I considered these but a SSD is supposed to have trouble with rewritten data. Is there a way to put just the persistent data into it?
A game is not supposed to be some kind of... place where people enjoy themselves!
I will definately be making the move to SSD but once the cost gets down to sane levels first. I will need like a 750gb for my MBP if I do go that route.
Bump and Grind Bane/SoA
Kenja No Ishi Earth/Empathy Controller
Legendary Sannin Ninja/Pain Mastermind
Entoxicated Ninja/PSN Mastermind
Ninja Ryukenden Kat/WP Scrapper
Hellish Thoughts Fire/PSI Dominator
Thank You Devs for Merits!!!!
Chaos, I think they have improved that issue somewhat with the SandForce processor, plus the OWC 240GB drive is actually a 255GB drive with the extra space being utilized for data management. I have not used the drive long enough to really say that this will never be an issue, but these drives have certainly improved a good bit.
As an aside, today I realized that I had forgotten to set the new drive as the start-up drive in System Preferences (which you need to do on a Mac when you swap out a boot drive) and the boot time, incl. Photoshop start is now down to 35 seconds! That is almost 2 minutes less than with the regular hard drive.
EvilRyu, if your MBP is recent enough (from 2009 on), OWC has a kit that you can use to replace your optical drive with another hard drive, or SSD. I would have loved to do that, but my MBP was too old. So you can have a small/cheaper SSD for the OS and the apps you want, and a bigger hard drive for data.
I think OWC may owe me a commission at this point. 
Another MASSIVE word of praise for my own SSD:
Ever since I installed it, CoX hasn't crashed. Not once. Not even when I try to break it.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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Ooh. Pricey but oh-so-nicey!|
Originally Posted by Xenos
Over the weekend I replaced the 160GB 7200RPM drive with a new OWC 240GB SSD.
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| Just for kicks I timed the boot (incl. start of Photoshop) of the MBP pre and post upgrade (I cloned the drive, so it was loading all the same stuff). Pre came in at 2:26 and post at 1:16. The biggest change of course was in opening the apps once I was booted to the desktop. Needless to say I am very happy. |
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| I don't have any numbers for the changes in COH, and I don't think that it would show in the frame rate, but I could tell that in areas that the MBP was choking on previously, it now does not seem to show any significant slowdowns. |
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Two thumbs up for SSDs. 
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Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
1:16 to boot? That's sloooow 
My 2010 MacBook Air 2.13 C2D with 256GB SSD cold boots to the desktop in 15 seconds or less. It's frickin insane. It also plays COH well at recommended settings (25-35 fps) and more than 50fps on performance settings. I've had it over a year now and it is by far the best computer I've ever owned. Light, fast, quiet, and reliable.
PRTECTR4EVR
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I agree 1000% I got a mushkin chronos 120 and it sings, in fact... I'm teaching it christmas carols for this up coming season!
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Originally Posted by Hyperstrike
If I could grow an extra arm, I'd make it three thumbs up *Goes and co-opts a random thumb*.
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It's better to save the Mystery, than surrender to the secret...
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Now I'm curious - what kind of hard drive did you have before that? Because I have a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid, which contains a small SSD, maybe that's why I don't crash much.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
Another MASSIVE word of praise for my own SSD:
Ever since I installed it, CoX hasn't crashed. Not once. Not even when I try to break it. |
Manga @ Triumph
"Meanwhile In The Halls Of Titan"...Titan Network Working To Save City Of Heroes
Save Paragon City! Efforts Coordination
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Possibly. Sometimes the client can time out waiting for data from the hard drive. In swap-heavy situations (especially on older machines with single drives), it's possible to swamp a hard drive, even with large caches.
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Originally Posted by CuppaManga
Now I'm curious - what kind of hard drive did you have before that? Because I have a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid, which contains a small SSD, maybe that's why I don't crash much.
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Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
Quote:
Not only that, but in certain types of flash memory reading the data from one location corrupts nearby data over time, requiring that it be rewritten regularly to avoid losing it. In addition, since the data is basically stored as puddles of electrons on devices in a chip, over time the electrons just begin to leak away, again requiring refreshing to avoid losing data. That menas a flash drive that's off for too long will begin to lose data (this is probably on the order of years, so it's not a huge issue).|
Originally Posted by ChaosExMachina
I considered these but a SSD is supposed to have trouble with rewritten data.
