Are you thinking of purchasing an expensive PCI Express Solid State Drive to help improve load times for your favorite games? You might want to hold onto your wallet when you hear about this.
PCIe SSDs tend to offer faster boot times than older SATA based SSDs, so it would seem logical that they would improve game load times as well. According to a hardware benchmark including today's expensive top of the line drives and traditional consumer grade SSDs, it turns out that may not be the case.
When it comes to streaming texture and map data from a drive, the benefits of the PCI Express interface such as more IOPS (input/output operations per second) don't help very much. This would matter more for referencing a database, or running many virtual machine instances on a server. The bottleneck for entertainment applications is usually top throughput speed.
Games typically won't be able to take advantage of PCIe drives, they merely load large globs of data that are already optimized for streaming, and don't need to worry about multiple tiny cache writes and on-disk lookup tables. That type of thing is typically done on the graphics hardware in much faster RAM anyway.
If you're the type of power user that wants to hot rod his or her PC, save that cash for a more substantial upgrade later on, or simply just to buy more games.
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Source: Slashdot
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