SSD noticeably smmoths flight experience

[CrashEd]

Placing the page file on a hard disk is a mistake. Should be on the SDD to enjoy the performance boost fully.

 

I agree, you'll get better performance, undoubtedly, but I thought that this would cause a problem with the OCZ Vertex drives? Doesn't the Sandforce controller throttle the speed of the drive when writing lots of uncompressed data to it? At least that's how I read it...

Edited December 3, 2010 by CrashEd

[Pilotasso]

Never heard of that, neither I ever any performance hit because of the page file. I do 1GB in 4kb chunks benchmarks and that alone is way way more taxing than the page file.

[CrashEd]

Never heard of that, neither I ever any performance hit because of the page file. I do 1GB in 4kb chunks benchmarks and that alone is way way more taxing than the page file.

 

Too many sequential writes in big chunks will definitely do it by the sounds of it.

 

Just been back-tracking where I read this and it turns out it was an issue with xp/Vista. Reading the OCZ forums they recommend having the pagefile on the SSD in Win7. Makes sense tbh.

 

I'm so close to getting one of these. If it wasn't (financially) a bad time of the year I'd be reaching for my bank card...

[Pilotasso]

Sequential writes is not what you have on real world. its rather random in nature.

[Rusty_M]

I'll admit to getting a bit confused. I'm sure Tom's Hardware said at some point that page files are "Poison" to SSDs.

 

I only bought the SSD because I saw what seemed like a good deal last week on Ebuyer. Thing still hasn't arrived yet, bloody snow-incapable-country. I don't know when, or if, I'll be able to replace it, so I'd quite like it to last reasonably well.

[EtherealN]

Page files (or "swap") is poison to SSD's due to the fact that it incurs a lot of writes onto the drives, and since each memory cell on a flash chip is limited in the amount of writes it can accept it does reduce their lifetime.

 

Modern SSD's don't suffer as much from this though - the newer flash chips technically still suffer from the problem, but the amount of writes they can take before failure is so high that you usually don't have to worry*. (And you can still read from a broken cell, so the OS can safely read the sector, move it to a fresh sector, and then mark the broken one as out of commission.)

 

*I remember someone making a purely mathematical model to failure on the Asus EEE's that had SSD's, and with continual usage they still estimated several years until this became a problem. I believe it was one of the Debian devs that did it (for the Debian EEE distribution variant, on the discussion of whether to still follow the Linux tradition of having a separate swap partition).

Edited December 3, 2010 by EtherealN

[CrashEd]

Agreed. There definitely seems to be conflicting opinions.

 

No post here for nearly a week. Sounds like you guys have had it bad.

[Rusty_M]

Edinburgh got a lot. We've had post but I've not had a "while you were out" card! I want my first PC component damnit!

 

/selfish child mode.

 

Edit: Hooray! It arrived whilst I was at work today! First ever PC component. How exciting (for me anyway). I was pleasantly surprised to discover it comes with a 3.5inch drive bay adapter

Edited December 4, 2010 by Rusty_M

[JaseGill]

Guys,

Sorry been away.

I didn't move the page file at all. I followed the OCZ guidelines to the tee.

With Windows 7 and the associated other OS drive stuff I have I decided to get the 2nd OCZ only because I wanted to keep the Flight Sim and general PC stuff separate and the deal at Overclockers at the time was good.

I have a standard spinning 1TB Spinpoint F3 for any other games as it seems, and has been mentioned in the forums, that stutter isn't so bad with non-flight sim related gaming. not that I play many PC games other than flight sims. That's what the PS3, Xbox360 and Wii attached to the big sceen plasma are for :)

J.

[Rusty_M]

Hopefully I can fit both DCS titles and FSX on it as well as windows. I might just keep the SSD for ED's sims, and put others on the HDD.

[emenance]

For my non raided friends

 

You can moddify a regular drive and make it faster than a raptor . I have using Raid 0 and a back up plan for alot of years. Prefer it.

 

The link below descrides how to EASY turn a 1.5 tb seagate drive into a drive faster than a WD VelociRaptor

 

http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=658

 

This drive was 59 bucks during black friday. maybe cheaper around Christmas again

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148337

 

Please let us know if you do this.

