An SSD isnt the required solution.
Obviously Solid State Drives are the best thing in computing of late (especially for laptops),… but now that the market is going mainstream with them and all efforts at high quality ‘enterprise’ units are not perceived as affordable- SSDs released lately, especially cheap ones, are VERY LIKELY to create MAJOR ISSUES running a game like this on a system without 6+ cores…
Why? Top of the line drives have better controller chips that alleviate cpu somewhat.
Cheap units are designed to hit the cpu in order to work at rated speeds.
Samsungs Magician software (and others), can only help so much.
Most of my first gen SSDs outperform modern units in the metrics that matter (when gaming)…
Remember: consumers are sold to based on spec sheets.
Like anything requiring statistics: these can be changed to ‘sound’ impressive. (Samsung are masters of it)
Even in the Evo range- the top size model usually gets last gens Pro controller - and these generally make the review rounds.
The lesser controllers dont hold up, and of course is what a cost cutting/conscious consumer will look at.
If last years Evo unit (largest capacity available) can be had second hand for same money as a newer ‘middle of the line’ part… Id take last years higher end part!
Eg 1gb evo 960 has controller from 950 pro units. The 256gb and 512gb evos (from the same lineup) use a controller that performs worse in games like KCD.
The largest sized 950 evo probably had a better controller (i have fact checked this previously but Im not doublechecking webpages right now)… whilst the models I have quoted might not be the true examples, it is true, in a more general sense.
End of day- you get what you pay for. There is a reason that high end solid state drives exist.
They are what set the hype for SSDs to come to market in a mainstream/cost effective way.
The masses want to pay less, so cheap SSDs make great low power drives for laptops and light desktop use.
Gaming is a heavy hitter, but most games load the level and then play the level. Cheap SSDs will be quicker than hard drives in this scenario…
KCD loads constantly.
Id rely on a 7200rpm hard drive with large cache over a cheap SSD for KCD- on systems without excess CPU horsepower.
Again, KCD is probably the only example of a game that pushes CPU and wants more than four cores.
Four core cpus should avoid cheap SSDs or else have a very bad game (loading/streaming) experience.
Seen a mates high end i7 with mainstream samsung SSD take minutes to load the game and ‘build the world’. … mine is ten seconds and nothing pops up later. I use enterprise level SSDs or fast hard drives with SSDs as a cache drive (some motherboards make it easy to use an old intel ssd as a dedicated cache drive to the hard drives onboard).
Long ramble- not all SSDs are created equal.
SSD does not deliver guaranteed improvement in this game if you do it on the cheap/dont understand your requirements…
