With all the talk going on about the new Intel Optane 900P and whether or not it's worth the investment, I thought I'd try and shed some light on what kind of improvements you'll find between the major types of storage devices, specifically as they relate to Star Citizen. Unfortunately, I do not have an Optane drive to test, but I have one of its closest competitors. Where this benchmark should help you the most is seeing the improvements in load times between a conventional platter drive, a SATA-based SSD, and a newer M.2/PCIe-based SSD, and hopefully give you a feel for the diminishing returns you might expect from Intel's offering. TL/DR Results Samsung SSD 960 Pro 512GB PCIe Gen 3 | IOPS: Read: 337,658 Write: 357,480 (Optane claims to get 550K/500K IOPS speeds) Run 1 Run 2 Run 3 Average To Main Menu : 0:32:43 0:31:73 0:32:46 0:32:21 To Crusader : 0:49:28 0:49:95 0:48:77 0:49:33 Total Load : 1:21:71 1:21:68 1:21:23 1:21:54 Samsung SSD 850 Pro 256GB SATA | IOPS: Read: 97,319 Write: 56,382 Run 1 Run 2 Run 3 Average To Main Menu : 0:39:84 0:33:24 0:32:91 0:35:33 To Crusader : 0:49:50 0:48:94 1:01:16 0:53:20 Total Load : 1:29:34 1:22:18 1:34:07 1:28:53 Seagate HDD ST3000DM001 3TB SATA | IOPS Read: Potato Write: Turnip (358 & 279) Run 1 Run 2 Run 3 Average To Main Menu : 0:42:70 0:41:32 0:45:09 0:43:04 To Crusader : 1:28:81 1:37:12 1:41:06 1:35:66 Total Load : 2:11:51 2:18:44 2:26:15 2:18:70 Observations & Conclusions Perhaps the biggest takeaway from this is that you'll save a fairly significant amount of time (nearly a minute) just by switching from a mechanical drive to a solid state drive. In the context of loading Star Citizen, the difference between the two SSDs is quite minimal with the largest discrepancy being in the less consistent times of the SATA SSD. (And to be fair, the SATA SSD contains my Windows install, so that might account for some of it.) When it comes to how the Optane 900P would compare to these, its IOPS speed is an order of magnitude greater than the 960 Pro, however, that order of magnitude also exists between the 960 Pro and the 850 Pro with only a marginal improvement in load times. If you absolutely want the best (and/or a Saber Raven) at any cost, go for the 900P. It's quite likely it'll shave a couple seconds off your load times, but don't expect it to be a game changer. (And it's definitely worth upgrading to even an entry-level SSD if you're still using a mechanical hard disk.) Testing Methodology & Platform So, if you're interested in knowing how I performed these tests, here are more technical details. As you can see above, I tested three different drives with three runs each. Each drive loaded an identical copy of the game straight from the executable and times were measured from initiation to the main screen, and then again from the main screen to Crusader. Times were recorded with a stopwatch and my average human reflexes; they were recorded only once the scene was fully observable. I've provided the input operations per second (IOPS) as the primary unit of comparison as that is where Intel has positioned the Optane drive to offer the greatest improvement over the 960 Pro (its sequential read/write speed is actually somewhat slower). The IOPS performance benchmark was derived using the Samsung Magician app. The test machine is a couple years old, so newer systems might see additional improvements. Here are the specs: ASUS Maximus VII Formula motherboard, Intel Core i7-4790K CPU, GeForce GTX 1080, and 16GB 1600Mhz DDR3 RAM With all that said, your mileage may vary. I'd be very interested to see what kind of load times other people are getting. I also plan on updating this once 3.0 hits to see if we're getting any further optimizations in this regard. Anyway, I hope you found this interesting, and that it helped you make a more informed decision on any future purchases. :floppy_disk: