Performance: SSD vs Hard Drive

Hi all,

I’m getting a new laptop to use for UE4, photo editing, etc., and was wondering,

what is the performance difference for installing UE4 on an SSD vs a hard drive?

Given the size demands of UE4, I’m inclined to install to a hard drive, but don’t know what sort of performance hit that will take vs SSD.

Thanks!

Hi Devaldiva,

I have run UE4 on both and I personally can’t tell the difference. I did not experience a FPS drop, hitching or any noticible performance hit after moving from SSD to HDD. I spoke to our Enigine QA department as well and they agree it should be fine either way. I would recommend HDD personally, just because of SSD’s writing limitations and that you will be altering files/assets frequently with UE4.

I hope this helps answer your question. If you do experience something different, please let us know so that we may look into what is happening.

I do not notice the difference, but I recommend installing it in the solid engine, and if you do not have more storage space you can save your projects on the hard disk.

it might only increase load times a bit. all it needs will be stored in the RAM anyways, but when loading a new asset or loading the entire project itself, it needs to load said data into faster accessible RAM or swap memory (temporarily stored data on drive)