[2022] How to fix slow load times, and FIX SLOW HDD and SLOW SSD

Do test again after a restart. Your OS will cache recently accessed files in RAM which can speed up loading because it doesn't need to touch the HDD as much.

Rust is only 20GB - pretty small by today's standards. If you play it often then just put it onto your SSD. Steam even makes it easy to move games between drives.

Setting your launch options to this should have a benefit when running on the SSD: +asyncWarmup true +warmupConcurrency 64 +preloadConcurrency 128 +forceUnloadBundles false