I recently moved my installation of Bionic Commando from an old hard drive to an SSD. I wanted to know how big a difference this made to the load times and I'm sharing my findings here, in the event that someone else might run the game and find it useful.

I timed the loads on my most recent PB run (SSD) ( https://www.speedrun.com/bc09/run/y6ddn26m ) and a run from a bit over a year ago (HDD) ( https://www.speedrun.com/bc09/run/y21ng19z ).

• SSD: 40 load screens totalling 1m 37s ~100ms
• HDD: 40 load screens totalling 2m 03s ~867ms

So based on this it looks like SSD saves around 25 seconds over HDD.

A deathless run will have 39 loading screens. One for each of the 37 levels, plus 2 extra before cutscenes at the start of the game and before Buraq Armada. Each of these runs had a death in them, so I timed 40 load screens in each. I'm not 100% sure that the HDD run only has 1 death, but I only found one when scrubbing through the video.

For completeness, here are my computer specs:

• CPU: i5-2500k
• RAM: 16GB DDR3
• GPU: Nvidia Geforce GTX 1070
• HDD: Samsung HD103UJ (1000GB / 7200RPM)
• SSD: Kingston SA400S37480G (480GB)

That's very interesting, and reaaally precise. I might get into speedrunning that game soon, I've played it since day one and it could be fun to challenge myself ; I'll keep an eye on loading times on my SSD, to see if I see the same time gain as you (I guess I will). Thank you very much for that !