computer, the better it is.

    Other “tricks” to boost your comfort of playing are:
    1. Increase wot thread priority (of course you already killed all big apps in background, especially flash-heavy browsers with many tabs, :P).
    2. Use spaces mod with same quality loaded for max distance – prevents lags when switching into sniper
    3. Running swap/system/wot from separate physical disks is an obvious one. Good one is to have separate partition for swap only on the begining of a large disk (old general trick, lowest latency).
    4. Killing wot and restarting every few battles – this game has serious memory leak problems…

    Unfortunately you can’t do much (besides buying SSD :P ) to improve horribly organized preloading assets. It sometimes IS mindboggling – if you can’t afford certain standard of hardware it most likely means that you are NOT paying a kopieyka in this game, thus income from you playing is below zero – so, why not raise requirements a bit every now and then…?

21. Would be nice to see tests with other SSD’s.

    A quick google search and i found out that the EVO drive is kinda expencive against any other SSD of it’s tier. I personaly don’t think that the Evo drives are that good compared to others, just because it runs faster doesn’t mean it’s more reliable and has a better life span.

    Just my 2 cents, correct me if i’m wrong.

    • Commenting on the life span of an SSD is pointless now. The current generation of SSD’s is basically new so no ageing tests were made. Unlike the HDD that is around since the ’80′s.
      Also, using that Samsung Magician software creates a life span of at least 10 years for the SSD.

      Also, the Samsung EVO 840 with 120gb is cheaper than an Intel 530 120gb by quite a lot and they are both relatively new and similar in performance.
      The Samsung 840 EVO has higher starting speeds but Intel is faster during sustained transfers.

      • Yeah but buying and SSD JUST(!) to have a single game run a tiny bit better is kinda stupid. That is why I asked for it.

        I mean spending about 100 US dollars for an SSD just so 1 fucking game runs a tiny bit better is stupid.

        • No, you could put your OS on the SSD and then move/re-install WoT as well. More benefit for you ;)

          But bear in mind, that WoT is only going to grow in size as HD models will be coming in so 120GB might be not enough in the not so distant future :P

          • My biggest and the best Computer upgrade is SSD with OS on it. No any upgrade c2d to i7 or anything are eaven close to compared HDD changing to SSD.

            and in this case also Wot on SSD =)

            • This ^^^^^.

              So many people fall for marketing BS. The single biggest REAL LIFE gain to your computer usage comes form upgrading to an SSD and getting a bigger, better monitor. Those things you see and feel every day when you use your computer.

              Other things, if we are not talking about upgrading a 6 year old component, you stick in the case, feel the difference for a couple of days then forget about them.

              • SSD upgrade feels like a small % gain when you do it apart from boot times.

                But once you have done it an old drive just feels sooooooo slow you will never not run a PC without an SSD again :)

            • Exactly. Because right now the data transfer bottleneck is the HDD read/write speeds.
              The further removed from the CPU/GPU/APU one gets, the slower speeds get, and currently SATA 2/3 specs are too great for the time it takes the platters to spin and the heads to access the relevant bytes…..
              And, upgrading the weakest link in the chain is the smartest choice.

22. I have been playing WoT for over 2 years but since latest patch performace is a disaster

    Solution for me is simple. I started playing War Thunder Ground Forces and guess what, no performace issues, better graphics and more realism for advanced player

    Money wise Ground Forces is much cheaper game giving you much more in return

    I feel silly to have spend my money on WoT but then it was monopoly

    WoT arcade battles don’t teach you anything about real tanks

    BTW For The Record should start covering Ground Forces

    Game is still new and rough around the edges but where it matters most it’s pretty good

    • And what this have to do with the post about SSD boosting performance in WoT?

      • I believe it is called “viral marketing”.

    • You must have not played WT yesterday, it seems. If you have, I call bullshit.

