Hmmm. The only game I've tried on my Vertex 2 has been a super modded Oblivion that was stuttering on my HDD because of all of the little tiny files it had to deal with. It was much better on the Vertex 2. But that's all I've used it for. It's my OS drive.
SSD advice please
- Thread starter suryad
- Start date
I am gonna hold off on all these buggy SSD malarkey getting sorted out first before I splurge the money for a couple of them bad boys. My confidence is completely shaken what with this Intel glitch and OCZ crapping out. I think I have yet to read anything bad about the Patriot Wildfire SSDs though.
I had a 64GB SSD for my Windows 7 system drive, but it's quickly filled so I have to upgrade to a 80GB one. It has the benefit of quick boot time, but since I don't shutdown my computer very frequently it's not a great benefit. Since 80GB is still not big enough, I have to install most of my games and applications on other normal HDDs so they don't benefit much (if at all) from the SSD.
After I upgraded to a Z68 system I bought another 64GB SSD as a cache for my main HDD. Right now it performs rather well. For example, loading a character in World of Warcraft at the first time after boot (no system memory caching of HDD involved) takes 54 seconds without SSD cache, and 23 seconds with SSD cache.
Depending on the price of RAM, it's probably better to simply invest more on the system memory to reduce loading time (that's why I think Seagate's hybrid HDD is not very attractive as it only has 4GB SSD cache, not much compared to currently common system memory size). However, SSD cache still has the benefit of being able to cache write (write back instead of write through) and also the ability to retain cached data across reboots.
After I upgraded to a Z68 system I bought another 64GB SSD as a cache for my main HDD. Right now it performs rather well. For example, loading a character in World of Warcraft at the first time after boot (no system memory caching of HDD involved) takes 54 seconds without SSD cache, and 23 seconds with SSD cache.
Depending on the price of RAM, it's probably better to simply invest more on the system memory to reduce loading time (that's why I think Seagate's hybrid HDD is not very attractive as it only has 4GB SSD cache, not much compared to currently common system memory size). However, SSD cache still has the benefit of being able to cache write (write back instead of write through) and also the ability to retain cached data across reboots.
I liked the post in the other thread on building a cache drive out of spare RAM. Allocate 4Gb of RAM to a RAM drive that is compressed on the SSD (empty on startup, very tiny) and expanded on startup to become another drive. Allocate your page file, browser cache, OS temp etc to that drive which is just purged on restart.
This one
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=58581&highlight=ramdrive
look for a post by alberquque
http://forum.beyond3d.com/showthread.php?t=58581&highlight=ramdrive
look for a post by alberquque
pagefile on a ramdisk? That seems somewhat bizarre. I did notice Windows is faster with the pagefile on my SSD compared to moving it to a HDD though. One example here was disabling/enabling a secondary display (bizarrely enough) because Windows 7 seems to hit the swap file when doing that.
I haven't been very interested in putting much besides apps and the OS on the SSD because games load from large archive files in a lot of cases and so HDD sequential transfers get the job done due to the game loads being frequently CPU limited anyway. The big exception for me was my modded Oblivion setup which would stutter a lot on HDD due to random accesses of small files.
I haven't been very interested in putting much besides apps and the OS on the SSD because games load from large archive files in a lot of cases and so HDD sequential transfers get the job done due to the game loads being frequently CPU limited anyway. The big exception for me was my modded Oblivion setup which would stutter a lot on HDD due to random accesses of small files.
I pre-emptively answered this question in my very first post in that thread...
I have a few older 32-bit apps that absolutely require swap space, but I have no 64 bit apps that need that kind of resources. So pagefile went straight into the ramdrive so it avoids those paging writes on my SSD.
I really want to throw a 4GB ramdrive on my desktop, set the compression flag, throw the entire Oblivion folder structure into it, and then built a junction to the ramdrive to replace the C:\Program Files\Oblivion folder.
Might finally solve the remaining stutter on that bastard
(But, hell, who am I kidding...)Being 32 bit programs, how can they possibly require swap space ? They can't allocate more than 4 GB (well, 2 really).
I think you'd be better off disabling swap completely (on Windows you need to disable core dumps on crash, since it uses the swap file as temporary storage to be allowed to disable swap).
Cheers
theres more than one program
windows will use swapfile space even if there is plenty of ram available, why ? who knows?
Silent_Buddha
Legend
I tried the pagefile on RAMdisk and almost immediately (ok exaggeration took a few minutes) ran out of memory. This is with 16 GB of memory. But then that's understandable my system managed pagefile was roughly 8-10 GB on disk. So cutting that down to 4 GB while also cutting my system memory down to 12 GB wasn't a very good idea.
Up until the point I ran out of memory there was also absolutely 0 perceivable speed increase.
That said, I have a 256 GB Crucial C300 SSD for my operating system and applications (Games are on a traditional HDD). I also have 100-150 GB free at all times so wear leveling should allow this drive to last well over 10 years even if there are frequent writes to the SSD.
Regards,
SB
Say what you want, but there were at least two older games just in Steam that required virtual paging space be enabled or they would crash -- on a Win7 64-bit box with 8GB of ram. There are apps that require paging space, even if you have massive overkill (relative to their age and true requirements) for installed ram.
My solution is not universal, but it addressed all the problems I needed to have solved. Primarily:
- I have a paging file so that all my games work (even the old ones)
- All my TEMP, TMP and browser cache data is now in ram versus in a physical format on the SSD taking up space that I would otherwise have to manually clean up once every month or so
- I'm not burning write cycles on my SSD for all the things that Windows would have written to those TEMP and PF locations on disk, thus preserving SSD performance and total lifespan
- I still have more than enough ram available for any other app I would normally use on that laptop
If this doesn't work for you, feel free to ignore it. This was a measurable help to the performance of my machine -- not just the PF, but the entire gammut of temp and cache redirection.
Yeah I have read of apps behaving strangely when there is no swap at all.
It'll still stutter unless you use the Stutter Remover mod that uses funky frame rate tricks to fool your brain. The stupid game engine stutters by design due to scripts loading for each cell and such. There's a CPU and IO hit involved that causes frame rate to be unstable and that's the problem.
I really want to throw a 4GB ramdrive on my desktop, set the compression flag, throw the entire Oblivion folder structure into it, and then built a junction to the ramdrive to replace the C:\Program Files\Oblivion folder.
Might finally solve the remaining stutter on that bastard
It'll still stutter unless you use the Stutter Remover mod that uses funky frame rate tricks to fool your brain. The stupid game engine stutters by design due to scripts loading for each cell and such. There's a CPU and IO hit involved that causes frame rate to be unstable and that's the problem.
Hey, what ever works
I'm guessing that they don't require swap, rather they check available (physical) memory and the game interprets the 64 bit value larger than 4GB as a negative value and tanks. By using a big chunk of RAM for swap you restrict the amount of memory windows reports as free and your app runs.
And yeah, Windows has poor HDD behaviour, so I believe you when you say it improves performance. I have a specific problem with a (system) log file being written every second on one of my laptops that prevents the drive from ever spinning down :-/
Cheers
What's it logging?
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