How does HDD speed impact Doom loading times?

Top: 850Pro
Middle: 950Pro @ 2x
Botrtom: 950Pro @ 4x

I needed to replace my motherboard so I picked up the Z97MX-GAMING 5. It had a M.2 slot which was all the excuse I needed to pick up the Samsung 950Pro. I was already running a SATA 850 Pro, so decided to take the opportunity to benchmark the difference in loading Doom then loading a level.

What I didn't know is that the GAMING 5's M.2 slot is x2, so limited the 950 to about half it's max speed. So I picked up a cheap PCIe card and now had 3 data points; 850 Pro, 950 Pro @ 2x, 950 Pro @ 4x

Though the best drive (in terms of read speed) was almost 3x faster than the worse, the difference in loading times was minimal.
Video was recorded using OBS to a 3rd drive not used in the test. A full reboot was done before each run and Windows was left to sit for a minute after logging in to ensure everything had finished loading. The pressing of the play button and the level loading screens were synchronized in post for timing.

The following launch options were used to skip the loading videos and the "Press SPACE" when loading is done.
"+com_SkipIntroVideo 1 +com_skipKeyPressOnLoadScreens 1"

Both those launch options will save you WAY more time in loading than any drive upgrade ;)

[MitchDC]

Nice video thanks for it. I'm wondering how to speed up the load times if even a super fast SSD doesn't help.

[frankynakamoto]

Can you perform a fps test on different drives and also compare it with SSD

[joshua]

no matter what hdd you have the loading time sucks in this game

[charlesajones]

That's all well and good, but how do you fix the issue of it getting stuck at 95% for 60+ seconds. It seems to happen totally at random. You can load the exact same level multiple times and sometimes it will load fine in 15-20 seconds. Other times it gets stuck at 95% and takes well over a minute. There's no disc activity during that time so what the hell?