SSD doesn't make a difference with loading times?! Help?

Hello everyone.

My computer has a 120GB Kingston Hyperx3 SSD and a 1TB 7200rpm HDD.My operating system (Windows 8.1) and steam are both installed on the SSD and I use my HDD for storing media etc
My SSD currently has 85GB of free space, is set up for TRIM and is Trimmed manually once a fortnight.
I am using a program called SteamTool (I'm sure you are all aware of it) which basically allows you to move games effortlessly from the SSD to the HDD and vice versa to save space on SSD for lesser played games.

However the problem I am having is that games seem to take the exact same time to load regardless of where they are installed/kept?
I have tried many ways such as installing them first to the SSD then moving them to the HDD, installing them to the HDD and moving them to the SSD etc nothing is effecting the loading times?!

Examples are:

Skyrim from the main menu to getting into game took 9 seconds on the SSD, exactly the same once it was moved to the HDD over 3 attempts each in both locations.
Crysis 2 from the main menu to getting into game took 15 seconds on SSD, exactly the same time once it was moved to the HDD, again 3 attempts in each location made, always exactly the same.

Am I doing something stupid here?

It takes my computer just 9 seconds to load up fully from a complete shutdown.

Other specs are:
Intel i5 quad-core 3.4ghz
8GB Ram
Nvidia 660ti GPU

it really depends on games and the limitation of other things also, such as ram speed and cpu speed and such.

however, i googled for your games and skyrim should see a decrease in loading times. is your other software still benefitting from an SSD, such as your OS and web browsers? if not, then you might have connected your SSD to a SATA 3 port instead of SATA 6.

9 seconds to load up is not that good but it sure says you've got OS installed on the SSD, so clearly the SSD is running normal.

http://crystalmark.info/software/CrystalDiskMark/index-e.html download this program and tell us test results, I hope the read is about at 300+mb/s

may be limited by bus speed rather than drive speed. as was suggested, check the sata connections.

there's some free drive benchmarking tools you can dl as well to test that the ssd is in fact running faster than the hdd

Thanks for all the feedback so far :)

Predatorrules the results are below.

HDD:

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 201.301 MB/s
Sequential Write : 196.879 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 55.398 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 92.401 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 0.609 MB/s [ 148.6 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 1.328 MB/s [ 324.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 1.885 MB/s [ 460.3 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 1.181 MB/s [ 288.4 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [D: 5.3% (49.0/931.5 GB)] (x5)

SSD:

* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]
Sequential Read : 425.386 MB/s
Sequential Write : 172.321 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 407.333 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 167.605 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 21.303 MB/s [ 5200.9 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 67.163 MB/s [ 16397.3 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 125.070 MB/s [ 30534.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 159.756 MB/s [ 39002.8 IOPS]
Test : 1000 MB [C: 34.4% (38.4/111.4 GB)] (x5)

Does this information show anything useful? I have no idea what it means.

BTW also downloaded a program called Hwinfo64 that has shown both my SSD and HDD are running at SATA 6.

As someone using a SSD on sata 2, it will still be miles faster than any HDD.

So you're talking about moving steam games backwards and forwards, if you install the game from scratch on the SSD is it noticeably faster than the HDD? I'm trying to narrow the problem down - perhaps this tool isn't working properly. Steam is quite clever, you can actually just cut and paste a game to somewhere else and steam will find it without having to download it (steam can have multiple libraries across drives now, so put one on each drive and try moving manually).

@kraken2109: What I do is I install/download all games to the SSD initially. Then if it is a game I do not play much or doesnt need the SSD (like terraria) I then use steamtool to move it over to the HDD which still allows me to play it, just off the HDD. I have never downloaded/installed a steam game straight onto the HDD to check load times.

IMO the tool must be working correctly as when I use it to take a game off the SSD onto the HDD the free space increases massively when looking at the SSD drive in my computer and the HDD free space decreases therefore the tool MUST be moving the game to the HDD, it's just the loading times staying identical :S

Steam has supported multiple libraries on different drives for a while now so you don't need to bother with that moving software anymore. When you install a game steam will ask you where to install it.

Either way, it's odd that you're not noticing a difference in load times.

Ok, so as I reasured the SSD is working fine, so it's either you didn't install the games on the SSD OR your GPU might be the problem, yes the SSD makes your game read files (load maps) faster but the no difference in load times could be actually result of GPU bottleneck, the better the GPU - the faster and easier it'll take him to process all the graphics

Are you really complaining about your OS taking 9 seconds to boot? or a heavy game like Crysis taking 15 seconds?

Those load times used to be minutes a few years back, so enjoy the speed.

Like others have said, it's not only the SSD doing the loading, RAM, CPU and GPU also have to load, and you don't have the strongest video card so it might take a few more "seconds".

@Galantina:

Your SSD is either broken or faulty, the software you ran shows that, you should be getting 500MB/s read and write as a MINIMUM.

http://www.kingston.com/en/ssd/hyperx

Look at the specs there, also 9 seconds to boot W8.1? a HDD takes that long, SSD should be 5 seconds max.

Get the SSD replaced if its new or buy a different one, its broken.

My regular SATA2 HDD loads Win 8.1 in just under 5 seconds (I had to time it right after I saw this post earlier). And my PC is far from being highend.

Maybe a clean fresh installed OS with no programs on startup takes 9 second with HDD, it takes about 20-30 sec with normal load of programs.

You're right about the writing speed but that only means saves, it got nothing to do with loading levels, though it might be something related to that I don't know about so yeah need to RMA it or you're not getting what you payed for.

I have a solid state hard drive and my OS is on it. Granted it's only 120GB of storage it loads windows from the time I turn on the pc to the time I'm in windows in 8 seconds. Now, people that is stupid fast. The only game I've got on that hard drive is BF4 and the load times are insane. I'm always the first player in a online match due to the insane fast loading times. Can anyone say attack chopper? If your not getting fast loading times or fast boot times your ssd might be a dud. Maybe you can send it back to whoever you bought it from for a replacement. Or worse comes to worse send it into the manufacturer for a repair.

My main point was that TC's SSD is faulty, I only chose to read the write speed as it showed a huge difference from stated specs. I could have pointed out the read speed is also 50MB/s less, but people would have skimmed over it, because its a small amount.

Everything else is correct, yeah its only saves, but even that is slow, maybe its related but if people see a large difference than a mediocre one, they are more likely to read the entire post.

Hello Everyone I have sent an email to kingston technical support and linked in this page, will see how I get on, thanks anyway :)

You guys do realize that an SSD has to have more than 50% free space to even come close to the writing speed it markets itself as? (which in most cases doesn't reach it either because of other factors)

"My SSD currently has 85GB of free space, is set up for TRIM and is Trimmed manually once a fortnight."

That's more than half but yes I'm aware of that fact.

@Galantina since you've been complaining on getting into the main menu of the games and not testing actual loading the levels I can suggest you a game that will clearly settle this thing.

Install Planetside 2 on both SSD and HDD and test warping from continent to continent / instant action / spawning into sunderer or galaxy

I know for a fact that the loading times there are horrible without SSD and that's the reason I bought one.

Hey Predator, I was looking into setting up my SSD for TRIM and trimming it fortnightly like you do.

I think Windows 8 has TRIM on by default, but how do you manually trim it?

I didn't set the trim on my SSD, I quoted the TC.

But you can check out this: http://www.eightforums.com/tutorials/8615-optimize-drives-defrag-hdd-trim-ssd-windows-8-a.html it's a nice tutorial

Ah righto, totally misread your post, sorry.