I have eliminated all graphics shuttering problems with Trainz.

Good day fen_tiger,

Please know that my queries are in no way to discredit your positive recent experiences with Trainz or anything of that sort. On the contrary, I am curious as to the real cause behind this performance improvement which many users may find useful including me, because who doesn't want to eliminate stutters and lag? The reason why the concept of "X software runs better on flash drive than on hard drive" does not make sense is because the technological differences between these two interfaces are vastly different. Please allow me to explain.

For simple comparison, everything I have posted thus far refer to data rates in Megabits (Mb/s) per second. To obtain Megabytes (MB/s) per second, simply divide by 8.

USB 2.0 allows for a maximum data rate of 480Mb/s.
IDE/PATA allows for a maximum data rate of 1116Mbit/s.
SATA2 allows for a maximum data rate of 3000Mbit/s.
Firewire 800 allows for a maximum data rate of 3200Mbit/s.

Usually, HDD's connect via a SATA cable to the motherboard whereas a USB stick is a direct interface connection (USB memory chips - motherboard) with no in-between cable. For a HDD to load data it has to first locate and index the required data before reading it and then sending the data to the graphics/audio portions of the motherboard.

This is wrong. SATA and USB are interfaces, just like you interface with, say, your soup with a spoon. A flash drive contains memory chips that interact with your motherboard using the USB standard. Due to its design, it is not technically possible to exceed the design speed (ie. 480Mbit/s). You have a small spoon to drink your soup with. True, a hard drive connects to the same motherboard using a cable, but this cable (and the drive) interact with your motherboard using SATA standard which allows it to reach 3000Mbit/s. The cable does not affect the speed of the interface, it is just a way to move the data from one place to another. You have a big spoon to drink your soup with.

An external Firewire 800 device can also be connected to the motherboard using a long Firewire cable, but because of Firewire's design, it can reach 3200 Mbit/s. In conclusion, it is not cables or lack thereof that affect speed, but the interface used. USB cannot be faster than SATA. You cannot drink more soup using a smaller spoon than you can using a bigger one.

Whenever I play Grand Theft Auto on the Playstation2, the game disk is constantly loading all of the time just to keep the game running. But if I take the disk out of the PS2, the game will immediately freeze up and become un-responsive.[/QUOTE]

Your Playstation2 became unresponsive because you removed the source media and it now has nothing to load from. No seriously, try removing your flash drive while you're playing Trainz.

Regards,
Nicholas
 
I remember back two years ago, I installed Trainz in a Revo drive (hope you know what that is). I got the same performance as in a standard SSD raid or a single SSD: very good but still, in heavily populated areas, slower frame rates. Technically, can some one explain why a USB external drive do better than a Revo drive? Today I run a single SSD and I load an 80+ board route in seconds, and that is enough for me, even if I get the stutters we all see from time to time (By the way, a Revo will load W7 in a few seconds, almost instantly).
 
Shane, there is a difference and this is where the misconception comes in.

Sure, both flash drives and solid state drives use flash memory chips. The similarities end there. The chips in a USB drive interface with a computer using, well, USB. The chips in an SSD interface with a computer using SATA. Fen_tiger briefly mentions something about his Playstation2 disc. Well, optical media is the slowest of the lot; your regular CD tops out at 4Mbit/sec. His Playstation wasn't working hard at all, not in the least bit. It was just lounging around waiting for the slow disc drive to give it the data it needs.
 
In reply to nicky9499

Exactly. Sony Playstations rely on the game disc being read constantly for the game to proceed, otherwise by taking out the PS2 game disc, the game locks up and can only be restarted by re-booting the console. The GTA series and the Sims series on PS2 rely on constant game reading. Without the DVD game disc in use, the game freezes and cannot be restarted easily.

If I was to remove the USB drive mid-game in Trainz, the game will just lock up, requiring a full restart. Tested Trainz off the USB drive and it works okay. The only acivitity light flickering was within the Cruzer flash drive during the drive session. The HDD light never once illuminated whilst I tried out a full drive scenario and also as I went through the various game screens.
 
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The difference is mainly speed. USB3 for example can reach speeds close to SATA from what I've seen, although USB2 is slower I know. In terms of the actual transfer though, speeds can vary on both SSDs and USB drives (for both small and large files) and it also depends on what caching is in use as well if any.

Shane
 
Good day Shane,

Fen_tiger has mentioned he is using a USB 2.0 flash drive. USB 3.0 can theoretically hit 5000Mbit/sec. For this to happen, all of the following conditions must be fulfilled: the motherboard supports USB 3.0, if using front panel, it must be a USB 3.0 header, the flash drive must be USB 3.0, any connected extension cables must be USB 3.0. Any link in the chain not supporting USB 3.0 will cause the device to fall back to USB 2.0. While we're on the topic of modern interfaces, Thunderbolt is designed for 20,000MBit/sec.

I'm not sure what removing the operating source media either from a Playstation or Trainz is supposed to prove or accomplish, except that lengthy database repairs and corrupted files are to be expected.
 
I would expect corruption myself removing any form of removable disc/device whilst Windows or a program is still using it, especially in Windows if it happens to be a drive formatted with NTFS rather than FAT/FAT32.

