Long story short, I got a new computer quite recently, and I installed the base game on my SSD knowing full well that doing so would probably decrease loading times to a notable extent. I figured that, by doing the same with my mods folder, it would take less time for the game to retrieve and load mods, thus making it faster. However, after I installed ALL MY MODS on the same SSD as the base game, I've noticed that it still is taking quite a while, like almost as long as it took to load with my old HDD. Even worse, I have literally 3 gigabytes of SSD storage left because of my hundreds of GBs of mods! So basically: Would it be better for me to move all my mods to my HDD? Like, does putting all of that crap on the SSD even help anything? Or does the SSD being nearly full actually slow down the loading of the game itself? All help and answers are much appreciated!!!
The more mods you have, the longer your game loads. You could have the fastest ssd in the world and it would still take a while to load if you have hundreds of mods.
Can confirm, I have ~170 mods and even with my mods folder on a 860 Evo it takes a while to load the first time. After building cache it does become faster though.
no. source: https://venturebeat.com/2019/09/02/the-death-of-disk-hdds-still-have-an-important-role-to-play/
I can also confirm. I've had ~1300 mods and my game took 20 min to even load a map. Your mod loading time has nothing to do with what type of drive you have, the more mods you have, the longer your game loads. It's that easy. So moving your mods to your HDD would be a good move, simply because of your free disc space.
the answer to all of these is yes yes, having everything on the HDD would be better if it eats up all your space, especially since the difference is so small. yes, it does make loading faster. like the other people said though, the more mods you have the longer the loading times are so the advantage is minimal. yes, unlike HDDs, SSDs actually lose some speed when they are very full. not really a very noticeable amount, but it happens.
If you have hundreds of GBs of mods nothing is going to make that fast to load. I don't think the devs ever intended for the folder to become that large, you should be thankful the game still works at all! I don't want to take this off topic but if you're suggesting HDDs are more reliable than SSDs I would generally disagree. Especially if physical abuse is a factor
Soooo...the consensus here is that I should put my Documents\BeamNG.drive folder on my HDD, because having it on the SSD makes such a tiny difference due to the vast quantity of mods and stuff I have, that it just isn't worth having it eat up all the space on the SSD, right?
SSD may be more reliable than HDD, but in terms of playing BeamNG, putting the same amount of mods on SSD or HDD have a negligible effect on loading speed. Thus in the OP's case (saving space), suggest mods folder be on HDD.