solid state drive?

tompaforum

has anyone run the game form a ssd? i thought it might make for quicker transistions.

jaguarskx

I do not have a SSD, but SSDs do allow programs to launch faster.

However... STO requires data to be downloaded when transitioning from on area to another, like sector space to a solar system to visit a planet or to do a mission.

A SSD will not help with downloading data, that is pure dependent on the servers and your internet connection.

kamiyama317

I run STO from an SSD. It varies from map to map - some load almost instantly, others do something like this:

Takes 2 - 10 seconds to go from 0% to 1%
Shoots up to 40% almost instantly
Sits at 40% for 2 or 3 seconds
Shoots up to 100% almost instantly and loads map

I would say that most of my map transitions take less than 5 seconds total. I am assuming that the brief stall periods are downloads? I don't know.

grouchyotaku

Now keep in mind that SSD, when compared to hard disks, have faster reads (as they eliminate both seek time and track rotation latency, and avoid file fragmentation issues...) but slower writes. Now with STO, as long as your download speeds are slower then the slower SSD write speeds, this will not be noticeable...

Also keep in mind that SSD do have a finite number of writes possible, so they do eventually wear out and fail, but the mean time between failures with modern SSD drives are at least as good as current hard disks are...

tompaforum

Thanks for your advice.

noroblad

SSD are nice but *some* of the transition issues are caused by server lock. It seems that at peak times, the servers choke up on making new instances quickly, and that leaves you in the load screen for 1-3 min or so. At non-peak server times, on the same PC, my load times are extremely quick, so its not tapping out the disk.

A less expensive alternative is to raid up normal disks, which cranks up your data rates significantly at a lower cost / GB of storage. Raid 0 on a pair of high rpm drives will solve ALL loading problems for ALL games; because ALL games were designed to load at an acceptable speed on a standard mid rpm single drive. You can go faster still, of course, but is it worth it?

In other news, defrag is useful esp on games like STO that refrag daily with bug fix patches to game files....

My conclusion is that SSD is very nice but not worth the price tag for most people. If you can afford it, sure, go for it, but don't expect a miracle for the cases where the server is the actual problem you will see no improvements there...