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Good SSD for improving load times?


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22 hours ago, HeyYou said:

Windows will let you put the page file anywhere you want. But, putting it on a slower drive than what the O/S is on, may have some unpleasant side effects.

Personally, I doubt that and besides what have ladyonthemoon got to lose and I would advice her to at least try to do that.

Should that not work, oh well, perhaps it would be better to buy a faster SATA or as a last resort a bigger SSD.

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16 minutes ago, Leonardo said:

Personally, I doubt that and besides what have ladyonthemoon got to lose and I would advice her to at least try to do that.

Should that not work, oh well, perhaps it would be better to buy a faster SATA or as a last resort a bigger SSD.

Windows is kinda funny about such things. Some folks can put the page file on a slower drive, and suffer no ill effects, others..... not so much. Some folks can get away with no page file at all... (and with 16gb of ram or more, you really *shouldn't* need one.....) but, it's windows. I have come to expect bizarre behavior from it. :D

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3 hours ago, Leonardo said:

hould that not work, oh well, perhaps it would be better to buy a faster SATA or as a last resort a bigger SSD.

Buying a bigger SSD is out of the question; as for a faster SATA, what speed should it have if I want to put a big and useful page file on it?

3 hours ago, HeyYou said:

Windows is kinda funny about such things. Some folks can put the page file on a slower drive, and suffer no ill effects, others..... not so much. Some folks can get away with no page file at all... (and with 16gb of ram or more, you really *shouldn't* need one.....) but, it's windows. I have come to expect bizarre behavior from it. :D

Ah, Windows, we're going to miss it when it disappears... :P

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1 minute ago, ladyonthemoon said:

Buying a bigger SSD is out of the question; as for a faster SATA, what speed should it have if I want to put a big and useful page file on it?

Ah, Windows, we're going to miss it when it disappears... :P

The day someone comes out with a stable O/S, that supports directx, and just does what I need it to, I will quickly change. :D

 

I think the fastest sata speeds are currently 6gb/second..... Of course, that assumes a drive that can support it as well. Best bet is to check and see what the best your mainboard can support, and go from there. Generally, the faster drives are simply higher RPM..... 7200 is pretty much standard, 10,000 is out there, and pretty reliable, 15,000 is also out there, but, they are expensive, and I hear rumors of longevity issues with them...... No personal experience with 'em though.

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7 hours ago, ladyonthemoon said:

How do I know what speed my current SATA has?

What brand is your SATA drive and what model is it, that kind of things can tell you a great deal about how fast a SATA is?

Check the BIOS about what type of SATA you have and doing that will often tell you what brand it is.

 

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16 hours ago, ladyonthemoon said:

Ah, Windows, we're going to miss it when it disappears... :P

I dunno, it's the cockroach of the operating systems world.  It feels like it's already been around forever and is unkillable.

 

16 hours ago, HeyYou said:

The day someone comes out with a stable O/S, that supports directx, and just does what I need it to, I will quickly change. :D

I guess that's classic Microsoft, they've made their proprietary stuff its own standard so it's almost unassailable.  I do wish developers would move away from DirectX to something more open... until then, Windows will always be the best and only Windows.

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I've never really been a fan, though I would agree that if I absolutely had to use Windows, XP or 7 tend to be the better choices.  Though 10 does have the big advantage of being 64 bits (and actually working properly as such) as 4GB really doesn't cut it any more.

I'm not really a vocal proponent of any OS in particular though, they all have their faults. :lol:  It's just that Windows has more than most.

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4 hours ago, vometia said:

I thought there was a problem where the 64-bit version didn't work very well; or maybe it's XP I'm thinking of, I don't really remember now.  I know I "upgraded" to 10 for a reason, but it seems to be eluding me at the moment.

64 bit XP was problematic, as very few folks wrote drivers for it..... I used it for several years, but, was never able to find printer drivers for it. For ANY printer....... and the workarounds for the 32 bit drivers never worked for me......

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12 hours ago, vometia said:

It feels like it's already been around forever and is unkillable.

It is NOT unkillable.  Here is what you need to do in order to prevent Win 10 to be installed regardless how many updates you get from Windows Update.

1.  Open Notepad and save a text document (empty if you want) as C:\Windows\System32\GWX.txt

2.  Right click on GWX.txt and select rename then remove the file extension ".txt", just ignore the warnings, and click Apply or OK

3.  Right click on GWX then properities and make sure you tick the "Read-Only" checkbox then click Apply

That's about it and now you should have no problem with a Windows Update that's about installing Windows 10.

Edited by Leonardo
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Windows 10 isn't specifically my problem, it's just Windows in general. :lol:  To be honest I don't really have quite as many objections to 10 as many others seem to have, though it's possibly because I bought a copy which I suspect didn't come with quite so much crapware (yeah I know, that's a bit naive).  But the other thing is I only use it for gaming and modding: everything else is done on a Unix of some sort, which also isn't perfect but I have a longer history of fighting with it and we've developed a sort of understanding with each other.

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Unix IS user friendly, it's just VERY picky about who its friends are.....

Windows 10 is ok, its possible to turn off most of the 'phone home' stuff when you install it. But, not all of it.... (there's some under the hood that microsoft doesn't give you options for.) Its reasonably stable, does what it is supposed to, and, unfortunately, a fair few things it should not. (chiefly install various stupidity, without giving any say-so in the matter.)

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  • 2 weeks later...

Earlier today I discover something odd that I think might explain why I can't run in-game after reloading my game.

