SSD vs HDD - What is the optimal drive setup for boxing?

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[swamphy]

Ok, first some preliminary information for "the rest of us"

HDD = Hard Drive Disk. It normally consists of a few "platters" (plates?) that are hard, shiny and look like a small, yet thick version of a CD-ROM. This is the "NORMAL" mass storage device on a typical home computer. When someone mentions their 'Hard Drive', they are referring to this. It's size is measured in Gigabytes.

SSD means Solid State Drive. It is a mass storage device much like your average hard drive, with a few differences. Instead of plates, it has memory chips, much like RAM chips inside. The advantage is higher data transfer speed. (its FASTER).

The lore surrounding this newer type of drive (SSD) is that the data seek times are terrible, so it's only slightly faster than an HDD.

What some have found is that by tweaking the way the Windows Operating System works, you can get greatly enhanced performance. At my company, we use SSD's for software with intensive databases. By doing this, we can use cheaper software that was built for smaller jobs and we can get more out of it. (for example, we can use the $500 accounting software where we would normally need to upgrade to the $5000 software).

So yes, it works.

The question, and point of this post is, does it work with EQ?

My gaming computer is as stock out-of-the-box as you get. Onboard video, sound, internal speakers, not made for gaming in the least. 2 gigs of RAM. It's made for business applications, not gaming. (and yet, I can box 7 or 8 toons)

I got a new SSD, copied my hard drive to it, and booted into Windows to see if it speeds up load times with EQ Titanium.

Here are my tests:

**************
Test 1 SSD
**************
Single Toon Logon
1:12 total

8box logon
3:18 for the first 4 toons other 4 froze/crashed at char select
17:18 for 8 toons total

**************
Test 2 :HDD
**************
Single Toon Logon
1:40 total

8 box logon
3:21 for the first 5 toons
8:57 total

******************************************
Test 3:HDD with SSD holding page file
******************************************
Single Toon Logon
1:12 Total

8 Toon Logon
7:33


As you can see, for single boxing, the SSD loads 72% faster.

However, when I started multi-boxing I got a terrible crash rate and had to keep trying to get toons to load. Ending up with almost twice the time it took to load 8 boxes onto my HDD.

Then, I found the balance.

TEST 3 was the optimal setup. I ran with this all night long and had little to none Hard Drive lag. It was the most stable setup I've used yet. Very enjoyable.

Let me explain TEST 3 for the "rest of us".

Windows uses what's called a "page file" for virtual memory. This is when your system does not have enough RAM to cover what you need for open programs. It writes the extra data to a 'mass storage device' (usually your hard drive) and reads from it as needed.

EXAMPLE: When you are in EQ and come upon a large group of toons, like in a raid or in the Nexus and your hard drive light goes nuts and you start lagging, your computer is using the page file to load all the characterful graphics.

So what I did was boot from the normal HDD, with the SSD as a secondary drive on the system. Then I moved the Windows page file to the SSD and sized it larger than normal (10gigs is good, but I'm going to double it to 20GB for good measure).

This gave me the best performance and I would recommend it to anyone looking for a cheap fix to improve speed without buying a whole new system.

Note: this did NOT enable me to box more than 12 toons, and boxing more than 10 is still too laggy to play like I like to.


Conclusion: Yes, SSD's are worth it. There are plenty of setups to play with and I certainly did not exhaust the possibilities.

FYI: I recommend to adjust your page file, whether you use an SSD or not. To get to it go to right click My Computer, go Properties, Advanced Tab, Performance "Settings" button, Advanced Tab, Virtual Memory "Change" button, using Custom Size set your initial to 12GB or more and your Max to 20GB. This will cut down lag when boxing if you have a low amount of RAM like I do.

at your own risk.... yadda yadda.

Hope you enjoyed my guide. Please feel free to add your own experiences.

[Crabthewall]

I'm just curious what brand ssd you are using and what exact model? I have multiple machines that I multibox eq on and they all use ssd's with 0 issues at all. Staggeringly faster than standard drives, I do however use independent directories for each toon on one of them while the others shares a directory.

Both intel ssd's x-25 g2's one 80 one 160.

I can tell you now though using a crappy ssd like an ocz (yes I said crappy ocz ssd's) does lead to stutter and read issues.

[swamphy]

Good question.

WD SiliconEdge Blue SSC-D0064SC-2100 2.5" 64GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - OEM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250001

here is my stock system:

HP Compaq dc5800

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4471547&

[Crabthewall]

Good question.

WD SiliconEdge Blue SSC-D0064SC-2100 2.5" 64GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - OEM

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820250001

here is my stock system:

HP Compaq dc5800

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4471547&

Yeah the WD is known to be a quite weak performer actually. You'd do better with:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167023&cm_re=intel_80gb_ssd-_-20-167-023-_-Product which I've seen as low as $169

[kalzin230]

The main issue with SSD drives is that they become exhausted after prolonged writing intervals, producing laggier timings as things go on. the best thing to do is have a raid setup. currently i run with 6x SATA 3.0Gbps WD velociraptor 300GB in raid 10 config via onboard raidchip (asus ramapge II Extreme) with 12GB RAM and Intel Core 2 Quad processor, video cards: Dual ASUS ROG MATRIX 5870 P/2DIS/2GD5 video cards. this provides me with negligable lag. the key here is the 12GB of ram, allow EQ to use 2GB per client active and you should be cozy at 30FPS cap (set this in video options).

