Hi,
Sorry for digging up this corpse of a thread, but I didn't see the point of creating a new one to add this:
SSD does help. Previously I was having constant ~100-200 ms audio/video pauses in almost every game when it was loading something (e.g. a sound effect for the first time, new camera angles or opening doors in RE1, etc.). At first I thought it was the same stutter as with shader cache, because it didn't do this on subsequent loads of the same asset, but when I tried the Ishiiruka build and enabled async shader compilation - the stutter remained as it were before. So, even though my HDD has a 150 MB/s+ reading speed, it really doesn't matter because of its access times, which are apparently slower than the real console. Moving the games to a SSD finally fixed these issues, and for the first time I'm having a constantly smooth Dolphin experience.
Sorry for digging up this corpse of a thread, but I didn't see the point of creating a new one to add this:
SSD does help. Previously I was having constant ~100-200 ms audio/video pauses in almost every game when it was loading something (e.g. a sound effect for the first time, new camera angles or opening doors in RE1, etc.). At first I thought it was the same stutter as with shader cache, because it didn't do this on subsequent loads of the same asset, but when I tried the Ishiiruka build and enabled async shader compilation - the stutter remained as it were before. So, even though my HDD has a 150 MB/s+ reading speed, it really doesn't matter because of its access times, which are apparently slower than the real console. Moving the games to a SSD finally fixed these issues, and for the first time I'm having a constantly smooth Dolphin experience.