Ssd/hdd ?

[Artorius]

So, back in beta, I made a thread about the loading time between zone that causes freezes and a dev replied to it basically saying my hard drive is too slow (seagate barracuda Sata II 7200 rpm).

It seems to have improved since then but I still notice some freezing. So, I am curious, how would one go about improving his hard drive speed ? Are there faster/better hard drive out there ? How about SSD ? Any feedback ?

HDD technology doesn't seem to evolve a lot while everything else is evolving at light speed.

Basically, I am curious how would a faster hard drive/SSD improve my experience in MO.

[Zehtuka]

I'm running an OCZ Vertex 2 here and it is a big improvement compared to my old HDD.
(7200 - 32MB)

I can actually catch up to people because they have bigger load spikes, however SSD's require quite a lot of tweaking to get them working at optimal performance.

[Mauzi]

I compared a decent single drive to a mirrored drive and the difference is most noticable. Also, having your system on a different physical drive will help alot, preferrably mirroring those aswell. Thus, a good choice with regular harddisks would be to use 4 drives total, which isn't an issue for today's mainboard that use to have a raid controller onboard and offer 4-8 SATA connectors.

An SSD will help alot more even, but unless you have a fortune to spend they're of rather low capacity and just a system and MO (along with all patches) will occupy alot of the limit disk space. If you decide for an SSD, make sure you get one of the most recent types (old generation types have severe issues after a short time, causing 1-2mins of PC pausing) along with Windows 7, which currently is the only system that supports SSDs properly.

Summary:
An SSD is way too small and expensive while 2 mirrored harddrives will be able offer all the capacity you will ever need.

Hope this helps.

[Artorius]

Originally Posted by Zehtuka

I'm running an OCZ Vertex 2 here and it is a big improvement compared to my old HDD.
(7200 - 32MB)

I can actually catch up to people because they have bigger load spikes, however SSD's require quite a lot of tweaking to get them working at optimal performance.

Huh, what do you mean exactly ? I'm not exactly an expert, I like it when things are simple, is it difficult to use a SSD ?

Do you ever freeze in-game ? What's your PC ?

Originally Posted by Mauzi

I compared a decent single drive to a mirrored drive and the difference is most noticable. Also, having your system on a different physical drive will help alot, preferrably mirroring those aswell. Thus, a good choice with regular harddisks would be to use 4 drives total, which isn't an issue for today's mainboard that use to have a raid controller onboard and offer 4-8 SATA connectors.

An SSD will help alot more even, but unless you have a fortune to spend they're of rather low capacity and just a system and MO (along with all patches) will occupy alot of the limit disk space. If you decide for an SSD, make sure you get one of the most recent types (old generation types have severe issues after a short time, causing 1-2mins of PC pausing) along with Windows 7, which currently is the only system that supports SSDs properly.

Summary:
An SSD is way too small and expensive while 2 mirrored harddrives will be able offer all the capacity you will ever need.

Hope this helps.

I'm aiming for an Intel X25-M Mainstream 160gb along with a Western Digital Caviar black 640gb sata3 6gb/s, are they good ?

What do you mean mirrored ? I never used more than 1 harddrive on my PC, I'm a total noob about using multiple hard drives.

Do you ever freeze in-game ?

[iZakaroN]

SSD have zero seek time, till that is the slowest part of normal HDD. In other side sequential read/write time are slower on most SSD, but even that SSD gives much better results especially for open world MMO.

The problem is that quality SSD are very expensive and have shorter life than normal HDD.

About progress of HDD my new Raid 0 Samsung 1T F1 x2 gives 240mb/s in the beginning and 130 MB at the end of the surfaces compared to the my old 320M Seagate where it was between 80 and 40.

[Mauzi]

Originally Posted by Artorius

Huh, what do you mean exactly ? I'm not exactly an expert, I like it when things are simple, is it difficult to use a SSD ?

Do you ever freeze in-game ? What's your PC ?

I'm aiming for an Intel X25-M Mainstream 160gb along with a Western Digital Caviar black 640gb sata3 6gb/s, are they good ?

What do you mean mirrored ? I never used more than 1 harddrive on my PC, I'm a total noob about using multiple hard drives.

Do you ever freeze in-game ?

The harddisk is a pretty good choice (though I would see about getting a larger model of at least 1TB), the SSD is decent aswell. Both are reknown manufacturers which I use to recommend to my customers.

Generally your plan to use the SSD for the system and a rather fast harddisk for your games is okay. Just make sure that the games reside on the first third (aka first partition of about 1/3rd of the disk) of the harddisk, since these become slower the further you get to the end. Thus, you best use another partition for your data - that doesn't usually require maximum speed. Or put MO on the system's SSD.

For further details about current SSDs you might want to have a look here:

http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/s...marks,110.html

Regarding using multiple hard disks to let them work together to either receive more speed or more data safety, have a look here:

http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleID=830

Do I ever freeze in MO ? Well, not that it is really noticable, disturbing or have any impact on the game. My current setup involves little above average disks only, but it is 3 mirrors (meaning 6 harddisks, I do need that much safety here) total and splits all the harddisk accesses perfectly across them. Though, as long as you use at least 2 drives, the setup is more important than the actual number of drives. Most important here is the chipset, which I use an Intel type which offers the best (most reliable and fastest) onboard raid controllers, in this case one of those reknown ICH7/8/9/10 types.

