Glossary:Solid-State Drive

A Solid-State Drive (or SSD) is a storage device that, unlike a standard harddrive, stores data on persistent flash memory. This enables much faster seek and read rates, as well as better shock resistance than a standard HDD. Solid-State drives are still more expensive per gigabyte than HDDs, but prices continue to drop.

When the Operating System is installed on a SSD, boot times can be improved to the point of taking a single digit number of seconds to fully boot. This is often the second most recommended upgrade to speed up a computer behind installing more RAM, due to the cost involved.

Over the years, SSDs with larger capacity were introduced, with the largest for a consumer-grade SSD being 8 TB as of 2023. Since it is expensive than the HDD despite the decline in price in recent years, most people tend to buy the SSDs with 2 TB of capacity, and it is recommended to only install performance-intensive games on the SSD and install the others on a separate HDD.

SSD comes in three primary form-factors: The SATA 2.5-inch, M.2 SATA and the faster M.2 NVM Express (NVMe for short). The total transfer speed of the SATA SSDs are limited by the aging SATA 3.0 interface (which has the speed of 300 MB/s), while the M.2 NVMe SSD (Which can reach up to 7.8 GB/s with PCI-Express Gen 4 x4 lanes) are limited by the PCI-Express lanes speed of the host device.

Differences from a HDD

There are some important differences between a SDD and a HDD. The first and most obvious one is performance. Due to a lack of mechanical parts, a SSD has much lower start up times, read times, noise. SSDs also have a much higher data transfer rate. Fragmentation causes no performance hit on a SSD, and on most Operating Systems defrag is disabled for SSDs.

When SSD was first introduced, SSDs were only available in smaller capacity (128 GB to 512 GB) and were more expensive than HDD. Since then, prices had come down a lot and SSDs with capacity as large as over 2 TB were introduced.

The NAND flash memory in a SDD has a limited numbers of times it can be written over, meaning that earlier SSD can wear out much faster than a HDD. This is becoming less of an issue, as more recent drives had moved to the 3D NAND flash and use wear-spreading algorithm to make them last longer. In fact, a single 1 TB Kingston FURY Renegade M.2 NVMe SSD has a endurance rating of 1.0 PBW.

Easily copying games to SSD without re-installing

With the use of utilizing symbolic links, user can easily move software and games to the SSD.

To do this, user must first move the software/game folder from a HDD to a SSD, and then use software to make the symbolic link. This way, Windows will still think the game is installed in its last location, when it is actually being loaded from a SSD. This is useful if the user have limited space in a SSD.

User can also move across games they're currently playing the most to the SSD, and move them back when they're done. User can also use Symlinks for other things, such as storing their saved games on Dropbox automatically.

DirectStorage API

The DirectStorage is a storage API that was introduced in March 2022 by Microsoft in effort to make full use of the storage drive in games, particularly the M.2 NVMe SSD. It was implemented in Windows 10 and Windows 11.

DirectStorage API allows the direct access between the storage device and the GPU, significantly reduce loading time. The version 1.1 revision remove the load from the CPU even further by adding GPU decompression, which allow the GPU on the graphics card to support and decompress the compressed game assets. Version 1.2 revision also added Buffered IO Mode for HDD.

While HDD and SATA SSD will have some performance increase with the API, it is the NVMe SSD that will benefit the most. The performance of SSD when using the DirectStorage API vary depending on the SSD itself, and this is noticeable when compare one SATA SSD to other SATA SSDs.

Currently, the range of games that utilize the DirectStorage API are extremely small. Notable titles includes Forspoken, New World, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart, EA Sports FC 24 and Forza Motorsport.

See also

• RAM Disk