Any PC Players Running FFXIV on SSDs?

[Sygmaelle]

Honestly for this particular game you won't have extravagantly faster loading times but, you ll defo have a performance boost

And yes, windows 8.1 is the way to go

[Shori]

I run using a 150GB SSD from Sandisk. I havnt done any tweaking at all because I didnt know I could til reading your post, but I do have an improvement compared to my old 1TB Hard drive from seagate. The loading screens are about half the original time, but the beggest difference is loading the programme up in the first place - HDD would take up to 15 seconds to get the client up, then probably another 20 seconds to the game after green button. SSD client is up as soon as I click the shortcut in my start menu and game probably 2 or 3 seconds after green button. Though obviously it hasnt improved connecting to servers at the start screen -.-

[DoctorPepper]

Personally I upgraded from a 7200rpm drive and old i7 930 cpu up to an SSD and i7 4770k and it took a good 15-20 off of my load times. Make sure your SSD isn't at full capacity because that seems to effect the performance on mine, I found that having about 25% free space as opposed to 5% free space made a big difference for me. Other than that I would recommend upgrading your CPU since that seemed to have the largest impact for me as far as overall performance goes.

[Judge_Xero]

To OP. As long as you did a clean install of your OS onto the SSD and have all the proper chipset/system drivers installed the SSD should run fast.

if there is a cpu limitation then you should be able to overclock that CPU a bit more. It should reach at least 3.8Ghz with good temps on a decent cooler.
You will want to lower the ram speed to 1333Mhz and boost the CPU/NB speed to around 2800Mhz as those CPUs are limited by the L3 Cache which is tied to the CPU/NB

[Foo01]

On my laptop I am using a 2 year old Agility 3 SSD 480GB and on my desktop, I have a 120 GB Toshiba SSD for the boot drive and another Vertex 3 60GB SSD for caching my 500GB harddrive where I've loaded FFXIV. In either case, they seem to take about the same to load and such. I was also trying the PS4 FFXIV beta, and I don't have a SSD there and the load times all seem about the same, although I never did time or benchmark them, but they seem to go quickly enough.

[PapaGuu]

To OP. As long as you did a clean install of your OS onto the SSD and have all the proper chipset/system drivers installed the SSD should run fast.
if there is a cpu limitation then you should be able to overclock that CPU a bit more. It should reach at least 3.8Ghz with good temps on a decent cooler.

I think that's what I'm going to do this weekend and just install everything anew. I struggle to find the most up-to-date drivers for my mobo though. The majority of the drivers on ASUS' support page are dated 2010 and their SATA driver (i.e. the .inf file) isn't even recognized by Windows. I had to go and find the 2014 one on my own.

There's these driver navigator programs all over the web and finds the drivers for you automatically, but I'm not sure if they're legit (there's also driver finder, driver installer, etc etc) and not willing to shell out $40~$50 for a one-time use.

You will want to lower the ram speed to 1333Mhz and boost the CPU/NB speed to around 2800Mhz as those CPUs are limited by the L3 Cache which is tied to the CPU/NB

Sorry what? LOL that's way over my head.

[Pseudopsia]

This are my load times:

Start count: When screen goes black.
Stop count: When ui element appears on screen.

Initial Login to Fallgourd Float: 20.616 seconds
Home Point to Gridania: 4.295 seconds
Zone to Central Shroud: 7.507 seconds
Repeat zoning between central shroud and Gridania: about 4 seconds each time.

System:
SSD: Samsung 840 1 TB SSD
CPU: i7 3930k @ 4.5 GHz
GPU: Asus GTX Titan
MB: Asus Rampage IV Gene
Mem: 16 GB G.skill 2400 Mhz DDR3
OS: Windows 8.1

[DrakoRocks]

so, you go from 10 seconds to 5 seconds (HALF the time) and its not significant for you? then, what is it?

loading is highly dependent on your connection also, when zoning to smaller and less crowded zones i get 2-4 seconds load and very crowded i get 5-10 seconds load.

If you want faster loading times, get everything better (connection and all pc parts) , im sure you will take another 1-2 seconds of every load.

[Welsper59]

Well I ran the performance benchmark in Magician on my HDD as well and got 128 MB/s in Seq. Read and Write. That's 8x the difference so I was hoping to see some drastic performance boost. I wonder if my cpu and/or my motherboard is the bottleneck now...

Mmmm it's possible that they could be. The Phenom II 945 isn't exactly the greatest at this point in time, but I guess it just depends on what your expectations are. If you want it to be quick like the Diablo mention on your friends computer, I don't think that's even possible with FFXIV. The SSD does help for things a little... but MMORPGs rely on streamed data a lot more than other genres would, which is something your SSD just wouldn't have an impact on.

An upgrade on your CPU would help the general load times, but unless you always wait 30sec or more to load your initial login, you really wouldn't see too much of an impact. Playing the game on my home desktop, which I don't remember the exact parts I use (I think it's an OC i5 3570k and some Corsair SSD), I haven't timed it but I believe it's low/mid 20s (in seconds). Even playing it on my 1st-gen Surface Pro takes around 24-ish seconds (just timed it). Though I'm not sure if my location atm testing it affected it a lot, as it's a better connection speed than what I have at home.

[Evil_Betox]

Loading times are around 10~15 seconds when i change zones or enter a dungeon, if i skip the cutscene right way i'm usually the first to load the game. I use a 7200 rpm hdd.