CoX on a Solid State Drive?

Is it worth it to put CoX on a Solid State Drive? If so, what's the minimum size drive I should get? The drive would just be for the OS and Internet Explorer (I guess) and CoX. Heck, practically the whole PC would be for that, although I'm thinking of trying out...shhhh...DCU Online. Would be nice if I had room for that, too, when the time came. Or should I just say screw it and keep it all on a 1TB plain jane hard drive? SSDs are still pretty costly from what I can tell. I can afford it, just don't know if it's worth it.

Solid State Drives are definitely faster, however with gaming it is only one piece of the puzzle, if you're building a high end gaming machine I'd go for it, if not then the benefits in terms of game performance are not spectacular. It is my understanding that you'll see maybe a 4-5% decrease in loading times and maybe a 5-6% increase in frame rate. That being said, if that's worth the cost to you then go for it, otherwise I'd go with a decent speed drive like the 10,000 RPM Barracuda from Seagate.

I'd get a small SSD and just install your games on it, then use a standard drive for your OS and regular apps.

I have a similar setup, but I'm using two regular SATA drives. I got a noticable improvement on my rig just by moving CoH off of the primary drive.

(Actually, I now personally build systems with three drives: 1 250GB OS drive, 1 500GB game drive, and 1 1TB+ storage drive.)

Quote:

Originally Posted by Nethergoat it's NEVER too late to pad your /ignore list!

Putting CoH on a solid state drive will not make a huge difference. The reason is simple. If you look in the pigg directory, you'll see just 67 files comprising nearly 4GB. These are *BIG* files. The main factor in loading them is the data transfer rate. SSD transfer rates are not shockingly superior to regular HDs.

On the other hand, my Windows directory and subdirectories contain over 68,000 files. When you start Windows, it accesses probably a few thousand of them. Now, SEEK TIME becomes a big factor - how long it takes to get to the start of each file. This is where SSDs absolutely freaking blow HDs out of the water. You'll hear people make claims that Windows used to take 2 or 3 minutes to load and now it takes 15 seconds on an SSD. That's not hyberbole.

To summarize, CoH will load faster from an SSD but it won't blow your mind. When I watch Windows or Photoshop load, that blows my mind. I have a 128GB SATA3 SSD.


How big a drive do you need? I have CoH and no other games installed. (I have the test server copy installed on a hard drive since I don't use it constantly.) I have a boatload of other apps, including some large ones like Photoshop. I'm running Win7 Pro 64bit. So far I'm using 40GB of the drive. My data is stored on a 750GB HD. If you're thinking about installing some other games as well, I would not go less than 64GB.


In my opinion, is an SSD worth it? OMG OMG OMG OMG OMG YES!!!!!!!!
To me, it's all a matter of proportion. My video card was over $300 and I have 8GB of RAM. They are still expensive, though. My drive was $276 in early 2010. Price on NewEgg today is $265. (Crucial SATA3 128GB)

They're worth it for the silence.

But what others have said is true: not a huge speed difference. The game operates out of RAM memory. Texture files still need to be transferred from the disk to RAM and SSD speed transfer rate isn't a huge boost over hard drives once your RAM is large enough to hold the entire game and textures currently in use.

Well if you never defrag your CoH folder on your regular hard drive, and the updater will frag it on every patch, then the lack of seeks on an SSD could speed up loading and zoning times besides the improved sequential read speed.

A few months ago I bought an 80GB SSD; I have Win7 64, CoH and most of my apps on it while file storage is on the three terabyte drives in the machine. Yes, I have a LOT of storage on the machine, and about half of it is in use.

I found that switching from a 7200RPM "performance" drive as my C drive to the little SSD improved boot time drastically and it made some difference in CoH performance... mainly in zoning. In actual game play there's little if any improvement that I've noticed, but zoning times are considerably faster.

SSD's are expensive and limited in size but they load programs MUCH faster and in general make for a more responsive machine.

Whoops! Here's a question I just learned to ask: SATA-II or SATA-III? Naturally, I think, "It's got a 'III' on it! It must be better than a 'II'!" But then I found out that the SATA-III has a top write speed of about 70MB, which is like lower than the lowest SATA-II. On the other hand, SATA-III has a top write speed of 355MB, which is higher than the highest SATA-II, which maxes out around 280MB. So what matters more, top read speed or top write speed? (Cost-wise there is no difference, I can get either for $120 at NewEgg.)

