I also have the latest drivers installed.

I had to do a fresh install of Windows 8.1, but I copied the game's setting folder/files (located in My Documents), so my settings are otherwise identical to my last Windows install. It's like comparing the speed of a turtle to a Lamborghini. So is it really worth it to have the game on SSD? I'm going to be upgrading to 16GB RAM soon, thinking of maybe installing the game into a so-called 'RAM drive', because RAM is lightyears faster than either a HDD or SSD. However, I just moved DayZ to the drive and it doesn't seem to help much, except the game loads alot quicker. I have a relatively weak GFX card (NVIDIA 555M from 2011), and a slow i7 CPU that barely hits 2GHZ, maybe 2.5GHZ if Intel Turbo Boost is enabled. It seems to make a few of my games run a bit smoother. But I've been thinking of maybe putting some games on it, DayZ: SA in particular.

Everything has been running great since then. I just bought a Samsung 850 EVO 1TB and installed it into my Alienware M14X R1 laptop a few days ago.

How to make dayz run faster