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LiamRiordan

The Rambling KR Player
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Aug 4, 2008
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Has anyone here been daft enough to try DH and its mods with an SSD? I'm in the process of acquiring one since my HDD is, (once again) failing.

Any experience here?
 
I don't recommend SSD's, it has nothing to do with DH.
SSD's is based on technology I don't trust. Every time you use the SSD, it's lifespan goes down, and the lifespan of SSD is far lower than HDD (they lose their speed advantage vs HDD's in ~2 years last time I checked).
Furthermore, if you have a good HDD, the speed of a HDD is good enough. I have a HDD from 2006 and I STILL load consistently faster than 99% of players in online games due to having an optimized system and good CPU despite the propagation of SSD's now. Speeds of HDD vs SSD is really only useful during the loading period, and most systems are fast enough.

I don't know why your HDD is failing yet again. I usually only get HDD failures if they overheat (very rarely, forgot to plug in my HDD fan). Are you properly cooling your HDD?
 
I don't recommend SSD's, it has nothing to do with DH.
SSD's is based on technology I don't trust. Every time you use the SSD, it's lifespan goes down, and the lifespan of SSD is far lower than HDD (they lose their speed advantage vs HDD's in ~2 years last time I checked).
Furthermore, if you have a good HDD, the speed of a HDD is good enough. I have a HDD from 2006 and I STILL load consistently faster than 99% of players in online games due to having an optimized system and good CPU despite the propagation of SSD's now. Speeds of HDD vs SSD is really only useful during the loading period, and most systems are fast enough.

I don't know why your HDD is failing yet again. I usually only get HDD failures if they overheat (very rarely, forgot to plug in my HDD fan). Are you properly cooling your HDD?
The lifespan is apparently a lot longer than I first thought too, I figured it was very short and I'd get one just for OS booting, which is my plan. Here is an exerpt:
So how long is long? To help users estimate how long an SSD will last, SSD vendors such as OCZ have come up with formula: a drive's life span equals its capacity multiplied by its write endurance rating, divided by the average daily writes. For example, the 120GB Vertex 3 SSD has a write endurance rating of 3,000 cycles. If you write 50GB on the drive daily, the total number of days the drive will last before becoming unreliable is: (120 x 3,000)/50 = 7,200 days, which is about 20 years. If you write an average of 100GB a day, the drive would last about 10 years.
Link:
http://www.cnet.com/uk/how-to/storage-talk-understanding-your-solid-state-drive/

Its the same HDD I used when it failed the first time, the head reader broke and I managed to get it repaired, but the data was still corrupt so it needed a total format. Its on its way out again so I'm ordering another 1TB from Seagate this time, I'm not going to use Atachi again.
 
I use DH with SSD but I don't think it makes big difference. Theoretically, with multiple small files, there should be a benefit but it's already fast enough with a traditional drive. And when you are past the loading process, everything is in RAM already. But for system performance in general, it's a nice boost.

About the lifespan - I have mine for over 1.5 years (as a main system disk) and it looks good so far. I recently checked it with SSDLife (http://ssd-life.com/) and it gave me over 90% score so I'm in good hope :)
 
The lifespan is apparently a lot longer than I first thought too, I figured it was very short and I'd get one just for OS booting, which is my plan. Here is an exerpt:

Link:
http://www.cnet.com/uk/how-to/storage-talk-understanding-your-solid-state-drive/

Its the same HDD I used when it failed the first time, the head reader broke and I managed to get it repaired, but the data was still corrupt so it needed a total format. Its on its way out again so I'm ordering another 1TB from Seagate this time, I'm not going to use Atachi again.

