kittycraft
Member
Would it be better to just continue using Trainz over 2 hard drives? Or have a giant one hold only Trainz? I have a mega hard drive & my Trainz filled it, about 150 GB filled with Trainz.
A Question about Hard Drives & Trainz
- Thread starter kittycraft
- Start date
Other people may disagree, but my belief is that it is better to have a quantity of storage space spread among two or more smaller hard drives than consolidated into one larger one. The reason I believe this is that if one has all the storage on one large drive, and suffers a catastrophic failure of that drive, one loses everything on the one drive. If one has two or smaller drives, with content spread across them (especially if back up is on one, and main on another) then one has to have two simultaneous hard drive failures to lose everything.
ns
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kittycraft
Member
Thanks for the reply, I thought that but I wanted to know what some people. Plus, I have some content that I got via email only & I deleted the emails not thinking that I needed them, silly me.
kittycraft
Member
Hooray for dooble post!
Would keeping the actual game on one drive & all the Downloads on another?
Would keeping the actual game on one drive & all the Downloads on another?
The way I have my computer setup is with 4 hard drives.
Windows is on one drive with my smaller program files(adobe reader,7zip pevsoft tools Etc).
Next I have my hard drive with only trainz installed to.
The next drive is what I call my Multimedia. All my downloads, videos,music,etc go here.
The next drive I have divided into three parts. First part my other large game installs go here(steam). Next part My backup files go here. And then the last part is for my Backup of anything to do with trainz.
I find this works for me because I can reload windows without worrying about losing my trainz install, or losing my vids,music etc.
The other thing I find for me is that windows runs better without the extra 373 gig of data on the windows drive.( 173 gig of trainz data + 195gig of other games data.)
And I have another computer that is used just for backup of my data as well.
Hope this helps.
Kenny
PS. Its 3 320 Gigabyte Hds + a 1TB HD
Windows is on one drive with my smaller program files(adobe reader,7zip pevsoft tools Etc).
Next I have my hard drive with only trainz installed to.
The next drive is what I call my Multimedia. All my downloads, videos,music,etc go here.
The next drive I have divided into three parts. First part my other large game installs go here(steam). Next part My backup files go here. And then the last part is for my Backup of anything to do with trainz.
I find this works for me because I can reload windows without worrying about losing my trainz install, or losing my vids,music etc.
The other thing I find for me is that windows runs better without the extra 373 gig of data on the windows drive.( 173 gig of trainz data + 195gig of other games data.)
And I have another computer that is used just for backup of my data as well.
Hope this helps.
Kenny
PS. Its 3 320 Gigabyte Hds + a 1TB HD
Consider using RAID 1 - disk mirroring
Consider using a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configuration for your system drive or any other drive you would like better performance on. There are 8 levels or types of RAID configurations available. However, RAID 1 or “disk mirroring” provides a mirrored version of the selected disk.
Remember that your system drive “C” contains all the Windows software and handles all your system needs (antivirus, program data and files, networking activity, system swap files, paging files, etc.) and is quite busy without the TRAINZ workload.
Your PC may already have a RAID capability within your disk controller, or you may optionally purchase an add-in RAID controller card for your PC. My system is a 6 year old HP m7650n, XP PRO SP3, Media center edition (E6300 CPU 2GB RAM with an add-in graphics card). I have only been using a RAID 1 configuration on my system disk for about 2 years and I am quite happy with the increased performance and redundancy I now have.
RAID 1 or mirroring provides that every piece of data written to your disk is automatically written to your mirrored disk as well. Also, every piece of data read from your system disk is read from either the main disk or the mirrored disk. This is where RAID 1 really shines as the reading of data from a disk is much more frequent than the writing of data. Thus the reading workload is spread over 2 drives – whichever is available first.
To implement RAID 1 you need 2 disks of equal size (2 x 250GB or 2 x 500GB). Install the spare drive into your system and turn it on. Select your BIOS or Boot page to turn ON the RAID support and select the drive you are going to mirror. Reboot. Voila, your system’s RAID controller will start to mirror the selected drive automatically.
