The truth about PC gaming on SSDs vs. HDDs, tested with real data

I have a friend Steve (not his real name) who still installs his PC games on a large, slow, noise hard drive. You know, the old-school kind that spins up before it can read or write data? I keep telling him to switch over to an SSD, not just for his own sake but for mine as well.

You see, Steve thinks he’s fine, that he’s harming no one by running his games on an HDD. But what he doesn’t realize is that his slow gaming times affect me and everyone else he plays with. Levels take minutes to load rather than seconds. Guess who’s always last when we jump into a game? His aged HDD makes our gaming time such a chore.

Please, Steve. I beg of you. Put your games on an SSD! I don’t care if your main drive ran out of space. Go buy another one! They’re quite affordable these days, and they make such a massive difference.

Don’t believe me? Think it’s all exaggerated? That’s what Steve says, so I took it upon myself to run the numbers. Here’s the cold, hard proof that shows why you should always run your PC games on SSDs.

Just look at the numbers! It’s a no brainer

I can’t believe I’m even having to make this call in 2025. I’ve been gaming off of SSDs exclusively since 2010. Back then, it was a Mach Xtreme MX-DS 100GB SSD. (Technically a 128GB drive, but in reality only about 100GB of actual usable storage space.) Want proof? Here’s my review of it that was saved by the Wayback Machine.

Even that comparatively slow SSD was transformative, though. Not only did Windows boot up quicker and games load even faster, but the whole PC experience was more responsive. It’s easy to forget what it was like to run an operating system on a hard drive — slow and stuttery, with pauses after almost every action as the drive caught up.

Even considering the fastest gaming hard drives (the Western Digital Raptor line), you’re still looking at several milliseconds for random access times versus the microseconds of legacy SATA SSDs. Sustained read and write speeds for HDDs can maybe reach 150MB/s, compared to the 14,500MB/s that the latest PCIe 5 SSDs are spitting out. That’s 100 times faster! And Steve’s still gaming on hard drives? Why, Steve?!

To be fair, I understand that this doesn’t matter as much for a lot of single-player experiences. You can hit play, walk away and make a cup of tea, then come back when it’s loaded and ready to go. I sit through one-minute-plus load times on my heavily modded Kerbal Space Program all the time (and that’s installed on a fast SSD).

But why put yourself through that? Time is precious. Every second that passes is a second you won’t ever get back. Wouldn’t you rather spend that second playing instead of waiting? And if you mostly play multiplayer online games, it’s not fair to put everyone else through that, forcing them to wait for you to finish loading your assets.

Gaming on SSD vs. HDD speeds, tested

If my impassioned plea against hard drive gaming in 2025 wasn’t enough on its own, how about some empirical evidence? I did a bit of testing to back up my suggestions with raw numbers. Just how much faster is an SSD over an HDD? Let’s see what the data says.

My drives and PC

I pitted my WD Black SN770 SSD against my massive Seagate BarraCuda HDD. I know, it isn’t a super-fast hard drive. But I chose it because it’s representative of the kinds of hard drives still used by many to store photos, documents, and games. It’s also really cost-effective in terms of gigabytes-per-dollar, so many will be drawn to drives like this over even some of the more affordable SSDs out there.

Both of those drives were fitted into my PC with these specs:

• CPU: AMD Ryzen 7950X3D
• GPU: AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX
• RAM: 32GB Kingston Fury Renegade 5200MHz
• Motherboard: Asus Crosshair X670E Hero

My methodology

What I ended up doing is running Marvel Rivals, Cyberpunk 2077, and Warhammer: Vermintide 2 on both drives. All of these games have their own custom splash-screen loaders, so I timed Boot Time (from the moment I hit Play to when the logo animations began) as well as Load Time (how long it took to load up a game). For Warhammer: Vermintide 2, that was loading into the hub in single-player mode. For Cyberpunk 2077, it was loading my save at the start of the game in the bar. For Marvel Rivals, it was how long it took to get to character selection when loading the practice level from the main menu.

The results

The results are stark and obvious. The hard drive’s load time is over seven times slower in the case of Marvel Rivals, and Cyberpunk 2077 took almost a minute longer on the HDD than the SSD (which, comparatively, loaded the level almost instantaneously).

Warhammer: Vermintide 2 is an interesting case. The gap between boot time and load time on SSD versus HDD is pretty small. It’s the slowest of all three games on an SSD, yet not that much slower on an HDD. In fact, it vastly outperforms the other two games on HDD. Perhaps it has something to do with how the game has optimized (or not optimized) its assets and how they’re streamed from storage.

Even so, the data is clear in all three cases: loading games from an SSD is significantly faster than loading from an HDD. The worst-case scenario here was with Cyberpunk 2077, which was over 10 times slower to load on an HDD versus an SSD. If this doesn’t convince you to swap drives, I suppose nothing will. For me, the wait just isn’t worth it.

Do you believe me now, Steve?

Come on, Steve. I’ve done all I can do. I’ve tutted every time you made us sit through that lengthy loading screen. I’ve made offhanded comments about how cheap SSDs have gotten. I’ve even made “jokes” about loving how much time we have to chat while waiting on you to load. Now I’ve penned this article, hoping it’ll finally get you to see the light.

All sarcasm aside, it might sound like I’m drive-shaming here. But I don’t mean any of this in a malicious or elitist way.

Yes, there’s an argument to be made that SSDs are more expensive than HDDs and therefore beyond the reach of some gamers. That’s a perfectly valid reason to stick with what you have. I don’t disparage anyone who can’t afford PC upgrades, and I recognize that I’m privileged to have been able to game on SSDs for years now.

That said, in 2025, SSDs are the cheapest they’ve ever been. In our list of recommended SSDs, our favorite budget option is the 500GB WD Blue SN5000 for just $45. Hell, let’s go even cheaper! You can buy a 256GB Silicon Power SATA III SSD for just $18. Is it really worth sitting through all that extra game load time for the sake of $18? C’mon!

Further reading: The best external SSDs for gaming