I have 2 hard drives on my PC, one SSD (200 GB) and one HDD (1 TB). Unreal Engine 4 is installed on SSD. My project folders are also on SSD but since my project folders are kinda big in size (and with the derived data cache folder getting bigger) and I don’t have much free space left on SSD, I am thinking of moving the project folders to HDD and have only UE4 on SSD.
Will there be a huge difference in performance when I will be building my games on HDD compared to SSD? Will compiling the shaders be slower since my project folder will be on HDD or that depends where UE4 is located and not the project folder?
If I had an option, which one would be better in terms of performance and compiling. To have only the project folder or derived data cache folder on SSD?
On a single Hard Disk with no RAID 0, you would need two HDD obviously for that (and RAID-5 or 6 with 3+ drives on hardware RAID controllers) compared to most if not all SSD you should see a decrease in performance in the 300% to 600% range on average depending on HDD type (2.5", 3.5" and 5400rpm or 7200rpm and its internal cache size).
If you can’t afford buying an hardware RAID controller (you can find fully working used models on eBay at cheap prices anyway, meaning from $50 to $150) with multiple SSD in RAID-5 or RAID-6 for both speed and reliability, at least you should get a newer SSD. A 480GB or 512GB one is rather cheap in the $70 range and even 1TB ones are quite affordable in the $120 range.
Idk if it’s on my side but. When compiling code, I was bottlenecked by my HDD. This doesn’t happen all the time though. Sometimes it takes very long to compile code and sometimes it didn’t. This problem was solved once I moved everything to an SSD though. Here’s 2 videos of me compiling pretty much the same code.
Get a larger SSD. In my experience using a mechanical HD with UE4 made me not want to use UE4. I’m compiling C++ code though. Maybe if you’re BP only it doesn’t matter (idk).