If you purchased an add-in card, follow the instructions provided – but the concept is the same.
As for spreading your data over multiple drives in case of a drive failure is no longer needed with RAID 1 if all is on your mirrored drives. However, using a separate location for all your CDP downloads is a good idea too. I use a common folder for all my TRAINZ CDP files and sub-folders within for each different version of TRAINZ I am running (TRS206, TS2010 and recently TS2012).
Some users will create more than 1 logical drive on just 1 physical drive. If the 1 physical disk drive fails – there go the logical drives. As drives get larger and larger over time, more and more data is at risk if not backed up on another device or media of some kind.
Consider using a RAID (Redundant Array of Independent Disks) configuration for your system drive or any other drive you would like better performance on. There are 8 levels or types of RAID configurations available. However, RAID 1 or “disk mirroring” provides a mirrored version of the selected disk.
Remember that your system drive “C” contains all the Windows software and handles all your system needs (antivirus, program data and files, networking activity, system swap files, paging files, etc.) and is quite busy without the TRAINZ workload.
Your PC may already have a RAID capability within your disk controller, or you may optionally purchase an add-in RAID controller card for your PC. My system is a 6 year old HP m7650n, XP PRO SP3, Media center edition (E6300 CPU 2GB RAM with an add-in graphics card). I have only been using a RAID 1 configuration on my system disk for about 2 years and I am quite happy with the increased performance and redundancy I now have.
RAID 1 or mirroring provides that every piece of data written to your disk is automatically written to your mirrored disk as well. Also, every piece of data read from your system disk is read from either the main disk or the mirrored disk. This is where RAID 1 really shines as the reading of data from a disk is much more frequent than the writing of data. Thus the reading workload is spread over 2 drives – whichever is available first.
To implement RAID 1 you need 2 disks of equal size (2 x 250GB or 2 x 500GB). Install the spare drive into your system and turn it on. Select your BIOS or Boot page to turn ON the RAID support and select the drive you are going to mirror. Reboot. Voila, your system’s RAID controller will start to mirror the selected drive automatically.
If you purchased an add-in card, follow the instructions provided – but the concept is the same.
As for spreading your data over multiple drives in case of a drive failure is no longer needed with RAID 1 if all is on your mirrored drives. However, using a separate location for all your CDP downloads is a good idea too. I use a common folder for all my TRAINZ CDP files and sub-folders within for each different version of TRAINZ I am running (TRS206, TS2010 and recently TS2012).
Some users will create more than 1 logical drive on just 1 physical drive. If the 1 physical disk drive fails – there go the logical drives. As drives get larger and larger over time, more and more data is at risk if not backed up on another device or media of some kind.
William0d0
Active member
I have 2 1TB WD black caviar drives as a RAID 0.
Performance is great.
No fancy partitions, everything (windows, movies, trainz...etc) is on the C drive.
With 8 gigs of ram there isn't much swapping going on and I really don't see windows being very busy with the drive while playing Trainz.
I have Trainz on 2 computers so that covers most of backing up. I also have an external drive and payware / my content stuff also goes on a thumb drive as a last resort.
Performance is great.
No fancy partitions, everything (windows, movies, trainz...etc) is on the C drive.
With 8 gigs of ram there isn't much swapping going on and I really don't see windows being very busy with the drive while playing Trainz.
I have Trainz on 2 computers so that covers most of backing up. I also have an external drive and payware / my content stuff also goes on a thumb drive as a last resort.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Some time ago we looked at Trainz with Perfmon and there was very little disk activity once the game had loaded.
TS2010 and later might be different but I doubt it.
Chris from N3V thinks that because Trainz uses lots of very small files that latency ie being able to locate the file on the hard drive is important and is an advocate of SSDs but from a frame rate point of view there isn't much difference between running from an SSD or a Raptor, less than one frame per second when I first installed TS2010. However I seem to recall some scenery objects do pop up faster.
