How does installing a SSD affect the games performance?

I played the Beta on a 7200rpm HDD and now play with the whole system on SSD. The load times for crossing zones definitely improved, but I don't feel any difference in actual gameplay. And in case you didn't know, during beta the game had a slower tick so many many people were having trouble dodging AoE because they'd be outside of the red zone for half to a full second and still get hit. I never had that problem.

I would recommend an SSD for any of these reasons:

• You have a liquid-cooled or otherwise super quiet system and the sound of your HDD motor spinning and the head moving around is driving you nuts.
• Your system (doesn't include peripherals like display, keyboard, mouse, speakers, etc.) is costing you more than USD$1000. Then why not. Might as well go the extra mile.
• You spend a lot of time on your computer, not necessarily just playing FFXIV:ARR. You will feel the SSD improvement the most in non-gaming related usage scenarios.
• You are at least putting the whole operating system on the SSD, and you will buy a big enough SSD that will hold all of your most frequently used stuff. My 120GB ended up not enough for my broad interests and now I run a 500GB SSD.
• You have already decided to buy a new disk, just trying to decide between HDD and SSD, and you don't mind the price difference.

Honestly, you'd get just as much of a performance boost from a hybrid as you would an SSD, and at a better $=G ratio to boot. Upgrading your OS should always be one of the last things you upgrade, especially if it's Windows. Especially if it's TO Windows...

For how much loading you do with scenes and zones. Its worth it. I put ffxiv and windows on the SSD and everything else on the HDD

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Originally Posted by DoctorPepper

Putting 2x SSD in raid 0 improved loading times between areas by around 5-10 seconds give or take for me (upgraded from 7.2k drives). Other than that there was no noticeable performance increase. The biggest increase will come from upgrading your CPU/GPU. Helps for things like hunts but I wouldn't purchase SSDs just for FFXIV.

Additionally it improves OS boot time quite a bit and allows you to access and copy files more quickly between multiple SSDs. Installing software/games also gets a lot faster in comparison to 7.2k drives.

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Its pointless to do Raid 0 with SSD atm. Just by putting in one SSD you get faster load times in the game. So instead of taking 10 seconds for transitions from zone to zone you take 3-4 seconds.

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Originally Posted by Destinova

Its pointless to do Raid 0 with SSD atm. Just by putting in one SSD you get faster load times in the game. So instead of taking 10 seconds for transitions from zone to zone you take 3-4 seconds.

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Its not even that much faster. Its more like 2-3 seconds at most. SSD is so overrated the hardcore try to say its that much faster in loading when its not. I have multiple friends with SSD Drives and I only take 2-3 seconds MAX to load an instance behind them.

Your better off taking that extra $100 bucks and putting it toward hardware that actually improves gameplay