I once had to compare my about same component PC with one of my friends' PC which mainly differed in the mainboard only. Mine being an Asus with Intel chipset, his being Asus with Via chipset. Due to the slow chipset (and especially the crappy Via raid controller) his overall PC performance is about 75% at max, even after he upgraded to a 2x as fast graphics card.

So all in all, make sure that you have a proper mainboard before buying an SSD or a harddisk raid, it will only get you as far as the base limitation of the mainboard will allow. Cheap mainboards generall are either fast and unreliable or slow (but at least quite stable) compared to proper ones.

Hope this helps.

[Shalgore]

RAID0 Is the solution

[Zehtuka]

Originally Posted by Artorius

Huh, what do you mean exactly ? I'm not exactly an expert, I like it when things are simple, is it difficult to use a SSD ?

It just requires some registry editing in Windows to disable things like prefetch, superfetch etc. Everything you need to do is quite well documented here.

Originally Posted by Artorius

I'm aiming for an Intel X25-M Mainstream 160gb along with a Western Digital Caviar black 640gb sata3 6gb/s, are they good ?

That's an older generation SSD, I recommend either an OCZ Vertex/Agility 2 or a Corsair F120

[Henrik Nystrom]

Originally Posted by Artorius

So, back in beta, I made a thread about the loading time between zone that causes freezes and a dev replied to it basically saying my hard drive is too slow (seagate barracuda Sata II 7200 rpm).

It seems to have improved since then but I still notice some freezing. So, I am curious, how would one go about improving his hard drive speed ? Are there faster/better hard drive out there ? How about SSD ? Any feedback ?

HDD technology doesn't seem to evolve a lot while everything else is evolving at light speed.

Basically, I am curious how would a faster hard drive/SSD improve my experience in MO.

HDD is mostly used for when you start Mortal Online, after that its memory and graphic cards. a SSD is a fast and nice HDD but expensive.
The freeze you talk about is an issue we have in our current build, this will soon be solved, doesnt matter what disk you use. Also we are supporting 64 bits so you can take some serious advantage of using more than 3 gig ram on your system. With the new build we also gain performance in shadows and light. And with our texture optimization we will unload the roof of the graphic cards which means minimize those type of crashes. So your HDD is only used when entering the game mostly.

[Sorus]

Originally Posted by Henrik Nystrom

HDD is mostly used for when you start Mortal Online, after that its memory and graphic cards. a SSD is a fast and nice HDD but expensive.

Saying that though were all running on a windows OS and we know how that uses swap files like a bitch so in theory having an SSD will speed up memory usage when windows is using the swapfile.

Afaik though you need win 7 to get the most out of the latest SSD`s as thats the only OS that supports the TRIM feature.

[Zehtuka]

Originally Posted by Sorus

Saying that though were all running on a windows OS and we know how that uses swap files like a bitch so in theory having an SSD will speed up memory usage when windows is using the swapfile.

If you run an SSD you always should disable the pagefile.

[Baggen]

Originally Posted by Artorius

So, back in beta, I made a thread about the loading time between zone that causes freezes and a dev replied to it basically saying my hard drive is too slow (seagate barracuda Sata II 7200 rpm).

It seems to have improved since then but I still notice some freezing. So, I am curious, how would one go about improving his hard drive speed ? Are there faster/better hard drive out there ? How about SSD ? Any feedback ?

HDD technology doesn't seem to evolve a lot while everything else is evolving at light speed.

Basically, I am curious how would a faster hard drive/SSD improve my experience in MO.

I had the exact same problem during closed beta my harddrive was approaching it last spin and when i crossed a node i had a load time of 15-30s, i changed to a ssd when i did my last reinstall and now the problem isnt a problem any more its hardly noticeable anymore.

For me it was worth it.. i keep all my files on a NAS and just system and MO on the ssd now.

[lionlol]

I run 2 60 gig ocz vertex ssd's and its a huge performace boost to your system all across the board. You will not regret buying one its like night and day comparison to mechanical drives that have to spin up. The only problem is you have to make a lot of tweaks to how your os runs to get max performance and maintain drive speed over time even in win 7.

[Artorius]

... on one side, the company CEO says SSD are not necessary, memory and video card is more important and on the other side, players says they've seen a good performance improvement with SSD...

[chickenkicker]

Originally Posted by Artorius

... on one side, the company CEO says SSD are not necessary, memory and video card is more important and on the other side, players says they've seen a good performance improvement with SSD...

not saying SSD will not boost computer performance( trust me im saving my money for a few of them) but i have a standard $89 HD THIS ONE and i dont have any hang ups load problems or any real issues at all. i run 120 FPS on the low side and 315 FPS on a high side. So for the people that are thinking about buying a SSD just to make this game run smother, the better money spent is on the biggest GPX card with the most memory you can afford.

[Context01]

Originally Posted by Artorius

... on one side, the company CEO says SSD are not necessary, memory and video card is more important and on the other side, players says they've seen a good performance improvement with SSD...

Understand what a HD does in a computer, you will then understand the CEO

/edit
Try defragmenting your HD if you think it is slow