Why HDDs are out and SSDs are in for gamers – 3DMARK Storage Benchmark Tested

If you are wondering why both the Xbox Series X and PlayStation 5 have moved away from cheap HDD-based storage, you will only need to look at the graph below to know why. For gaming workloads, HDDs offer poor performance in all of 3DMARK’s storage benchmark’s tested metrics. 

When it comes to latency, lower results are better, with Corsair’s MP600 offering the lowest latencies of our tested SSDs at 100 microseconds. That said, faster PCIe 4.0 SSDs are available, meaning that lower latencies are possible with today’s higher-speed PCIe 4.0 SSDs. 

Comparing HDDs to SSDs highlights the latency benefits of solid state storage mediums. SSDs react much faster than HDDs, allowing SSD-based systems to start computing data faster. Even our slowest SSD, the SATA-based Corsair Neuron XTI, offered us Average Access Times six times lower than our Seagate hard disk drive. With Corsair’s MP600, Average Access Latencies were 12x faster. 

Regarding raw data rates (bandwidth), it is clear that SSDs offer much higher performance levels in gaming workloads than HDDs. Our slowest HDD is over 5.6x faster, while our fastest HDD is 11.7x faster. 

What’s clear below is that NVMe SSDs are significantly faster than the SATA SSD that we tested, but the performance leap is nowhere near as large as the jump from an HDD to a SATA SSD. 3DMARK gives our slowest SATA SSD delivers us an overall score that is over 5.8x faster than our HDD, while our fastest SSD can only achieve scores that are around 2x higher than a SATA SSD.