    • Probably you have been away from WoT too long, for performance was crapped since 8.11

      I’ve been playing War Thunder, both flying thingies and rolling thingies. It didn’t impress me much. it HAS performance issues, it HAS microlags (not as often as WoT), and it COOKS my laptop (I’ve registered up to 97°C while playing, usually from the 3rd battle onwards, and I’m using a cooling base).
      Graphics-wise, I won’t care to discuss. I play both games on minimal settings, and WoT requires me to compress textures 75% to get half the FPSs that WT outputs. But certainly no game can have “impressive gaphics” on minimal settings, even at 60+ mas FPS gameplays.

      On the realism…. yep, that’s exactly the divide between WoT and WT.
      Wargaming has created games with comprensive HUDs and lots of information, good for newbies and not-hardcore gamers.
      Maybe we DO like that approach, and the barebones and ultra-realism approach from Gaijin is not what rocks our boats. Also, their crew management is FAR from realistic.
      It’s good that WT has the option for people to step up their gameplay, but some of us have no such tastes.

      Now, WT has the AWFUL design choice to give out “distributable experience” and then HOLD IT BEHIND A FREAKING PAYWALL!!! That Experience was GAINED IN-GAME. Keeping it ransom for eagles is the worst shameless-est-er PAY ME! signpost.
      If the game is going to reward me with some candy from playing fine, having to spend cash for that same frigging thing is a slap to the face.

      And really I don’t care much about “learning real tanks” while I play.
      WoT has sparked in me a certain interest in armored warfare, but for learning I come here and search the forums and look into Wikipedia and Achtung panzer!, so….. no, thanks, getting a 200-words rendition about a plane is not what I’m looking for while I open the “details” tab for my death-dealing vehicle.

      If SS starts covering WT, it will be fine.
      If he keeps on covering only WoT, it will be fine.
      If you want to learn from both, look for The Mighty Jingles. He’s a nice player, has intelligent and informed opinions, knows how to talk, how to analize gameplays, how to laugh during games and commentaries…..
      FTR covers a major hole in information-flow for WoT. It allows an international crow to access early information and answers directly from the devs, which would normally be unaccessible due to us not knowing russian. IF WT had the same issues, then a simmilar channel for translations would be needed. But I guess it’s not required for the time being.

      You say WT is rough around the edges….. WoT, although it has more performance bottlenecks, also is “rough around the edges” (gameplay-wise, I enjoyed it from 6.4 until 8.10).
      Both games are different beasts. Both were designed with different goals in mind, and should be regarded as not equal.
      And when AW comes out, we’ll have yet a wholly different game with wholly different strengths and weaknesses and wholly different roughnesses around the edgesses. And those who like it more will move there.
      And those of us who fancy all three games, we’ll play them all.
      Competition is good for the customer, and I hope WoT grows stronger from it. If it manages to voercome the “make WoT more like WT” requests and develops into a full-fledged game and resolves the crappy coding (bottlenecks, performance drops, breakneck release calendar that spits out one crappy release and requires the next to fix it, lack of new content, tank tree madness, model fuck-ups….), WoT will be rolling around for some more years.
      And it will be the ancient competitor that the other games use as baseline to meassure if they’re good or not.

      • I just read this and I am amazed how you managed to do it. NIce wall of text, great arguments a brilliant taste and sense of humor. Kudos!

23. I don’t run with an SSD but I do have a Core i5 3570, 16gb of RAM and GF 660 Ti.

    For me, the game usually loads into battle in less than 5 seconds (First battle or two sometimes take longer).

    I think it’s worth noting that the performance testing done above is a little shallow. I would be more interested to see what kind of a difference the SSD makes in a low-spec system (E.g. The laptop I used to run WoT on which had only 8gb of RAM and a Radeon HD 4570 GPU).

    • The above test was done mainly to confirm a theory of mine with what hardware I had.
      I took advantage of the upgrade to an SSD to test it out.

      Testing it on a wide range of computers implies having either the components or access to those computers and messing with them for a few hours.
      I have neither the time or the components for what you mentioned. But anyone is free to do the test on whatever computer or components they have access to. :)

      • Thank you so much for your time man.

