Meyer Tech Rants

The prevalence and performance of SSDs There's been a lot of hype around SSDs for nearly a decade now, touting anything from 10x to 100x the read and write speeds as seen on the spinning rust hard drives of old. SSDs have become nearly ubiquitous on the modern PC for several reasons including tighter boot and load times, an improvement in overall system responsiveness, and an increasing reduction in cost. However, the real-world performance improvements we see from SSDs over their Hard Drive counterparts is often nowhere near what is expected. Not only do almost all even recent AAA titles run fine off a Hard Drive, games rarely load more than twice as fast when we install them on an SSD. Even more concerning is the often imperceptible difference installing an extremely fast -- and far more expensive -- NVMe SSD makes. But why is this? Why do games take so long to load even when our storage can clearly make up the difference.  Note: If you're already well versed in HDD a

Before you even get started, I've made an effort to sort of section off the article into chunks and paragraphs, each sort of labeled or starting with a question. If you understand the subject of what I'm going to say pretty well, perhaps feel free to skip the paragraph.  The superiority of the PCMR vs Console Peasants It’s no secret that the PC Gaming Master Race is as strong as ever, as tongue-in-cheek as you may or may not take the term, and that’s not even a bad thing. PC gaming legitimately offers many competitive advantages over current consoles; Access to an undeniably wider repertoire of games going back decades, competitive prices and stores thanks to competing marketplaces, like Steam, GOG, Origin, UPlay, and even heaven forbid, Microsoft Store. PCs offer higher framerates, custom resolutions, multiple monitors, faster CPUs and GPUs, a superior interface for some game types like 4x, FPS, and RTS. Of course, we can’t forget about the unbelievably fast storage