Actually it's not at all the formula they stated. Write occur in 4K page size chunks. Deletion from an SSD (to free up space for a write) occurs in 256K block chunks, and all sub 4K page chunks in the 256K block which is not set to be deleted needs to be copied. Therefore, the worst case is that on each 4K deletion, there are excess writes which occur which increase wear. The amount of excess writes increases with fragmentation, and disk defragmentation (I think) should significantly increase disk wear since you are essentially moving many 4K pages around and each move requires a copy (and thus wear down) of a 256K block unless the disk defragmentation software is optimized for SSD (I doubt it is if you have XP/Vista/7). Furthermore, speed decreases as the wear goes up, so the performance advantage decreases at a much faster rate (which iirc from a slide I saw in CS61C was ~2 years, although the reliability has probably improved today to maybe 5 years) than the supposed best case usability time of 20 years. Lastly, program optimizations intended for HDD are useless if you have an SSD. Therefore, the performance difference over an SSD vs a HDD after a few years of usage is not that significant.

A more accurate worst case estimate would be (Size * Endurance) / (<Amount of Writes>/4K pages * 64 writes/4Kpage) where amount of writes increases the more you use the disk due to possible problems with disk defragmentation. In other words, the worst case is 64x faster wear than the formula you mentioned. If we take an average of worst and best case, then it's still 32x higher wear then the best case mentioned in the article.

(Although once SSD sizes reach TB territory, wear won't be as large of an issue since the need for deletions will be less)

What really kills SSD's is deletion, not necessarily the write itself.

SSD's should work very well for OS boot however since there is very few re-writes unless the OS is saving logs to the SSD or something. Even then the logs shouldn't be long and as long as the SSD is sufficiently large, shouldn't result in problems.

(As an aside, the failure of HDD due to parts failure is equally relevant for SSDs, SSD usage wear is an additional failure vector that HDD do not have)
 
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Deleting files on a disk doesn't overwrite the entire file, just the few bits that point to where it is at. So the "page size" doesn't really matter. And even then the SSD moves stuff around so it is not always pounding on the same little bit of the disk. It also detects when areas are becoming worn out and stops using them.

Modern SSDs will last longer than the lifespan of the other parts of your computer by several times. The only reason to not switch entirely to SSDs is they are still much more expensive than traditional drives.
 
SSD is simply flash drive which is an electronic hardware. HDD is a mechanical device. SSD will and always be faster than a HDD; electrons are faster than rotating macroscopic things.

Lifespan of SSD is naturally shorter than HDD because aging of transistors are quick compared to mechanical HDD devices. But even your aged SSD will be much faster than a fast 7200 rpm HDD. Perception of "short life SSDs" is not really true, lifetime of SSDs and your DRAMs are not very different.

HDD is a dead technology, cost of SSD drives are quickly falling, within few years, there will be no more HDDs. So, if you want better performance from any application, use SSD. Any application will require hard drive at certain point and SSD will process these instantly.

I use SSD only and even instant loading of DH makes me happy :) Yeah, i have only 128 GB but my external HDD of 1 TB is always with me to store anything necessary :)
 
I've been meaning to ask this for a while: Does anyone know if there's a way to lower the CPU cycles for DH? Sometimes when on the go I play on an older laptop, and the CPU (dual core @2.5 Ghz from ca. 2008) consistently runs around 40-45%... just enough heat that I wish I could lower it a bit (consistent heat = not good for lifespan of laptops). Doesn't seem like the game really needs that much CPU power anyway.

I think it spends 90% of it, always checking for a plethora of events/decisions that aren't going to happen for years, if ever. It loads them all, and then has to check constantly.
 
With windows you can change the CPU priority of a process.

Start the program, CAD, Start the Task Manager, right click on the DH program, set priority.

If you change it to low it will probably run slower.

You can also change the power setting on your laptop to run slower. Start, Control Panel, Power Options
 
With windows you can change the CPU priority of a process.

Start the program, CAD, Start the Task Manager, right click on the DH program, set priority.

If you change it to low it will probably run slower.

You can also change the power setting on your laptop to run slower. Start, Control Panel, Power Options

Changing the priority helped a bit (noticeably), but when I went into power settings and lowered the % of "maximum processor state", it really knocked the CPU usage down to a more reasonable level.

Strangely, I detect absolutely NO difference in terms of game speed/lag, etc. It's all perfectly fine, just as before! I even went into a busy scenario, cranked up the speed, started messing with a bunch of stuff... just to see if I could get it to 'sweat' a little bit. Nope... it's perfectly fine. But now running at only a fraction of the CPU load. Thanks. :)