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The number of read/write cycles for most flash memory is on the order of hundreds of thousands. It'll be interesting to see how long these devices last compared to hard drives.
To be fair, hard drives are being pushed to the physical limits as well, and are becoming more prone to similar problems by packing so much data into ever tinier magnetic domains.
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From what I seen is that you will sooner get mechanical failure on a normal drive well before you lose data on a SSD. I currently do alot of desktop support for students at a university. It just amazes me how fast the hard drives in brand new computers go out. This is with Macs and PCs. I have yet to see a SSD come in with problems. Usually the student is lucky to get to 3 years on a laptop if using a normal drive. My guess is that with a SSD chances are something else will break long before the SSD will. Again this is not me saying SSD dont break its just alot less likely to. I cant wait till the cost gets down to some sane level so I can finally buy a few for my desktops at home when I build a new system.
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Originally Posted by Rodion
Not only that, but in certain types of flash memory reading the data from one location corrupts nearby data over time, requiring that it be rewritten regularly to avoid losing it. In addition, since the data is basically stored as puddles of electrons on devices in a chip, over time the electrons just begin to leak away, again requiring refreshing to avoid losing data. That menas a flash drive that's off for too long will begin to lose data (this is probably on the order of years, so it's not a huge issue).
The number of read/write cycles for most flash memory is on the order of hundreds of thousands. It'll be interesting to see how long these devices last compared to hard drives. To be fair, hard drives are being pushed to the physical limits as well, and are becoming more prone to similar problems by packing so much data into ever tinier magnetic domains. |
Bump and Grind Bane/SoA
Kenja No Ishi Earth/Empathy Controller
Legendary Sannin Ninja/Pain Mastermind
Entoxicated Ninja/PSN Mastermind
Ninja Ryukenden Kat/WP Scrapper
Hellish Thoughts Fire/PSI Dominator
Thank You Devs for Merits!!!!
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I had the standard 500GB drive that ships stock with all Macbook Pro 15" models. I can't remember the brand but it was the kind included in all 09-10 MBPro's.|
Originally Posted by CuppaManga
Now I'm curious - what kind of hard drive did you have before that? Because I have a Seagate Momentus XT Hybrid, which contains a small SSD, maybe that's why I don't crash much.
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My upgrade was an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD.
My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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Originally Posted by EvilRyu
From what I seen is that you will sooner get mechanical failure on a normal drive well before you lose data on a SSD.
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Of course you'll get mechanical failure sooner on a HD. An SSD isn't a mechanical storage device!
That doesn't mean you won't have failures sooner.
Part of it depends on drive I/O. Part of it depends on drive reliability. Some of the drives out there are horrendously fast, but a couple of the brands are rather notorious for high drive failure rates.
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| I cant wait till the cost gets down to some sane level so I can finally buy a few for my desktops at home when I build a new system. |
But this window is starting to close.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
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Do you still have the old hard drive around? Unfortunately Apple used 3 different hard drives during that period.
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Originally Posted by Nalrok_AthZim
I had the standard 500GB drive that ships stock with all Macbook Pro 15" models. I can't remember the brand but it was the kind included in all 09-10 MBPro's.
My upgrade was an OCZ Vertex 3 240GB SSD. |
Manga @ Triumph
"Meanwhile In The Halls Of Titan"...Titan Network Working To Save City Of Heroes
Save Paragon City! Efforts Coordination
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Careful with that one. SLC (single level cell, or 1 bit per cell) SSD's have endurances in the hundreds of thousands to a million write cycles.|
Originally Posted by Rodion
The number of read/write cycles for most flash memory is on the order of hundreds of thousands. It'll be interesting to see how long these devices last compared to hard drives.
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Pretty much all consumer-grade SSD's these days are using MLC (multi level cell, 2 bits per cell) technology. MLC has a much shorter lifetime, in some cases as low as a thousand write cycles (but usually estimated at up to ten thousand cycles). This is still better than a hard drive, unless you're running an enterprise database or streaming storage.
Manufacturers have started playing with 3 bits per cell (TLC). The best estimates I've seen for TLC is a thousand write cycles and it could well be lower than that. TLC scares me at the moment, I personally wouldn't use a TLC drive.
(The reason why the drive companies are stufffing more bits per cell is because it allows them to offer larger drives for lowed prices.)
