SSD vs HDD for games: what a faster drive changes

You are still on the loading screen when everyone else is already in the match. Or a store page says "SSD required" and the game would have to live on the big hard drive. Or you have just bought an NVMe drive and want to know what moving your games onto it will change.

The drive's job in a game is narrow: it delivers data. It decides how long you wait on a loading screen and how quickly the game can read the parts of the world coming into view. Once something is in memory, the drive plays no part in drawing it.

What the drive does while you play

Microsoft's DirectStorage announcement separates two jobs. One happens on a loading screen. The other happens as you walk through an open world: the game loads the distant scenery coming into view in real time and drops what goes out of view. To do that, games cut assets such as textures into smaller pieces and load only the pieces the current scene needs.

That second job is a stream of small reads. Microsoft put the asset streaming budget of previous-generation games at around 50 MB/s, which at 64 KB per piece is hundreds of read requests a second, and wrote that using the full bandwidth of a modern NVMe drive turns it into tens of thousands of requests a second.

Small scattered reads are where a hard drive is weakest: it has to move a read head to each piece, and an SSD has no head to move. The Windows 7 engineering blog put numbers on it in 2009: the better SSDs did 4 KB random reads almost 100 times faster than a typical hard drive, about a tenth of a millisecond per read against roughly ten. In Microsoft's random-read test, 176 of 182 hard drive configurations landed between 0.8 and 1.6 MB/s, while the SSDs ranged from 11 to 130 MB/s.

Those are 2009 drives, so read them as the shape of the gap. The cause is still there: Microsoft's current performance troubleshooting guide works out a hard disk's delay from its rotation speed, and gets about 11 ms to read any block on a 5,400 RPM disk.

Games that list an SSD

Some publishers put the drive type in the system requirements. As of October 2026, the Steam store pages (the Starfield page, for example) list these:

Under minimum, that line means a hard drive is below the least the publisher says the game needs. Store pages change, so check the current one for your game.

SATA SSD or NVMe

Both are SSDs. What differs is the bus they use, and Windows reports it. To see what you have, open PowerShell (no administrator rights needed) and run:

Get-PhysicalDisk | Format-Table FriendlyName, MediaType, BusType

MediaType says SSD or HDD, and BusType says NVMe, SATA, USB or another bus. If MediaType says Unspecified, look the model up on the maker's site. Task Manager shows part of this too: on the Performance tab, select a disk and the Type line names the drive type, such as SSD or HDD.

We did not find a published comparison of game load times on SATA and NVMe from a source we could verify, so this page makes no claim about the size of that difference. Before you buy, time the same load from the same save three times on each drive.

DirectStorage

DirectStorage is an API that developers build into a game, not a switch in Windows. Microsoft's case for it: existing APIs make the game handle each read request one at a time, and at tens of thousands of requests a second that overhead becomes too expensive for a game to use an NVMe drive's bandwidth. Many assets are also compressed and must be decompressed before the CPU or GPU can use them.

• The game has to use it. Microsoft's wording is "a DirectStorage capable PC and a DirectStorage enabled game".
• NVMe gets the most from it. The 2022 release post says you may see benefits on any kind of storage device, and that installing games to an NVMe SSD will maximize IO performance.
• Windows 10 or 11. The same post says it is compatible with Windows 10, and calls Windows 11, with the latest storage optimizations built in, the recommended path for gaming.
• Later versions. Version 1.1 added GPU decompression, which Microsoft says works on all DirectX 12 GPUs with Shader Model 6.0; 1.2 added a buffered mode a developer can switch on for slower hard drives.
• Without it, nothing breaks. In Microsoft's words, games "will continue to work just as well as they always have."

TRIM and Optimize Drives

TRIM is how Windows tells an SSD which clusters a deleted file has freed. Microsoft's support page describes it as telling the drive where it can safely do cleanup work when it is not busy saving or loading your files. On NTFS, Microsoft's fsutil reference says TRIM is enabled by default unless an administrator disables it. To check, type this into an ordinary Command Prompt or PowerShell window:

fsutil behavior query DisableDeleteNotify

NTFS DisableDeleteNotify = 0 means TRIM is on; 1 means it is off. Microsoft's reference gives one reason to set it off on purpose, a device that performs worse with it on. If that was not your decision, the SSD TRIM card on w0a's Fix page puts it back to the Windows default (enabled), as SSD TRIM describes.

Windows also runs a scheduled optimization on each drive. Search for defrag on the taskbar and open Defragment and Optimize Drives. Each drive is listed with its Media type (Solid state drive or Hard disk drive), the Last analyzed or optimized date and its Current status; Change settings under Scheduled optimization sets how often it runs, once a week by default. Microsoft's defrag reference adds that the task does not wake the PC or run on battery, and that on an SSD its traditional pass, defragmentation plus retrim, runs once a month whatever the schedule says.

Microsoft's own sources differ here. The 2009 Windows 7 post said Windows 7 turned defragmentation off for SSD system drives, as not helpful enough to warrant the extra writing; the defrag reference, last updated in 2024, describes that monthly pass. Neither asks you to act by hand, and the support page says Windows optimizes drives automatically, so leave the schedule on. On a hard drive, the reference says defrag needs at least 15% free space to finish; with less, it only partially defragments.

Moving a game to the SSD

In Steam, following Valve's instructions:

1. Open Settings in the Steam client and go to the Storage tab.
2. If the SSD has no Steam library yet, add one with the + button at the top.
3. Select the drive the game is on now, select the game, and choose Move.

This moves an installed game without uninstalling it. For other launchers, follow their own instructions. Then time the same load again and compare.

What does not help

• Defragmenting an SSD by hand. Windows already schedules what each drive type gets, as the section above shows.
• Moving the page file off the SSD to spare it. The same post found page file reads outnumbering writes by about 40 to 1, and said there are few files better than the page file to place on an SSD. The page file and games covers the rest.
• Expecting the drive to change a loaded scene. A drive changes when data arrives, not how long the GPU takes to draw it. A low frame rate where nothing new is loading points elsewhere; GPU not at 100% is the page for that.
• Buying a drive for first-run hitches. Hitches the first time you see each new effect, which fade on later runs, match the pattern shader compilation stutter describes. Read that page before you spend money on storage.

Related

• Why games stutter on Windows 11
• Disk at 100% in Task Manager
• The page file and games
• SSD TRIM
• Shader compilation stutter