 

Or you can just do this http://www.techarp.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=143&pgno=0 Basically you can partition any drive to use the faster parts of the drive.

Edited December 7, 2010 by emenance

[Shaman]

I have a question to current SSD users. Shall one install Windows 7 OS entire on SSD (with its page file) or there is no real benefit while simming? Or maybe just install the default page file on SSD? Or just install game files on SSD (what I hear from you).

[Pilotasso]

OS and page file on SDD. SIm's also on SDD, lighter games and multimedia on a separate HDD. Minimum size required for all this is 120GB.

 

Make sure you install torrent, Emule and other downloaders onto the HDD's and their temporary directories set there as well.

[HiJack]

+1 same setup as Pilotasso :)

[MackTheKnight]

I started using SSD's a little over a year ago. (Around the same time as Win 7 released.) I have 2 OCZ Agility 120 GB drives running in RAID 0. Read speed is around 475 with Writes around 390.

 

I have my OS and all my resource intensive simulators on these drives and they run beautifully. It's amazing how much of a bottle-neck the old spinning drives are. I still use a 1 tb spindle drive for my data and my other steam games, etc.

 

Eventually I'll update my data drive to SSD's, as well.

 

I backup my RAID0 array to an external RAID 1 NAS just in case I run into problems. This is done on a weekly basis. I do the same with all of my critical data files on the 1 tb spindle drive. :)

 

-Mack

[emenance]

i like those synology SAS at newegg.com. I would also like to start backing up to a raid 1. Its either back up or pay someone to do it for you.

[bumfire]

^ dont use raid one to backup to, thats the last thing you would wanna do.

[JaseGill]

+1 to Pilotasso.

That's exactly how I'm configured and I noticed a significant difference.

All I'm thinking now is that I may have to get an I5 and a new mobo to get the bet out of DCS.

Waiting on Beta4 1st though to see how it performs on my current hardware.

J.

[topdog]

^ dont use raid one to backup to, thats the last thing you would wanna do.

 

How come? If you don't intend maintaining a history/library of multiple backups, the least you can do is offer some protection to the one you're counting on. It's not necessarily the most cost effective strategy, but it is a strategy if you value time and effort > money.

 

Just wondering if that's your only objection or you have some other consideration in mind.

[MackTheKnight]

Raid 1 - is a mirrored drive set - what's the issue with backing up to that? A drive fails you hot swap the failed unit and you're good to go. That's what it was made for....

 

Raid 0 is a striped set when you have the goal of performance/speed in mind. Hence I use that for my OS and flight sims

[Rusty_M]

So as it looks like I'll finally be putting my first new build together tomorrow, what is the general consensus regarding SSD's?

 

As I only have 60GB, I need to make a decision. I can keep it for sims and HDD heavy games, or use it for Windows, and put a few sims in the remaining space. What would folks recommend?

 

Also, would changing the HDD/SSD I have ED sims stored on use activations/deactivations, or can I change their installed position within the same PC?

[RSharpe]

I have a 120GB SSD running the main Windows 7 OS partition as well as ARMA2 and DCS A-10C. Those are the two games that seem to benefit from fast read access speeds. The rest of my bloated user folder and my programs (including Steam) is located on a 1GB WD Cavier Black HDD. I have 6 other HDDs containing various movies, TV, music, and data.

 

I suggest you keep as many applications installed on a separate HDD. Relocate your user folder as well since that grows out of control really fast.

[Rusty_M]

It was really only FSX, ED sims and potentially Rise of Flight if I get it that would've potentially been on the SSD. ArmA 2 for me will be on the HDD, as I bought it through Steam.

[power5]

Put OS and games on your 60gb. Should be plenty big enough if you install other programs to mechanical drives. By the time you fill it up bigger ones will be cheaper.

[JaseGill]

Rusty,

How come you're upgrading at the moment.

Do you know that in 5 days the next generation of i5 and i7 are released on the 9th of Jan. They even reckon that the price wont be significantly more than the current generation and will have the added bonus of lowering the price of the current generation.

Just a thought.

J.