[Kejek]

Maybe I'm wrong, or just out of date with SSD's, but they still have limited writes before they begin to fail correct?

With that in mind, the idea of a pagefile of about 10gb on an SSD thats 64gb kinda scares me. What I remember reading a few months ago was that most SSD's were sitting around 50,000-100,000 writes before they started to fail (and I understand its each block of data, and that the entire SSD will not fail at once, but slowly blocks become unusable).

I dunno, just seems like your eating up your small 160$ SSD quickly.

[Crabthewall]

My oldest ssd is in a tablet pc I've been using since march 2008 without issue. Honestly, you are probably far more likely to fail a spinning disk then a ssd. Regarding slowing down over time, this has been addressed quite well with wear leveling, garbage collection, and trim.

[Isaaru]

My oldest ssd is in a tablet pc I've been using since march 2008 without issue. Honestly, you are probably far more likely to fail a spinning disk then a ssd. Regarding slowing down over time, this has been addressed quite well with wear leveling, garbage collection, and trim.

I've got hard drives that have been running more than 10 years.  I would hope a hard drive (especially one that's 4-10x more expensive) wouldn't fail in two years.

[Crabthewall]

My oldest ssd is in a tablet pc I've been using since march 2008 without issue. Honestly, you are probably far more likely to fail a spinning disk then a ssd. Regarding slowing down over time, this has been addressed quite well with wear leveling, garbage collection, and trim.

I've got hard drives that have been running more than 10 years.  I would hope a hard drive (especially one that's 4-10x more expensive) wouldn't fail in two years.

Sure and if you are like everyone else you've had hard drives fail in very short order too. That's luck of the draw and statistics. Statistically a good ssd with a quality controller under normal load will outlive a spinning hard drive. Go figure something that spins at 7200RPM will die faster than something that isn't spinning and doesn't give off heat, who'd have thunk...

[Isaaru]

You'd think so crab but with such a small sample of SSD's in user's hands we haven't seen what the real failure rates will look like.  Majority of the users of SSD so far are power users who naturally abuse their equipment a lot more but at the same time can take care of it and troubleshoot it a lot easier.

I've only ever replaced one hard drive, and that was a 40GB pos from a cheap compaq laptop.  I usually end up retiring the pc, or replacing PSUs/mobo/etc long before a hdd fails.  I've used every kind of hdd:  5400, 7200, 10k, and 15k rpm drives as well asenergy efficient and server friendly models in several different raid configs.

Maybe my statistics are off, I don't know.  When ssd is cheaper I'll be more inclined to use them.  And I'll damn sure abuse them.

[Crabthewall]

You'd think so crab but with such a small sample of SSD's in user's hands we haven't seen what the real failure rates will look like.  Majority of the users of SSD so far are power users who naturally abuse their equipment a lot more but at the same time can take care of it and troubleshoot it a lot easier.

I've only ever replaced one hard drive, and that was a 40GB pos from a cheap compaq laptop.  I usually end up retiring the pc, or replacing PSUs/mobo/etc long before a hdd fails.  I've used every kind of hdd:  5400, 7200, 10k, and 15k rpm drives as well asenergy efficient and server friendly models in several different raid configs.

Maybe my statistics are off, I don't know.  When ssd is cheaper I'll be more inclined to use them.  And I'll damn sure abuse them.

Well my experience goes a bit beyond that, and I'll say now even on modern drives, I see a lower failure rate in time with ssd's over hard drives. However there is a word for people like you that are afraid of technology, we call you luddites Or if you prefer, just cheap.

Try one out for a week as your primary boot volume (a quality ssd) then let me know how much better those spinning disks were. I know I've certainly tried both 

[Thyl]

I actually have a friend whose brother is a ludite. That term being very different today than what it was when it came into being.

I wouldnt say someone is cheap for not getting SSDs. They are definitely faster for reads but also 20x the cost per gigabyte.

The one other thing I will note is that I pretty sure newer OSes like Windows 7 can use a command to keep newer SATA SSDs from experiencing the performance degredation that comes with use. They however still will die eventually with use. Also their performance decreases when they have smaller amounts of avaialble space left.

Personally I've never had a hard drive fail in one of my machines. I may just be lucky. Or it may be the fact that other component failures have sent me to getting another machine.

Statistically speaking though it does look like SSDs are more reliable until they croak.

[Isaaru]

Try one out for a week as your primary boot volume (a quality ssd) then let me know how much better those spinning disks were. I know I've certainly tried both 

I plan on running one in my next PC build but with my deployment coming up I just bought a laptop for the trip which is going to extend the time frame to build another PC.   

[ieawenpo]

Ive been using SSD's in my systems since they were introduced.
There is no single greater piece of hardware that will give you the performance boost that changing to an SSD will bring you.

I love them and have 9 of them in various systems.
Just don't raid them.

[Crabthewall]

Ive been using SSD's in my systems since they were introduced.
There is no single greater piece of hardware that will give you the performance boost that changing to an SSD will bring you.

I love them and have 9 of them in various systems.
Just don't raid them.

You can actually raid some ssd's and still preserve trim for example.

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