How much does a PCI SSD help with preview times?

Anyone have one? I know normal SSDs are faster than mechanical drives, but has anyone noticed a significant improvement with a PCI SSD for preview times? I'm trying to determine if they're worth the cost.

AFAIK PCI Express SSD can be even twice faster than SATA SSD. Haven't had a pleasure to play around with it so I can't confirm it, but if you will, please share your experience .

Hard to say. My laptop (PCIe SSD) boots in 3 seconds and takes 4 seconds to preview Copy Girl. My desktop (Samsung 850 Evo) boots in around 15 seconds and takes 5 seconds to preview Copy Girl...so the PCIe is much faster but only helps preview by about 1 second. That's not accounting for the rest of the machine though. My desktop's CPU is much faster so maybe that has something to do with it.

Also, that's a slightly older PCIe SSD. A brand new desktop PCI SSD could be faster but you're talking at least $400. Also I've heard they have some issues if used as a boot drive, but I don't remember the details. Last I looked into them was almost 2 years ago.

Some of my older projects take 15+ seconds to preview on either machine so I'm also wondering how I can improve that. I was just talking about it in another thread, but C3's in-editor spritesheeting might be the only thing to really make a difference here.

I have a regular Kingston 60GB SSD and my game takes 10 seconds to preview - 5 to open up NW.js and 5 to load. Windows 10 opens up in about 7 seconds. Getting an SSD was a great decision, especially because the 60GB was at a really good price. I don't think upgrading to a PCI-E one would be worth it though, I mean, even if it's twice as fast it's just like 3 seconds faster...

AFAIK PCI Express SSD can be even twice faster than SATA SSD. Haven't had a pleasure to play around with it so I can't confirm it, but if you will, please share your experience .

Yeah, some of them are even faster than that at least for read speed. The normal SSD I'm looking at is 550 MB/s read, 520 MB/s write and the PCI one is 1400MB/s read, 600MB/s or 1000 MB/s write (the product page lists both write speeds in different places. I'm a little confused).

If I do get one I won't have a way of properly comparing it though as it'll have to be part of a new computer, and my current computer has a mechanical drive.

Hard to say. My laptop (PCIe SSD) boots in 3 seconds and takes 4 seconds to preview Copy Girl. My desktop (Samsung 850 Evo) boots in around 15 seconds and takes 5 seconds to preview Copy Girl...so the PCIe is much faster but only helps preview by about 1 second. That's not accounting for the rest of the machine though. My desktop's CPU is much faster so maybe that has something to do with it.

Yeah, that's what I'm not sure of. If previewing is limited more by the CPU than the SSD, the extra speed would be unused at preview time.

Also, that's a slightly older PCIe SSD. A brand new desktop PCI SSD could be faster but you're talking at least $400. Also I've heard they have some issues if used as a boot drive, but I don't remember the details. Last I looked into them was almost 2 years ago.

I don't have a need for huge amounts of storage, so the one I'm looking at is actually quite a lot cheaper, at $145-160 for 240GB. $400 is out of my price range.

Thanks for the heads up about possible problems using them as a boot drive - that's what I was planning on using it as so I'll look into it before deciding.

I have a regular Kingston 60GB SSD and my game takes 10 seconds to preview - 5 to open up NW.js and 5 to load. Windows 10 opens up in about 7 seconds. Getting an SSD was a great decision, especially because the 60GB was at a really good price. I don't think upgrading to a PCI-E one would be worth it though, I mean, even if it's twice as fast it's just like 3 seconds faster...

Yeah, I'm really on the fence about it. I'm just remembering how the CC version of loot pursuit would take 3-5 minutes to preview and am hesitant to make a decision because of it. I know C2's way faster than CC when previewing, but I don't know how long it'll actually take which just leaves me unsure. It might be worth it just for the piece of mind.

nope it doesn't help you in any way, unless your games are over a few gigabytes big.

boot speed doesn't matter -> my laptop starts in 4-5sec win10, but that's because i have uefi boot with shitload of services and what not. and it has evo 840 (2.5" drive)

real performance matters in 4K random read which is around 40MB/s and that is super good, because HDDs are around 0,15MB/s -> which makes them really slow when loading windows because of lot of fragmentation and small files.

now about games -> let's say you're doing an android game, limit 100mb. let's say you have 100mb, 1000 files, which is 0.1mb per file. that's 4K reading -> 2.5s if you have a ssd with slower 4K it will go even worse.

if you have a huge game ~500-1000mb with big files ~ ssd uses seq. read which is in my case ~460MB, let's say i have 2 big files of 450MB and 100MB of small files = 2 sec + 2.5sec = 4.5 sec if you have a drive with faster seq (PCIeSSD) let's say 900MB/s it will be 1 sec + 2.5sec = 3.5s , so yeah, nice gain of 1 sec! for probably double the money.

as you can see here:

http://techreport.com/review/28032/a-fr ... cie-ssds/4

in real bench ("Work") - > the gain is so subtle from PCIEssd that it doesn't really matter -> check the first table to see what kind of files are there.

in copying big files ("Media") -> you do gain some significant speed.

anyway in any case - if you want to save your money - buy samsung evo 850, cheap, good, fastest 2.5" ssd probably today. if you really want that "little" upgrade in terms of PCIeSSD and visually no speed difference - buy the PCIe version of samsung 850.

in any way if you're coming from a HDD you will notice huge huge difference so it won't matter what you buy because you'll be blown away <img src="{SMILIES_PATH}/icon_e_smile.gif" alt=":)" title="Smile">

anyway can you post your current PC specs arima?

In my experience SSDs are great for general system performance, but I'm not sure it would help preview mode. Preview tends to just read a bunch of files from disk. If you have lots of RAM and a modern OS, it will probably keep a cache of regularly-used files in RAM. So while the first few previews might be slow, eventually it loads the regularly used files in to RAM then it's not hitting the hardware at all! So maybe just make sure you have a couple of GB free in RAM for the OS to cache with.

As saiyadjin says the strong point of SSDs is random read/writes which is things like starting up a complex app, or booting Windows.

Thanks everyone, I'll put that money to better use by getting an i7 instead of an i5 then.

saiyadjin My current specs? Vista, AMD Athlon 64 x2 4400+, mechanical hard drive, 3.5 GB DDR2, 512 MB Geforce 9800GT, so a new computer is going to be quite the upgrade.

oh, so you're building a whole new pc? well then just take a good SSD of 120gigs for programs and windows (or 240 since today 120 seems a bit low), and a 1TB for other things.

like ashley said (and i couldn't say it better) - you will notice massive imrpovements in windows workflow and program opening and stuff, but it won't matter really in games -> only their loading. which won't be much different because fragmentation and loads of files that load slowly.