I've been half-seriously contemplating one of those shiny new(ish) SSDs for the sole purpose of improving Oblivion performance. I'd prolly go for the 64gb Corsair SATA III model. (My mobo includes SATA III so could take advantage of the extra throughput.) I would not use the drive to replace my OS partition (C:) but rather keep it as a special drive where only Oblivion and associated utilities reside. (64gb wouldn't comfortably house both Win7 and a heavily modded Oblivion installation in any case.)

My thought here is to (greatly?) reduce stutters caused when resources need to be loaded into memory from my hard drive. Faster initial game/save load is a plus but not the primary concern.

What's the consensus? Anyone here use such a drive for Oblivion? How does it perform? Do you consider it worth the investment?

Thanks in advance!
-Decrepit-

There were a couple threads on this in the not so distant past...... too bad that SSD is only three letters, and the search engine won't let ya use it......

Some folks have reported great success at reducing cell change induced stutter. Others, not so much so. Given that the costs have come down quite a bit on the SSD's, if you have the extra cash to spend, go for it.

Anyone has experience with Oblivion/Fallout on an SSD? Because I am contemplating the same thing as Decrepit.... But only if it REALLY reduces the "load-stutter". The price of those things is still outrageous! But I want the best experience in Skyrim (and FO:NV).

EDIT: SSD's random read speed is so much higher than HDD's random reads, but how do Oblivion and Fallout actually read the data? Small random reads, or large sequencial reads? Anyone knows?

I had Fallout 3 installed to my SSD and it worked amazingly. Got rid of almost all load times. But Oblivion didnt see a huge performance gain. I still got some of the random FPS drops when wandering around.

Which loading times do you mean? I don't mind the loading times when you enter a building. But you say there's still stuttering with an SSD while wandering around....? I would have thought that was 100% hard-drive related. Not so?

It is mainly HDD related. But Oblivion was so poorly optimized that when wandering around, I did still see some stuttering. (Fallout 3 ran fine, with no stuttering at all.)

Hmmm, maybe I will buy a SSD later this year then (before Skyrim arrives). Probably put some often used apps on it as well, since they're small anyway. Trouble is, Skyrim and FO:NV are Steam games and if I want to put them on that (way too small) SDD, I have to put ALL my steam games on it. Gonna be a tight fit, unless I delete some of them. Oh, why oh why does steam force you to install all its games in the same folder?!? :cryvaultboy: