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Considering an SSD drive - Any issues with STO?
goodscotch
Member Posts: 1,680 Arc User
Please post if your PC is running on an SSD drive. Does this affect your gameplay in STO?
Thanks in advance for your posts.
Thanks in advance for your posts.
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Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
Reason being is not because the data is being read and processed any faster, but because an SSD has no moving parts to it, so there's no delay from the platters spinning up or the reading head moving into position.
Word of advice about SSDs to all though: Don't bother using a disk defragmentation program on them. SSDs use flash memory similar to that in USB drives and RAM chips to store data, and flash memory is by its very nature fragmented. When you defragment an HDD, it takes data and moves it around to form an orderly pattern on the disk, which does increase performance and might even gain you some space, but on an SSD, all it does is take that fragmented data and put it back in another fragmented pattern, so you won't see any benefit to defragging an SSD.
Hell, it used to be that the SSD read/write cycles (the number of times a particular space can be written over and accessed before degradation makes it unusable) were really low, so regularly defragmenting an SSD would actually severely compromise the lifetime of the drive. Thankfully the technology has advanced to where that's no longer an issue.
Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
I disagree that modern SSDs are problem free. A two year old study from Facebook's data centers shows a surprisingly high rate of heat related problems and uncorrectable read errors.
http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebooks-ssd-experience/
Even the newer NVMe drives are known for their sensitivity to heat.
"-Grind is good!" --Gordon Geko
Accolades checklist: https://bit.ly/FLUFFYS
The article is misleading. It addresses first and second gen SSDs in a server use case (we use newer ones in a standard PC use case), only talks about the hyper expensive PCI variety (SATA, M.2, and mSATA are the norm for consumer use), and doesn't break it down by brand to get a reliability check.
This article has wonderful information... if you're talking about building a server out of old parts.
We aren't.
Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
On an SSD data transfer and access speed is a key factor. This is happening at a far higher rate than Mechanical HDD's which were a bottleneck. Even the communication protocol was a bottleneck, hence NVMe now replacing AHCI which included language meant for a mechanical device.
Mechanical SATA --> 2.5" SSD SATA connected --> 2.5" SSD PCIe connected <---> NVMe.
It's not really a case of "don't bother" to defrag your SSD, don't ever do this as it's detrimental to the SSD's life as you mentioned. Let the manufacturer's software (i.e. Samsung Magician) and the drive itself take care of garbage collection and optimization. With some operating systems the OS may take a part in this as well.
I'd completely agree that modern SSD life in terms of data reads and writes, MTBF, etc make their usable life not a concern. Many have 5 year warrantee's just like a mechanical hard drive.
A 2.5" SSD can really speed up an older laptop or desktop in all respects via a SATA connection. A newer M.2 / NVMe drive is plain silly fast. Nice middle ground if you have a spare PCIe slot is to get a PCIe adapter card for a 2.5" SSD for machines not supporting NVMe.
Are you saying that NAND flash cell manufacturing and design is different today than two years ago? I'd be truly interested in any resources describing this in more technical detail. Might be what finally convinces myself to do the switch. The only changes over the past couple of years I was aware of so far is wear leveling algorithm improvements and the NVMe interface but I admit it's not easy to keep up with every technological breakthrough.
"-Grind is good!" --Gordon Geko
Accolades checklist: https://bit.ly/FLUFFYS
No problems. And I unlike other games the loading times are the same. The game is slow to boot and map loading is the same as always. Only in other games did I notice a HUGE difference.
But yeah, no problems with SSD's.
I recommend getting one from Western Digital.
SSD's are a solid tech now. You won't "wear" one out. There are no heat problems, it has no mechanical parts. In my first computer that had an SSD there was no room for it.. So it was just zip tied to a support collum in the case, lol.
Two.years ago? Not sure I could get you that information, but the article you linked wasn't referencing two year old equipment. It was referencing first and second generation enterprise SSDs, which are much older.
Any way you slice it though, that article is pointless for a consumer because it does not reference consumer grade equipment or consumer level use. It references enterprise level data storage for Facebook, which means 24/7 uptime and constant access. Of course the failure rates are going to be high. It's a huge amount of data coming in and going out all the time. Your average PC doesn't come close to that level of use. Hell, even your top end PCs don't come close.
Things I want in STO:
1) More character customization options such as more clothing options, letting the toon complexion affect the entire body, not just the head. Also a true RGB color picker applied to all costume and appearance options, which would allow for true appearance customization and homogenous colors instead of "this same exact color looks vastly different on two different pieces."
2) Bridge customization, not bridge packs. Let us pick a general layout and adjust the color palette, console appearance, and chair types, as well as more ready room layout options.
3) Customizable ground weapons, i.e. The aesthetic look of phaser dual pistols but they shoot antiproton bolts. For obvious reasons this would only apply to standard ground weapons.
4) For the love of Q please revamp Plasma Ground Weapons. They look like demented Supersoakers right now.
5) True Vanity Impulse and Deflector effects similar to Vanity Shields.
6) A greater payout for hitting T6 Reputations. Currently it takes more time and resources to get from T5 to T6 than it does to get from nothing to T5. Make that grind really pay out at the end.
7) Mirrorverse Refugee event similar to AoY/Delta/Gamma, complete with new Mirrorverse recruits for all factions.
8) Independent Faction, because yo ho yo ho a pirate's life for me!
Only minor reduction in load times since you are still waiting for the servers.
Drive 1: Samsung Evo 850 500GB SSD
Drive 2: Western Digital Black Edition 2TB 7200RPM Mechanical.
PC is a Core i7 4770k @ 4.2GHZ with 32GB of RAM and a GTX 1080.
The total difference observed was exactly 0. Both drives are able to load the game before most maps are finished loading from the host. In almost every case the 2 drives performed the same and I ended up moving STO to the Mechanical Drive since there was no real difference. There were a couple isolated times when a zone might load 1-2 seconds faster, but of all the games I have tested for performance, I have yet to have any game show less of a difference then Star Trek Online when it came to the hard drive I installed to. Simply put, the game loads very quickly locally, any delay or long wait times you get in this game are likely from waiting to receive files from the host. My internet connection is 120MB so it's plenty fast, the game server is the limitation in almost every case.
The game works great on either, and I always recommend a SSD over a Mechanical.. just don't buy one strictly for STO. You will be disappointed by the result.
In Windows operation.. man.. it's night and day. SSD is unquestionably faster, I can hardly stand to use a Mechanical drive anymore.
Yeah, this is basically what I experienced and posted above. Agreed. Not sorry at all I purchased the drive though. As you said, so many other things were affected positively that it made this upgrade worth it. I also doubled my RAM...going from 8GB's to 16GB's which may be overkill, but it's there if needed.
> themadprofessor#9835 wrote: »
>
> Hell, it used to be that the SSD read/write cycles (the number of times a particular space can be written over and accessed before degradation makes it unusable) were really low, so regularly defragmenting an SSD would actually severely compromise the lifetime of the drive. Thankfully the technology has advanced to where that's no longer an issue.
>
>
>
>
> I disagree that modern SSDs are problem free. A two year old study from Facebook's data centers shows a surprisingly high rate of heat related problems and uncorrectable read errors.
> http://www.zdnet.com/article/facebooks-ssd-experience/
>
> Even the newer NVMe drives are known for their sensitivity to heat.
Facebook a reliable source. That's like getting advice from a stump
If you actually care to read the article you'll see that Facebook isn't the source.
"-Grind is good!" --Gordon Geko
Accolades checklist: https://bit.ly/FLUFFYS
> monodoso wrote: »
>
> Facebook a reliable source. That's like getting advice from a stump
>
>
>
>
> If you actually care to read the article you'll see that Facebook isn't the source.
Need a hug
Nice, those are some solid upgrades.
I'm glad you enjoy the new drive.. the only downside of SSD's is that it makes it hard to use PC's that don't have them. When I go to work, my work PC feels like it's ancient technology because it has a mechanical drive. I always think something is wrong with it because it's not supposed to take that long to load windows.
Yup...me too. 10-15 second load versus a 120 second load is like night and day.
If I had to replaced the 32TB of storage in my HTPC with SSDs I think I would need to knock over a bank.