Is NS2 SSD friendly?
ezekel
Join Date: 2012-11-29 Member: 173589Members, NS2 Map Tester
Join Date: 2012-11-29 Member: 173589Members, NS2 Map Tester
Just got an SSD and wondering if this game is SSD friendly.
I'm not talking about it loading faster, I'm talking about how much will it write to the drive? Does it write every time the game is played even if you're not downloading/updating mods
My ssd seems to have a lot of write life, but since I use my computer so much I don't want write to it too much. Or should I just install it to my HDD where I originally had it. I don't mind waiting a bit for maps to load
I'm not talking about it loading faster, I'm talking about how much will it write to the drive? Does it write every time the game is played even if you're not downloading/updating mods
My ssd seems to have a lot of write life, but since I use my computer so much I don't want write to it too much. Or should I just install it to my HDD where I originally had it. I don't mind waiting a bit for maps to load
Comments
The performance increases you'll see with an SSD will make it definitely worth it.
I believe SSDs will fully move over to PCI though, or at least I think that's the plan.
PCI ssd's are fast but are unable to boot an OS. They are coming out this year with the next port after sata 3 which I believe is some mix of sata and pci intellectual property. We don't need more speed though in my opinion.
http://techreport.com/review/25681/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-testing-data-retention-at-300tb
And there are various other articles via google you can find. Basically, as long as you're not writing over 1TB a day, you're going to be fine.
Install NS2 to your SSD.
I believe the samsung magician has already done this for me, however I set it to max performance mode over more reliability mode.. would have to double check.
The advertised lifetime is 150 TB of write and I think my warranty is 10 years? Guess I'll put my favorite games on my SSD and then the rest to the regular hard drive. Or if I hit the lotto I'll grab some TB SSD's!
PCI ssd's are also expensive, but are worth it if you are in creative media. Especially as we hit the 4K revolution. The port after SATA 3 is SATA Express and is already out on some of the latest motherboards.
Put it on the SSD you wont be sorry.
You don't have to worry about writes on an SSD in general. Triple level cells, the worst kind, can sustain ~10 000 writes. For a modest 256 GB SSD that's ~2.5 PB of writes if the wear leveling algorithm is good. That's 700 GB of writes per day for 10 years.
SSDs have had reliability problems. These were almost entirely related to the controllers (they make sure that you don't write to the same cells repeatedly by spreading writes out etc) and drivers. Hopefully these kinds of problems are a thing of the past; but like bad capacitors they might be a recurring evil that happens every few years whenever some company designs a new controller. The result of these problems have usually been bricked drives or gradually slowing write performance, usually teething problems with new designs rather than incremental generational improvements.
That's not fair. PCI-E SSD's are no more inherently expensive than regular SSDs.
If you design a custom ASIC and produce only a single chip ever; that chip will cost you at least a million dollars and much more if it's an advanced process like 22 nm or if it requires significant R&D. If you make millions of chips, the same chip can cost a dollar a pop. That's what large fixed costs do to low volume production.
If you make these PCI-E boards and sell 10 000 of them to niché applications, they will be very expensive; but that does not mean that the marginal cost of producing more of them is high; it's not.
Not because it will kill it but because it's unnecessary. Don't worry about anything else. What you read about disabling services, moving swap files and temp file directories is not only unnecessary but also a shame since those kinds of workloads are perfect for an SSD. If you need to swap then you need to swap and you really don't want to swap to a magnetic spinning plate if you got something better. You want to use your SSD fully, not save it for future generations to put in a museum.
Windows 7 detects SSDs and will make all the adjustments automatically, like disabling automatic defrag of the drive, not prefetching when it's deemed unnecessary and so on. If the manufacturer recommends making some changes then you might as well do them, it won't make a difference (unless you also have harddrives in your system, then you forgo the those optimizations but really, just stop worrying already).
If your SSD dies it's not because it ran out of writes.
WIndows 7 does not allow a defrag of a ssd by its default programs, but dont use other programs to try. ( I dont know if you can force a defrag but windows7 wont schedule one)
While SSDs have wear the issue is basicly nonexistant. Other problems will arrive much sooner then your SSD breaking down due wear. (like that article linked, you should hit 35 years)
SSDs become, for a SSD, loads and loads slower the more data they contain. So you will most likely first experience this problem when you install more and more on the ssd. (I estimate to keep 25% free space available)
To compare writes.. I as most folk have my pagefile also on my ssd, which is being written always. I still expect it to outlast any other use I have for it! I suspect mine needs replacement due to being full far sooner then any write errors)
Also SSD come with a additional hidden size for backup reasons. So when a few cells finally do die, the SSD will use those backup cells. You shall not experience write problems due to wear until the full backup space is used.