Yesterday, I had obtained Grimsever for Mjoll in the dwemer ruin she lost Grimsever and came from the dwemer tower near the road, close to the entrance for the Frostmere Crypt ruin.

Today, I continue from where I left last night and now I couldn't run despite for not being encumbered.  After a while I checked my gear, I mean those enchanted amulets, rings which all had the Carry Weight enchantment and all was were active, but as soon I *remove* one and then I click on it a second time now I could run .

So it seems to me that somehow the game or my SSD doesn't recognoize the Carry Weight enchantment properly after reloading a gamesave.

Of course I could be wrong, but that seems logical to me.

On 2018-01-29 at 10:30 AM, Leonardo said:

When I play either SLE or SSE and reload my game after I did something, anything it doesn't matter other than I was running, then I decided to re-load my game I can't run with my PC anymore in-game.  Sometimes I can re-load my game 1-2 times before I can't run and this only happen in Skyrim.

I suspect, now this is my theory, that a SSD handles data information differently in comparison to a SATA and there is one thing, from I understand, a SSD might not have is a cache memory while a SATA has a cache memory.

So when I re-load my game in Skyrim the data from the Skyrim.ini and/or SkyrimPrefs.ini isn't properly saved on a SSD while it is properly saved on a SATA.

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I've taken the plunge myself and finally decided to go for a medium-size SSD drive to speed stuff up: in the end I rather randomly chose a Crucial MX200 500GB which hopefully doesn't suck: it seems to have good reviews, and enough of them to hopefully reduce the randomness factor you often get with customer reviews.  I didn't want to spend a fortune so I had to do some mental juggling between brand, (apparent) speed, capacity, price and reviews before choosing something at random.  I guess prices have come down a fair bit by the look of things.

I figured 500GB should be a usable amount: it's not enough to replace my games folder but it's plenty to shift some particularly speed-sensitive games across: my recent excursion into FO4 has been irritating enough with its frequent cell-loading pauses that Something Must Be Done, even having rid myself of the diabolical v1.10.50 executable; and even though the loading times of e.g. Inquisition seem faster now that I have more memory (yeah I know, that seems slightly odd, I can only assume it's caching a lot of stuff it would otherwise need to haul off storage) but still way slower than I would like.

I've only bought one which is somewhat against the grain for me as I've been a firm believer in mirroring or some other form of RAID for the past 20 years, but I guess I want to be certain that it will actually see a significant improvement before making a bigger investment.  I also want to see how well SSDs work with mirroring before doing so anyway: I'm not sure a typical RAID system will be able to pick up on the sort of errors that are known to befall SSDs.  It's a pity Windows doesn't support ZFS which properly checksums data and has a built-in revision control system; I don't know as much about NTFS as I "should" except that I know it's not as good as it should be.

I'll probably copy games to the SSD as I need them since it isn't that much of a headache to move them using either Steam or Origin (not decided which is the best approach, whether links or "reinstalling" after moving the data) but I'll keep them backed up on the HDDs anyway.  And all my modding and stuff goes on the server's RAID-10 array which is backed up about once a week so even if there is a "catastrophic" loss I shouldn't lose a significant amount of work and saves, etc, though reinstalling Oblivion or FO4 would certainly be no fun!

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5 hours ago, vometia said:

I'll probably copy games to the SSD as I need them since it isn't that much of a headache to move them using either Steam or Origin (not decided which is the best approach, whether links or "reinstalling" after moving the data) but I'll keep them backed up on the HDDs anyway.  And all my modding and stuff goes on the server's RAID-10 array which is backed up about once a week so even if there is a "catastrophic" loss I shouldn't lose a significant amount of work and saves, etc, though reinstalling Oblivion or FO4 would certainly be no fun!

When I need to backup something I usually copy the entire partition, just so I don't forget to copy a single file. :tongue:

Sure, it takes time to copy a whole partition in Windows Explorer, but I have a lot of free time.

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I think I'm just mean with my storage!  My backup drives are only 2TB each and almost full, I really need to get bigger ones.  I'm fairly thorough with stuff I've worked on myself but I agree with your principle as mistakes happen, and even when they don't reassembling everything is a bit of a pain.

For Windows "backups" I use mirroring, which protects somewhat against hardware failures but is not useful for software errors, accidental deletions or viruses. :/  I guess I should really get another weatherproof HDD enclosure (or two) to do Windows as well as the Unix box.

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  • 2 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

I think it's probably been a "must have" at every point in the past, and one I had to learn the hard way, several times!  But even with the IT budget at work (I may have got to choose how a lot of it was spent, but still had to get the justification past my pointy-haired boss: who after griping about it promptly spent literally ten times the entire spend to date on a "vanity server" because someone in a neighbouring department had one, the same again on a team of people to manage it, though there was cronyism involved; and then years trying to find something for them all to do.  Grr.  But I digress...) it was quite painful seeing "useless" storage space costing money.  Took that mentality a long time to dispel considering that logically I knew perfectly well that it wasn't useless!

Seems weird to me that in the mid '90s, DEC were still internally experimenting with RAID solutions internally and memos were going around asking for any unused HDDs people could donate (pointy-haired bosses again: budgets for actual work were by that time practically impossible to get approved) as they'd had their own RAID products out for 10 years and they weren't even new then, though I vaguely recall something about them testing out really gigantic arrays rather than the usual small-scale mirroring and XOR stuff.

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  • 1 year later...

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