Sick and tired of sitting through loading screens between races in Gran Turismo 5? If you’ve got yourself one of those classic “fat” PS3 consoles, slap a solid-state drive (SSD) into that puppy and watch the loading times plummet — at least, according to a user named Phil over on the Beyond3D forums.
Taking two PS3s (the aforementioned “fat” with the game installed on a Corsair F120 SSD drive, and a Slim with the game installed on its standard SATA drive), Phil timed how long it took for the game to initially load up and checked out several different tracks’ loading times in the game’s Arcade mode. He found a sizeable, consistent drop in loading times. The biggest factor seems to be the architecture of the SSD itself — it has no moving parts, so there are no mechanical heads moving around frantically to access the thousands and thousands of tiny, incremental files that make up the Gran Turismo 5 installation.
While SSD seems like it would be better for installing games compared to regular storage, the drives are costly and don’t fit in the PS3 Slim. Factoring in the affordability of 2.5″ HDDs, which the Slim accepts, the SSD solution seems more and more impractical — despite the impressive loading times you see above.
Gran Turismo 5 loading times slashed with SSD install originally appeared on Joystiq on Tue, 14 Dec 2010 07:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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