Many gamers have their gaming PC configured with an SSD for a boot drive and a hard drive for mass storage. Therefore the first performance test we ran was on the Seagate Barracuda Pro 10TB hard drive ($349.98 shipped) and this 7200RPM SATA III 3.5-inch internal hard drive averaged 42.388 seconds game load times on FINAL FANTASY XIV: Stormblood. This is our baseline performance number, so next we tested the ‘old’ circa 2015 Crucial BX200 value SATA III SSD that featured 2D Planer TLC NAND Flash memory. Game load times improved to 33.885 seconds by moving from a HDD to an SSD, which is an improvement of just over 20%. This is the significant performance increase that most gamers sense when they upgrade to an SSD for the very first time.

We then ran a 2TB drive from the worlds best selling SSD series, which is the Samsung SSD 850 EVO. This drive series uses Samsung V-NAND (3D TLC NAND) and we saw performance improve once again, but not to the degree that we saw from moving from a HDD to an SSD. We are seeing about a 23% improvement over the HDD, but only about 4% over the Crucial BX200 series drive. The Samsung SSD 850 EVO 2TB drive runs $749.99 shipped, which puts it out of reach for many despite costing under $0.38 per GB. The good news is that the Samsung SSD 850 EVO 500GB drive has similar performance is only $154 shipped or $0.31 per GB.

Next, we tested four PCIe NVMe drives to see how they would perform over SATA III SSDs. First up we have the Kingston A1000 that is a value drive series was just released here in 2018. The 1TB model that we tested performed about half a second better than the Crucial BX200, but was actually slower than the Samsung SSD 850 EVO drive. PCIe NVMe drives look great on paper, but this just goes to show that PCIe NVMe drives might not be better than SATA III drives for gamers when it comes to load times. This is also why when some users upgrade from a SATA III SSD to a PCIe NVMe SSD that they don’t notice any difference.