      • :-/

24. Or you could just install WoT on a RAM disk/drive provided you’ve got 32GB+ of RAM. Way faster than any SSD to date.

    • That is probably the best approach … good point

    • I found this link regarding installing RAM Disk software, I hope it helps someone:
      http://blog.laptopmag.com/faster-than-an-ssd-how-to-turn-extra-memory-into-a-ram-disk

      • Considering that 16GB is actually enough for WoT and comparing that to SSD prices, this is actually quite the deal. :D

        • WoT is currently 13-15 GB, so that is good enough for now.
          As the size increases from HD models and textures, it might require up to 64 GB. I doubt the game would increase to even 50 GB.
          But as DDR4 becomes widespread and 16+ dimms become affordable, that will be possible too.

25. 1) A lot of people who have WOT installed on HDD, will have even worse HDD model than the nice and fast WD Black of Am3r1knu’s rig. So that means even bigger difference in FPS compared to SSD.
    2) As a long term SSD user, I can approve, that SSD gives huge advantages in all kinds of loading and access speeds, not only for WOT or other games, but everything.
    I have never ever had a single lag or FPS drop due to file loading and maps usually load in couple of seconds.
    Had a case once, that WOT crashed after I had just loaded in the match, and I even managed to relaunch client, relog in it and got in the same battle faster than some other players.

    So, if you have the options – install OS and WOT on SSD, you will feel the difference!

26. Steps for WG:
    1. Upgrade to the 64 bit of BiGworld
    2. Multi core
    3. Ram usage.

    *Since some (not that many) Russian players are morons and are on 32bit, include a link to 64 bit version of Windows.
    They WILL NOT BUY IT ANYWAY. Put link of torrent.

    • JAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJAJA

      I’d prioritize it all in reverse. RAM first, multicore/multiGPU, and then 64-bit engine.

      32-bit computing is still too common in emerging economies, and if someone’s hardware is old enough that it can only use 3-4 GB RAM, then it probably is old enough to not support 64 bit XD

27. a couple of issues I noticed with this test:
    one: running the game and OS from SSD – since he had the OS on the HDD, he could’ve just copied the game to the SSD, the improvement would’ve been more noticeable
    one other thing hecould’ve done – moved page file to SSD

    two: running in window mode – NO NO NO!
    I’m also noticing he had resource monitor as current active window – NO NO NO, just no!
    that screws with the game’s process tremendously, invalidating the test

    • 1. I wanted to eliminate the HDD completely from the ecuation.
      2. I guarrantee you that my performance was the same with or without running in windowed mode. Also, the resource monitor was the active window ONLY when that screenshot was taken. Mind you, I did not want to take a screenshot of my entire desktop.
      Another thing was that the Resource Monitor kept reseting the data if I ran the game in fullscreen and then Alt+Tab’ed to see it.

      • hai salut o/

        there are other software that monitor CPU load and framerate (using FRAPS) but run in background – I use Hwinfo

        to eliminate HDDs from equation, you would’ve needed 2 SSDs ;)

        • ps: also, you didn’t said if the OSes were freshly installed or one was older – in kinda’ matters

          • Well, yeah….. assemble, install the OS, install the game, run the tests, rinse and repeat.
            A more thorough test would be testing the difference from HDD, then OS on SSD, then OS and paging file on SSD, then everything on SSD, and making a 4-way comparison.

            Though, I guess that would require around a week for preparation, execution and data analysis….. I wouldn’t be able to run such tests.

28. hm, how big is wot atm?
    thinking bout outting it on a ram disk i am..
    In a meglomatic attack i bough 16 gigs for my rig, maybe now they are usefull at last (nearly 3 years later).
    mfg eX

    • The kit is 7.8 but the client is ~19 gb.

    • Without updates, res_mods, replays and screenshots folder it is 13,3 for me.

    • Think 15 GBs now and slowly increasing to 35 as tanks are upgraded to HD.
      So, currently that RAM would allow you to store the game, but then you’ll need 2-4 more to store your OS.

      Though, with 16GB dimms in the near future and astronomical limits for DDR4, a RAMdisk might be still a viable option in a not-too-far future ;)

29. I wonder why people actually are still using HDDs for OS and games. SSD gives such huge performance improvement in anything you do on PC. I keep HDD only for file storage and anything that needs to be run often is installed on an Intel 335 SSD. Very satisfied. And to be honest when everybody was having those problems after last few patches I did not have a single glitch.