Also SSDs are build to use the least used cells first to prolong the life of every cell. (so technicly it writes the data to a new cell rather then rewriting the old one)
That's the drive I just picked up, however the 256GB version. I wish I could have afforded the TB version so I could just use that as a main drive! I just hooked back up my old HDD and am reformatting it now for storage of other games and all that. The price of a TB SSD is quite insane.. and I really doubt it cost that much more to produce....... probably something like 3x profit from production cost
Anyway thanks for the info everyone. I've got the SSD in an intel chipset (which works well with overclocking) installed everything it needed, and used the samsung stuff to maximize performance. Even beat the advertised speeds in both read/write (but not random iops) games don't feel like they have a 'performance boost' but they do feel smoother.. as if it's never loading textures or buffering? just feels like the whole map is preloaded.. so I'll put my favorite games on the SSD and everything else to the SSD!
Uh what?
Companies are still selling them for more for the same amount of storage... You can argue all you want about how the NAND is the same and R&D costs and that they are in a niche market so the economy of scale is different for both these categories, but they are still more expensive to the consumer RIGHT NOW than SATA drives.
Will they be equal in the future? Probably not, at least in the consumer space.
Few hardware for computers has high high profit margins. (except apple)
Dont fill the entire SSD as that WILL slow performance on it.
My os was already installed on my SSD.
I got everything working properly
OS installed on SSD in an intel chipset sata port, all drivers/software installed. AHCI/ samsung auto thingy TRIM on. Hibernation off, samsung performance automatic stuff done and the drive is aligned to 1MB or w/e
Then got my old hard drive formatted and aligned as well, and it's just a single storage drive and I've already installed mumble and some other stuff on it. Also all downloads from my browser go immediately into my storage drive instead of the SSD
Just wondering now if I should grab CC cleaner and use it 1x a year or if that's not really needed. I actually learned quite a bit from this process and it'll help me with future building for sure. I've also left all the drivers for this PC on a flash drive for easy future use. Now to save up and feel impulsive and move onto the next project
Yeah I heard someone was able to get an SSD to write a petrabyte or something.... sounds insane.
Only thing I currently have disabled is allowing my computer to sleep..... still a bit fearful of that, but honestly shutting down and booting up is very fast that it almost feels like sleep mode so I don't really miss it.
@RapGod
It's quite fun, I learned a lot when I setup this SSD and then got my old hard drive as a storage disk.. and the fact that hard drives can be out of align, or in wrong/slower sata ports... and that you can tell windows (or have software) make adjustments to get extra speed out of your drive.
However I wouldn't really want to do it again since I'm a paranoid type person (getting over it slowly) and hate settings, specifically computer settings. :d
Edit - I don't have the cash to upgrade so I rely on his leftovers
Bottom line: buy an SSD, put your most demanding games on it. You'll thank yourself later and it's hardly a big investment now.
It seems to have made my counter-strike more smoother . I also forced the 'preload' command so it loads the entire map before connecting, I don't really feel any hitches and it always feels like the entire world is loaded and information is sent to my screen faster than before. (No framerate gain however) but I'll always take a smoother looking image.
So I believe it does benefit performance, but in a different way. My game was much less smooth with the same framerate on a 7,200 rpm hard disk. Which is still in my system and will be where most things are installed.
One day I'll be able to have a machine of entirely SSDs or whatever is out, and maybe even run them together in raid which I've never done
While the best SSDs of course provide the best in general, even the less expensive SSDs will speedup things more then a HDD ever did.
if you only have SATA 300 (unofficial SATA2), then you do not 'need' to buy the more expensive SSDs as those are 'sata3' and will not hit max speed on a older rig.
Do not that if you buy TO crap a ssd it will die faster.
For the ones who can not buy any SSD but have some money left, hybrid disks (from seagate) are a option. Those are a mix between harddisks and SSD, and if you often play the same stuff longterm in a row, you should see improvement.
How much space is on your SSD? Because really, there's no reason to not install programs there. It just speeds up the computer overall a lot. You should dump all the data on your HDD. Stuff you don't need often.