Lineage II – Hard Drive vs. Solid-State Drive

When I installed a solid-state drive into my personal PC this past spring, it was magical. All of a sudden, I booted into my OS faster, applications opened quicker, and there wasn’t ever a time when I encountered OS lag due to a slow I/O. It goes without saying that games also stand to see a nice benefit when moved to an SSD as well, but given the limited storage size along with the growing size of games, it’s not always easy to dedicated a good chunk of your drive for a single purpose.

It’s for that reason that I almost never run a game off an SSD. In doing personal comparisons, I never found there to be a major difference with game performance between an HDD and SSD, save for faster level loads (and sometimes, even those were indistinguishable). Then there’s a problem with me being lazy. The reason I moved over to an SSD this past spring and not earlier is because of the hassle of dealing with a new OS install, but sometimes, these hassles pay for themselves ten times over, and that turned out to be the case here.

A couple of weeks ago, one of my favorite MMOs, Lineage II, became free-to-play, and as a result, I’ve been playing it quite a bit. The problem with this game is that it is built on a mega-hacked-up engine and it runs just as poorly today as it did when the game first hit retail in late 2003 (in Korea, early 2004 for North America). Sometimes it takes an entire minute just for the game to load, and things can only get worse from there.

Due to the sheer number of people in a given town, the game can lag quite horribly on a hard drive. This is something I never thought much about, and attributed it to the poor game engine, not I/O. Picture portaling to a town and then have the game lag for up to a minute afterwards, and perhaps beyond. It’s understandable why this happens – there could be hundreds of people in a town, all wearing different armor, using different weapons and so forth. High IOPS is not a hard drive’s strong point.

When someone else complained about the performance in a thread on the official forums, someone recommended getting an SSD, and so, I decided to test the game out for myself on mine. The difference… was mine-blowing. I’ve put thousands of hours into this game since its launch and have always dealt with lag, sometimes extreme, and now, things were smooth. There are still some areas where lag is a problem, but that’s been due to the fact that there is a lot of action in the screen. Picture a town where a couple hundred people are actually in the midst of battling or running around – there’s a ton of information flying around.

I was impressed enough by the improvement that I created the video above and posted it to my personal YouTube account. In it, I show what the game is like when run on a hard drive, and then on an SSD. Note that while the game is extremely laggy on the SSD, that’s not typical for anywhere but a busy town. Towns with few people are fine, and generally anywhere else in the game world is as well (unless again, you are in a place with hundreds of people).

This is just one example, however. If differences like this can be seen in this MMO, then chances are good that most MMOs would experience similar improvements, and generally any other game that seems to have high I/O demands (Civilization V is another example).

If you want to learn more about the game, you can check out its official website.