Does an SSD Actually Make Games Load Faster?

Short answer: sometimes, and not in proportion to the box speed

An SSD usually changes the experience most clearly when it replaces a mechanical hard drive. The more difficult question is whether a faster SSD—especially a high-end NVMe model—makes a particular game load noticeably faster than an already decent SSD. Public tests do not support one answer for every title.

This is an evidence synthesis of published testing and technical documentation. TST LAB did not perform its own hands-on hardware test. The cited test results belong to their publishers and should be read with each test’s setup and scope in mind.

Why the headline bandwidth is only one part

Sequential throughput measures how quickly a device can transfer long, contiguous blocks under specified conditions. A game’s loading path may instead involve many small or scattered requests, latency between requests, file-system and operating-system work, decompression, asset conversion, CPU tasks, memory allocation and the game’s own sequencing. A peak sequential number does not encode that whole pipeline.

A loading screen may also spend time doing work that storage cannot accelerate. If the drive supplies data faster than the CPU can decompress it, or the engine serializes a stage that could have overlapped, a faster drive may wait. Conversely, a streaming scene that requests assets continually can expose storage limits even after the initial loading screen has ended.

Microsoft’s DirectStorage documentation illustrates why the pipeline matters: the API is designed to reduce I/O overhead and can route supported compressed data through hardware decompression, while title-specific request handling and buffer choices still affect the path. The existence of an API does not mean every game uses it, or that a drive’s headline throughput becomes the game’s loading-time improvement.

What public tests found

TechSpot’s multi-drive game comparison reports different patterns by title. In its F1 25 tests, PCIe SSDs loaded in essentially the same time; SATA was reported as about eight percent slower, while even the tested hard drives loaded comparatively quickly in that game. For Indiana Jones and the Great Circle, its tested PCIe drives completed fast-travel loads in under five seconds with little difference among those PCIe models, while the SATA drive took longer. These are observations from those particular drives, game versions and procedures—not universal percentages for another PC.

Tom’s Hardware tested a separate collection of eleven titles and examined in-game storage activity and frame performance in addition to loading. Its report found cases where PCIe storage improved low-percentile frame results versus SATA during a streaming workload, while PCIe generations were often much closer to one another. That is a different question from measuring a single loading screen. It should not be merged numerically with TechSpot’s separate games and test system.

Across the studies, the broad pattern is more defensible than a single winner: HDD-to-SSD improvements can be large in games that make the disk a bottleneck; differences among SSDs are smaller or negligible in many loads, but particular streaming workloads can behave differently. The spread between games is part of the result, not noise to hide.

Read a storage benchmark with its conditions

Before applying a result to your own system, check:

• Was the test a cold launch, a warm reload or an in-game transition?
• Were drive models, capacity, firmware, free space and thermal state disclosed?
• Was the same CPU, memory, GPU, operating system and game version used across drives?
• Does the result measure loading time, asset streaming, frame pacing or a synthetic storage score?
• Was the game using a storage API or decompression path that your own games actually use?

The practical takeaway is not “buy the highest sequential MB/s.” It is to distinguish a clearly slow hard drive from the much tighter contest among solid-state drives, then look for a test that matches the game and task you care about. Storage can be decisive at a bottleneck; its maximum advertised speed is not a shortcut to predicting which bottleneck a game will encounter.