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Of course; it's my new backup drive. When I get home this afternoon I'll let you know the details.
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Originally Posted by CuppaManga
Do you still have the old hard drive around? Unfortunately Apple used 3 different hard drives during that period.
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My guides:Dark Melee/Dark Armor/Soul Mastery, Illusion Control/Kinetics/Primal Forces Mastery, Electric Armor
"Dark Armor is a complete waste as a tanking set."
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You're forgetting the wear leveling algorithms built into the controller, so you avoid massive amounts of write cycles to the same cells every time. Significantly prolonging the usable lifetime of the media.|
Originally Posted by Brillig
Careful with that one. SLC (single level cell, or 1 bit per cell) SSD's have endurances in the hundreds of thousands to a million write cycles.
Pretty much all consumer-grade SSD's these days are using MLC (multi level cell, 2 bits per cell) technology. MLC has a much shorter lifetime, in some cases as low as a thousand write cycles (but usually estimated at up to ten thousand cycles). This is still better than a hard drive, unless you're running an enterprise database or streaming storage. Manufacturers have started playing with 3 bits per cell (TLC). The best estimates I've seen for TLC is a thousand write cycles and it could well be lower than that. TLC scares me at the moment, I personally wouldn't use a TLC drive. (The reason why the drive companies are stufffing more bits per cell is because it allows them to offer larger drives for lowed prices.) |
Most of the MLCs are tens of thousands of write cycles per cell. Aggregated across tends or hundreds of gigabytes and you're talking years of use from a drive.
Clicking on the linked image above will take you off the City of Heroes site. However, the guides will be linked back here.
Quote:
My old 2007 MBP (2.0 GHz Core Duo, 120 GB 5400 rpm disk, 8600GT) would boot to the desktop in about 26 seconds. (Unlike Windows this is when the OS is done and you can start using the machine.|
Originally Posted by Knowmad
1:16 to boot? That's sloooow
My 2010 MacBook Air 2.13 C2D with 256GB SSD cold boots to the desktop in 15 seconds or less. It's frickin insane. It also plays COH well at recommended settings (25-35 fps) and more than 50fps on performance settings. I've had it over a year now and it is by far the best computer I've ever owned. Light, fast, quiet, and reliable. |
Since Apple uses the EFI BIOS the time spent in BIOS POST is negligible, it's just loading the OS into RAM from disk that takes time.
I haven't timed my new December 2011 Macbook Pro yet, but it's faster from the 750 GB 5400 rpm disk but not by much. I hardly ever boot my Mac, I mostly just put it to sleep, and then it wakes up instantly.
When playing CoX I can use Ultra settings with the Ati 6750 and everything seems to run fine (don't know the fps). The game starts in about 5 seconds from the disk and I have 3-4 second load times when switching to a different map area.
These numbers might go down with an SSD, but even with a low end 5400 rpm disk I hardly ever have to wait.
It runs really well on the Mac right now as far as I'm concerned, although I haven't tried any of the high end content (just reached level 20).
The disk might make more of a difference on the 8600GT, if you have the model with 128 MB video memory, as then it has to move textures around a lot more. Still that should be mostly stored in RAM, and not on disk, unless you have a lot of other applications running.
Just wanted to share a little improvement I made to my aging MBP and the way COH plays for me.
The change is not Earth shattering, but it's a welcome improvement and I would encourage anyone who is on the fence about adding a Solid State Drive (SSD), to go for it.
My COH machine is an older 17" 2008 MPB with 4GB of RAM and GeForce 8600M card. Not cutting edge in any way, but it plays COH well enough. Over the weekend I replaced the 160GB 7200RPM drive with a new OWC 240GB SSD. On this pre-unibody MBP it was a little bit of an operation, but the videos on OWC had all the info for the upgrade.
Just for kicks I timed the boot (incl. start of Photoshop) of the MBP pre and post upgrade (I cloned the drive, so it was loading all the same stuff). Pre came in at 2:26 and post at 1:16. The biggest change of course was in opening the apps once I was booted to the desktop. Needless to say I am very happy.
I don't have any numbers for the changes in COH, and I don't think that it would show in the frame rate, but I could tell that in areas that the MBP was choking on previously, it now does not seem to show any significant slowdowns. It does not look like a new game, but it just seems to have fewer problems, which is a nice bonus to this upgrade.
Two thumbs up for SSDs.