Cheerio John
TS2010 and later might be different but I doubt it.
Chris from N3V thinks that because Trainz uses lots of very small files that latency ie being able to locate the file on the hard drive is important and is an advocate of SSDs but from a frame rate point of view there isn't much difference between running from an SSD or a Raptor, less than one frame per second when I first installed TS2010. However I seem to recall some scenery objects do pop up faster.
Cheerio John
More expensive? they're £260 for 2TB at the moment due to the flooding, just how much more expensive can they be?
Very grateful that I bought two 2TB Caviar blacks for £60 ea just before the flooding occurred.
johnwhelan
Well-known member
Interesting, I think I was just running a fairly simple layout so a more complex one might be different.
Cheerio John
The way I have my computer setup is with 4 hard drives.
Windows is on one drive with my smaller program files(adobe reader,7zip pevsoft tools Etc).
Next I have my hard drive with only trainz installed to.
The next drive is what I call my Multimedia. All my downloads, videos,music,etc go here.
The next drive I have divided into three parts. First part my other large game installs go here(steam). Next part My backup files go here. And then the last part is for my Backup of anything to do with trainz.
I find this works for me because I can reload windows without worrying about losing my trainz install, or losing my vids,music etc.
The other thing I find for me is that windows runs better without the extra 373 gig of data on the windows drive.( 173 gig of trainz data + 195gig of other games data.)
And I have another computer that is used just for backup of my data as well.
Hope this helps.
Kenny
PS. Its 3 320 Gigabyte Hds + a 1TB HD
This is very similar to my setup, except I use 3 drives instead.
1 for Windows and smaller programs
1 for Trainz only
1 for backups. downloads, and videos downloaded off my camera.
I also have a couple of external backup drives that I copy my Trainz backups too, including complete copies of my Auran/TS12 folder, just in case something should croak.
I update these daily using Fast Copy instead of Windows Explorer. FC is so much faster and doesn't calculate the files and folders prior to copying the data. This I think is one of the most frustrating aspects of Windows 7! It takes about 2 hours to copy over 120 GB of data.
Here's the link to Fast Copy.
http://ipmsg.org/tools/fastcopy.html.en
John
It's a good thing you have backups because a RAID 0 means if one drive croaks, you'll lose everything to the bit heaven in the sky!
John
One of the simplest ways to handle hard drives....
windows and backups is to take and put up a windows home server in the house. I have one running WHSv1 because of drive extenteder(Just a Bunch of Disks JBOD). It's a quadcore I5 low end graphics but 20 Tb of storage, yes 10 2 Tb drives. 850 watt PSU. It's got everything on it, and backsup all critical data daily on all machines in the house, including a couple of wi-fi laptops. Along with storing a couple thousand movies, record albums, photos and home videos.
All the critical files are mirrored on the server automatically in real time.
One of the nicer things about it is when my Daughter comes home from College, or my Son comes back from working...he works all over the United States, they are part of our homegroup, and the server will back up their Laptops too, as soon as they turn it on in the House.
And it's one hell of a media server to our HTPC's.
windows and backups is to take and put up a windows home server in the house. I have one running WHSv1 because of drive extenteder(Just a Bunch of Disks JBOD). It's a quadcore I5 low end graphics but 20 Tb of storage, yes 10 2 Tb drives. 850 watt PSU. It's got everything on it, and backsup all critical data daily on all machines in the house, including a couple of wi-fi laptops. Along with storing a couple thousand movies, record albums, photos and home videos.
All the critical files are mirrored on the server automatically in real time.
One of the nicer things about it is when my Daughter comes home from College, or my Son comes back from working...he works all over the United States, they are part of our homegroup, and the server will back up their Laptops too, as soon as they turn it on in the House.
And it's one hell of a media server to our HTPC's.
Here's a look at the bad boy FWIW.
http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/Aerocool Strike-X ST Full Tower Gaming Case Data Sheet.pdf
Looks wicked as sin......