    And SSD prices have become so affordable in recent year and so.

    • people are not running it because its quite expensive compare to hdd but I guess you always had lot of money to spent on pc but most of the players don’t have that opportunity.

    • affordable? no they aren’t
      for the price of a 120Gb SSD you can buy a 1Tb hybrid SSHD

      • that’s odd zmeul, I have an SSD in my computer, 128gb size, and somehow I also paid for it.

        Do you work yet? Like take money for it work?

        • oh I’m sorry
          do you know what else can you do with ~100$? BUY FUCKING FOOD for my family, also you can pay bills

          • Here’s an idea: As long as you have to consider food for your family or a new computer part, maybe you shouldn’t be having a family yet.

            • I should’ve been an orphan then, OK …

    • SSD prices are not affordable IMO. A good SSD with 120GB will only be enough for OS, Woflfenstein new order 50GB, WoT 20gb and Watch Dogs 25 and maybe BF4 30GB+. And with the upcoming games that ALL will be developed around the 50GB Blu-ray discs, you better stockpile on SSD’s now if you want to install more than 2-3games on it.

    • I think when people in Britain or other relatively well-off countries upgrade, they probably do buy them. But realistically speaking, for most of us when we build a new computer, it’s about compromise. Personally I can’t afford (and don’t want) to spend £1000+ on a new rig, given how casually I game.

      So if I were to go for a relatively a 240GB SSD, that’s £90-120. For the same price, I can buy a 2-4TB HDD, with “comparable” statistics. People are always going to go “bigger, is better!”.

      I’ve used just over 300GB on my laptop. With what, you might ask..? I have no idea :P And I guess that’s the thing about SSDs, people think “oh, but I’ve nearly filled my 500GB HDD, how can I use less space? Because you only use the space you have. But that’s by-the-by. I’m looking at buying a decent rig that will cope with most of what I play. (which isn’t going to be Tom Clancy’s Division on full graphics). So I’ll compromise. But you’ll see the take up of SSDs very slowly. If you’re a gamer, you’re going to see the benefits.

      If you’re a casual gamer? Less so. When I build my rig, I’ll buy an SSD to run the OS, but probably have an HDD for everything else…

      • 120GB SSD is 80$ (or 70€ here).
        Actual size is 112GB.
        Windows takes up 30GB, programs and rest under 17GB. Leaves you about 65GB for those games you really need a SSD for.
        Minus 15GB WoT and you still have 50GB free.

        If you ever consider upgrading anything of your PC, upgrade your SSD.
        Or even better: when you buy a PC don’t buy one with the wrong drive in the beginning.

      • Yep. Installing on an SSD takes more savvy and know-how than just dumping the stuff on a 1-4 TB HDD.

        SSDs deteriorate with access, so you need to move the files and constant read/write out from the disk.
        Less-used programs and files should be in a HDD, be it a secondary drive on a desktop or a portable disk on a laptop.

        I’ll also get an SSD (120-250 GB) for OS, frequent programs and some games, and then store everything else on HDDs.

        Now, with future SSDs going over 1 TB, the need to get more than one will be reduced.
        Hope they also increase reliability, for even HDDs over 2 TB are less reliable than those under that mark.

30. noticed that a very long time ago. WoT is loading almost everything from the HDD dynamically. Uses less RAM then but it’s incredibly stupid when most computers today have 4 GiB of RAM or more. Surely makes for a fun experience on an older notebook. Fire the gun for the first time? Yeah let me freeze here for a bit, got to load the sound. Oh you just ran into 4 unspotted enemy tanks? Let me freeze for a while, you can play again after each one of them shoots you.

    • “Oh you just ran into 4 unspotted enemy tanks? Let me freeze for a while, you can go back to the garage after I load the explosions and minimap effects, when your tank is a smoldering pile of metal.”

      There, fixed it for you. ;)
      (yeah, I’m a light tank driver, heavies have a lot better survivability)

31. as somebody with enough RAM, I’ve actually done some testing of running the entire WoT client on a ram disk to measure loading times. I found that loading data from xvm was the biggest time user, so I didn’t continue. I should redo these experiments comparing HDD, SSD, and ramdisk.