1) NEVER defrag an SSD. There isn't a need. Auslogics Disk Defrag has a check box in it's options to not list SSDs so you can avoid doing so.

SATA III is the 600MB/s or 6Gb/s SATA interface. It has twice the peak bandwidth of SATA II which is 300MB/s or 3Gb/s. With conventional mechanical hard drives, you will only see a difference in Burst speed, basically dumping the on drive cache on a read. Right now top sequential read speed for a mechanical hard drive is around 150MB/s while most SATA II drives will have a burst speed of 225-250MB/s.

(In reference to Katie V's post)

That was true before they added garbage collection / TRIM functionality to the drives and Windows 7. Write performance decay is a lot less, nearly non existent in some cases.

The thing is that mechanical hard drives have been around forever and people who right file systems, the part of the OS that handles reading and writing files have been using a few assumptions that have been true for very long time.

First, every sector on a hard drive is in the same place physically on the hard drive. The controller on the hard drive only needs to know that to get to cluster 2814, that's N tracks in and the Mth cluster on that track, every single time. Second, there is no penalty in performance writing over existing data. It make no difference if the sector is empty or has deleted data in it. Third, it doesn't matter if you write over that sector once or a million times, it will still work.

All of those aren't true on for an SSD. First there is the write penalty that Katie V mentions in her post. An empty 4KB cluster can be written to with no penalty. A previously used one needs the entire block it's in to be erased first and then considerably more than that 4KB cluster has to be written out. Second Flash memory can only be erased a certain number of times before it can't be erased reliably anymore.

So to get around those two problems the physical location of a cluster can move around. The previous cluster 2814 has "deleted" data in it, fine we'll write our new data in that empty cluster over there and call that cluster 2814. This is why defraging an SSD is pointless. On a normal mechanical hard drive the idea is to arrange all the clusters in a file in order to minimize moving the read head. But there is no such thing in an SSD and the SSD is actively fragmenting the file during writes to avoid the need to erase and rewrite a block to free up space.

Also there's a percentage of the total clusters held in reserve for writes. So a 64GB SSD may have 72GB of Flash so there's always some empty clusters available for a quick write.

What the garbage collector (actually more like an anti garbage collector) / TRIM function does is consolidate good data into blocks with fewer "deleted" clusters from blocks that are mostly "deleted" clusters. Then at the drive/OSes leisure, a block with no valid data (because it already moved the valid data out) can be erased without the need to write back any valid data into it. That now empty block can be sent to the end of the line for writes to help conserve the number of times it will be erased.

In most reviews nowadays you will see them torture test an SSD with loads of writes and deletes and more writes so write performance will start to suffer. Then then will wait a little bit and test again. That's what the "fresh"/"used" designation means in that review at Tom's Hardware.

I think it's safe to say that if you use a 'good' SSD, and make sure it and your OS supports TRIM (see: Windows 7), you will never have to worry about your drive going slow on you.

Good SSDs are anything by Intel, Indilinx, and SandForce. They can provide good worst-case performance even without TRIM. SandForce drives do amazingly well without it, and although it ain't perfect, it can justify you forsaking TRIM for a RAID setup.

If you're interested in this sort of thing, I would suggest reading Anandtech articles on SSDs. Anand Lal Shimpi was the man who blew the lid on bad SSDs; he discovered, investigated and publicized how a bad SSD will cause half-second or one-second stalls in light usage. Thanks to him, we have SSDs tuned for real world performance, rather than peak benchmark scores.

I've got an intel G2 160 gig drive. My system is noticably faster than with a spinning disk that it had before I upgraded to the SSD. The windows logo at boot doesn't finish animating before I hit the login screen. I zone consistantly faster than friends with HDDs in a number of MMOs and similar-spec systems/settings. In general I can watch them vanish as they start to zone, click, and still beat them through. I haven't done extensive CoH testing, though I have noticed my CoH zones seem to take a long time to start with no SSD activity going on.

If you built your own system and spent in the 150-200 range on your cpu and graphics board, the SSD is the next biggest (overall) upgrade you can give the system. There's a reason the first-gen netbooks with the anemic Atom processor and their "slow" SSDs were as fast as they were -- with a HDD it would have been torture to use one.