Building one of these is simple, (windows home server), and you can use old drives to get started, a crappy old video card and $50.00 or less server software.
The generation of (W)indows (H)ome (S)erver, WHS, I'm running now is (1, One).... as 2 or WHS 2011 doesn't have drive extender. But it, drive extender is comming back by popular demand in other versions of server products from MicoSoft and will come back to WHS IMO, already 3rd party devolpers are beta-ing or selling replacements for drive extendor in Windows Home Server 2. It is, (Drive Extender) ,the most useful piece of software MicroSoft ever created bar none.
http://static.highspeedbackbone.net/pdf/Aerocool Strike-X ST Full Tower Gaming Case Data Sheet.pdf
Looks wicked as sin......
Building one of these is simple, (windows home server), and you can use old drives to get started, a crappy old video card and $50.00 or less server software.
The generation of (W)indows (H)ome (S)erver, WHS, I'm running now is (1, One).... as 2 or WHS 2011 doesn't have drive extender. But it, drive extender is comming back by popular demand in other versions of server products from MicoSoft and will come back to WHS IMO, already 3rd party devolpers are beta-ing or selling replacements for drive extendor in Windows Home Server 2. It is, (Drive Extender) ,the most useful piece of software MicroSoft ever created bar none.
I've been using old comps as NAS for a decade now. Strictly speaking, you don't even need the server software, as long as you know how to create a share. My wife always thinks my various "computer corpses" serve no purpose, hehe!
Seriously, though, consumer-grade NAS with RAID-1 are a lot better and cheaper than they were a few years ago and power savings are something to think about. I still find an old RAID-able desktop to be more trustworthy though, at least right now.
Seriously, though, consumer-grade NAS with RAID-1 are a lot better and cheaper than they were a few years ago and power savings are something to think about. I still find an old RAID-able desktop to be more trustworthy though, at least right now.
But just wondering....
Have you ever looked at WHS software v1 W---drive extender? It's simplicity for networks, in it's JBOD almost Raid....it's actually Windows Server 2003 with no need for IT, and Windows Server 2008 Media Streaming for $49.95 for 10 users in a box for idiots like me?
Plus...it takes care of all computers in the house, and those that enter the house...without intervention. Windows Home Server.
I've been using old comps as NAS for a decade now. Strictly speaking, you don't even need the server software, as long as you know how to create a share. My wife always thinks my various "computer corpses" serve no purpose, hehe!
Seriously, though, consumer-grade NAS with RAID-1 are a lot better and cheaper than they were a few years ago and power savings are something to think about. I still find an old RAID-able desktop to be more trustworthy though, at least right now.
Have you ever looked at WHS software v1 W---drive extender? It's simplicity for networks, in it's JBOD almost Raid....it's actually Windows Server 2003 with no need for IT, and Windows Server 2008 Media Streaming for $49.95 for 10 users in a box for idiots like me?
Plus...it takes care of all computers in the house, and those that enter the house...without intervention. Windows Home Server.
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I've been using old comps as NAS for a decade now. Strictly speaking, you don't even need the server software, as long as you know how to create a share. My wife always thinks my various "computer corpses" serve no purpose, hehe!
Seriously, though, consumer-grade NAS with RAID-1 are a lot better and cheaper than they were a few years ago and power savings are something to think about. I still find an old RAID-able desktop to be more trustworthy though, at least right now.
I used to run a Sun Sparc Ultra 10 as my server. This was a great machine except the hard drive was too small. It's also way complicated to add in any hardware into it, such as a SCSI controller, so I retired it and now used one of those headless NAS boxes. It comes with a 2TB hard drive, so there's plenty of space for what we use it for.
I still backup the data I keep on there as well. Remember it is another computer with hard disks, which will die just like they do in a PC.
John
I installed my 2012 on a SSD. I get the same results as John, seriously improved loading time but frame rates are just the same as 2010 on the regular HDD, possibly a little worse.
Mick berg.