32. Once you go SSD you never go back simple as

    • SSD’s are nice but far too unreliable. They can suddently go off and that’s it. Goodbye data! but anyway someone must be crazy to store important data on a SSD.

      Other than that OS and a few games is enough for a SSD.

      • And the same for HDDs the simple truth is any piece of technology and instantly break at anytime SSD are a hell of alot better and cheaper now than say 4 years ago. Also SSDs also have the added bonus of if they are dropped they will be fine which makes them far more suitable for laptops and tablets.

        Were a traditional HDD platters will be damaged the rule of thumb is once a HDD is dropped it can never be trusted ever again even if it functions 100% not the case with SDDs. I am a big IT guy and have worked with so many systems over the years SSDs rarely fail though there’s obviously unique cases. The main disadvantage of SSDs are the fact speed deteriorates over time.

        • Sorry but a simple googling shows many situations of SSD insta-fail flatout dead results. Also a friend of mine had a Kingston 120Gb. After 4months of use it suddently failed to work. The bios didnt even recognized it anymore, couldnt boot nothing.

          Dont know what IT guy you are, but HDD’s gives the user ALOT of about to break signs. They dont just go off like an SSD.

          Anyway SSD are good too but not there yet. Too size limited and too expensive.

          • SSDs are reliable enough. Suddenly failed to work? I don’t want to know what your friend did with it or why he didn’t buy a SSD from a reliable manufacturer.
            Size limited? I think 1TB is more than enough.
            And they aren’t expensive either. Yes, they cost more than a HDD but for that price they’ll boost your PC like no other component of it.

            • And even now manufacturers are preparing to release 4, 8, 16, 32 and 64 TB SSDs, so in the not-too-far future, these will be the data storage medium of choice.
              I can’t wait for the future to come :D

              • You and me both cant wait for the future. also I think it was Intel but someone is working on creating a way to reheat the flash chips on the ssd to fully restore to factory speeds after an SSDs speeds go down after years of use.

            • Thank you someone who understands. just because you have had a bad experience with a product or service doesn’t mean that that product or service is bad it just means you got unlucky.

33. HDD? cant remember when i used this. its so long time ago.

    • You’re the same if I go from using a SSD system to standard HDDs it makes me cringe how slow HDDs really are.

34. Testing game performance due to disk and using fraps? Guess what program use resources of disk

35. I made also some testing on how disk usage is done by WoT and made a post on official forum (sorry the post is in french, but the images talked for themselves, and google can translate it.

    It’s there: http://forum.worldoftanks.eu/index.php?/topic/389782-freezes-et-lags-la-piste-du-disque-dur/page__fromsearch__1

    My observation was that various pkg files are still loaded during the games (tank models, sound, and surprisly even map). In addition the temp folder supports a big activity of small tmp files during the game

    I’m not surprised then that a SSD improve the gaming experience, especially by limiting micro-lags done during the file access.

36. I think it’s pretty ironic that the piece of hardware that currently boosts FPS in WoT the most (the SSD), is actually the piece of hardware that Russian players are least likely to have. Dual core processors, 4 GB Ram, a video card that was made after 2010, that’s rather common even with second world nations now. But none of these things actually help with WoT.

    But the SSD noticeably increases performance and decreases load time, a piece of hardware two years ago was still a very rare piece of hardware people bought for gaming PCs in the developed countries and even today many people dismiss it as a luxury not really necessary, just to keep their budget down. I’d be surprised if more than 1% of RU WoT players have their client installed on a SSD.

    But this certainly isn’t intentional by WG, this is really just a side effect of their horribly backwards client and low RAM usage.

    • Yep, sloppy programming.
      I mean, why can’t they just upload the common assets (sound, tracer effects, explosions, reticles) into the ram every time one enters a battle? After all, there’s a loading screen, where one would expect the tanks and map to be loaded. Adding the common assets wouldn’t take even 1 more GB.

      Also, I guess there might be a way for the program to find out if there is enough sace for it on the RAM to lead it, or if resources are limited and then it keeps it on the HDD.

      Anyway, the data transfer bottleneck is ALWAYS the disk access rates, so keeping things that far away from the processing units is an inefficient choice.

37. So I bought a 64gb ssd awhile back and then realised I needed to run Windows 7 as well. What is the best way for me to use this SSD for WOT?

    I thought I could just use the SSD like a partition and load WOT onto it…..

    What is best way to install setup? Anyoine have an article or advice? Is it even worth it or should I just return it?

    • 64GB is a bit small but you can still do it.

      Install Windows and your common programs to the SSD.
      Your user folder (with images, videos, music,…) can be moved to the HDD. Google will help you.
      After that you should still have 15-20GB free which can be used for WoT. Just make sure you delete the WoT updates folder, it takes up like half the space of your WoT client.

38. Gawd, this game… Which monkey decided to program it the way it is? It’s a fucking mess through and through and despite (or maybe because) such questionable nods to outdated hardware, it’s a resource-hog like no other game…

39. Another option for those with 20+ GB RAM, a RAMdisk would allow for the game to load the assets into the RAM and then use its transfer rate directly into the CPU/GPU/APU.
    Currently, the game in my lap weights 14.6 GB, but when it grows to 30+ it would be hardly a viable option.

40. im not surprised by this at all . I have A SSD and a good PC i can load the map way before the counter starts. i feel sorry for people that the round has already started and they still haven’t made it into the round.

    looks like 2 SSD in raid 0 would be awesome as long as you back up your system

41. FFS!!!
    I have 2GB VRAM and 8 GB RAM. Freaking USE IT!!!
    Client isn’t using more than 1200 MB VRAM and 1GB RAM!!
    Preload all the files for all the vehicles that I’m in the current battle with!!
    I don’t freaking need an SSD!
    My partition is defragmented and I always get in the battle before 30 sec countdown starts.

    P.S.
    SSD didn’t caused fps spikes because smaller access time, 0.1ms SSD vs at least 16ms HDD(7200rpm).

42. As a person using a SSD, the performance is great.

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44. I am using SSDs since Intel came out with their great 80GB model. I had 128 GB crucial and now have 250 GB Kingston since then.

    250GB is finally feeling “enough” for OS and several games installed. Loading times are insanely fast (5 seconds usually) (also have 16 gigs of RAM – but You dont really need that with SSD) – so You will really be amongst 1st in game.
    With prices below 4000 CZK (200 USD roughly) – its a great deal, making Your work with computer way more efficient.

    And dont be afraid of known “fame” that SSD cells have limited write cycles. When I sold my Intel SSD (80GB) after 2 years of intesive playing usage – it had only 2.5% of its “life” used. So under normal conditions – You have absolutely NO chance to reach those limits. Maybe in servers which run 24/7 and write to disc a lot, but definitelly not in home computer.

    So my recomendation – go for combo 128 or 250 GB SSD + secondary regular HDD for downloading, movies, pictures etc .. Your computer will feel finally a lot lot faster

    nufnuf

45. OK CONFIRMED…I HAD A 64gb SSD sitting here and I didnt do anything except Copy WOT over to D drive and now I run the game from there.

    Its kind of like Symbolic links except its 1 giant symbolic link.

    I went from 20-28 FPS and Micro Lag often with anything ruynning in background it was death…to 34-38 FPS but holding steady and never haveing microlag if to many tanks pop up or to many autoloaders etc…..Its 34 fps no matter what. Also that was with movie in background….LOL

    OMG they need to optimize game g=because this game would rock like this smoothness at full graphics like 99% of our comps could with multicore.

46. My ASUS motherboard came with a built in 32GB SSD intended for capturing the system state for rapid restart. Unfortunately it only supports up to 16GB RAM, so I installed WoT on it instead. It certainly ‘feels’ better (I didn’t do any rigorous analysis of FPS), but the biggest difference seems to be on battle entry. I went from entry at around 10s to go on the timer to pretty much the full 30….

47. World of Tanks is not WORTHY of my SSD space. It used to be. No more.