Shane
 
Playstation DVD game discs are in read-only format and the game data contained on them cannot be corrupted if the disc is removed mid-game from the console. If I was to remove the USB drive from my PC without properly disconnecting it, the most likely thing to happen is I would corrupt the files on the stick making the stick unusable if unable to be repaired by chkdsk.

One time I managed to somehow corrupt the music files on my iPOd nano by accidently removing the USB cable by mistake whilst the iPod was being uploaded with new files. Just goes to show how easy it is to corrupt data in the most unlikely of ways without realising the reasons as to why it happened. My iPod is okay though following a chkdsk repair to it.

* Even a FAT32 format USB stick can be damaged beyond repair if removed carelessly from a PC. I've ruined two FAT32 USB sticks so far by not disconnecting them safely...
 
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If you start with a very slow hard drive that is fairly full and hasn't been defragmented for a while running XP then you'd expect to get a lot of head movement and very sluggish response. Given that Trainz use a lot of very small files then it is possible that a USB stick could be faster. There is a minimum size that the hard drive will read or write which these days is much larger than the average Trainz file so although the hard drive transfer rate is faster by the time its got the head over the correct track and read in the entire track the USB stick could have returned a small file.

For larger transfers the hard disk should outperform a USB stick but for tiny files the inverse maybe true.

Cheerio John
 
It could be then that as Trainz is composed of numerous small files all over it, it could be an advantage for using an external media device. But the flip side is, data transfer to and from the device is slower than by conventional means. Routes take a bit longer to load, as well as the service packs takes more time to complete, etc. However, when the route finally does loads up, everything in the game world appears on screen quicker than if the route was to load up from the HDD.

Trainz, wanting to refresh and update the scenery as you move in any direction in the game world could be constructed from small scenery, environment files loading one after the other (?) in sequence. Maybe this could be the real reason why my game runs with smooth FPS and no lag, even on scenery heavy with content.
 
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The USB thumb drive may appear faster now, but as the device ages it will become much slower due to the numerous retries needed as the electronics wearing out. They are meant for transferring and reading data for the short term rather than for long term repetitive use. The biggest problem will be when the device becomes unreadable due to failure. Unlike a regular hard drive, when digital devices die, they die. There is little luck in retrieving the data stuck on them, and if there is anything left of them they have a reduced capacity.

These devices are rated by the number of read-write cycles they can handle with better quality devices having more of both of course, but usually they have something on the magnitude of 100,000 write cycles (http://www.getusb.info/what-is-the-life-cycle-of-a-usb-flash-drive/) which isn't very much. The reason for this is the way they operate. These devices are based on the old CMOS ROM technology which has been around for about 30 years. In the old days the devices were much slower, and didn't have an easily accessible interface like we have now or the OS support. The firmware developers used special ROM burners, as they are called, to burn the data to the device. The voltages back then were pretty high too, requiring 24V to write to the device. Once they were burned, they were put into the computer systems for boot-up options which were permanently loaded. Later on the flash manufacturers came up with NOVRAMs wchh could be written to on the fly, so-to-speak. To hold this information, after shutdown, there is a battery, and we still use this setup today to hold BIOS settings on motherboards. They still used a proprietary interface to access, however, so the values couldn't be accessed by the end-user. On some systems, such as the old Visual V-550 terminals, the settings were saved using special keystrokes and combinations.

Our SSDs and USB flash drives use a combination of technologies and are on the order of magnitudes much larger in capacity, but smaller in size at the same time and are far faster. In essence, they write permanently using a higher voltage and don't require a battery to hold the information just like the flash ROMs of 30 years ago and instead of having access times in milliseconds (ms), the access time is measured in nanoseconds (ns). This is all well and good, and in theory it works pretty well, but the issue still is the number of writes, which we've been speaking about. These are not an infinite amount, a regular platter drive doesn't have an infinite number either but a lot more, but these numbers are set by the manufacture depending upon the quality. The devices always have more capacity than is allowed. This is called trim space on SSDs and USB thumb drives, and is referred to unallocated space on platter drives. The reason for this is to remap bad sectors on the device. On a flash drive, there are no sectors as in a platter hard drive, so this is emulated and as the cells become faulty, they are mapped out of the way so they can't be accessed again by the operating system. It is in this area that the old-fashioned hard drives have the advantage. If the sectors are marginal, the data can still be recovered, sometimes. On a digital device, the data is binary. We've got it or we don't, and once the cell dies we lose our stuff and rather quickly too.

John
 
It could be then that as Trainz is composed of numerous small files all over it, it could be an advantage for using an external media device.

This falls under random I/O. Random I/O is usually much slower than sequential I/O because of obvious reasons (the required data is all over the place as opposed to one nice chunk). There could be a possibility your flash drive has a slightly faster response time as compared to a hard drive, but given that flash drives are almost never used for the purpose of running large programs off it, there is virtually no response time data on USB flash drives anywhere on the internet.
 
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This falls under random I/O. Random I/O is usually much slower than sequential I/O because of obvious reasons (the required data is all over the place as opposed to one nice chunk). There could be a possibility your flash drive has a slightly faster response time as compared to a hard drive, but given that flash drives are almost never used for the purpose of running large programs off it, there is virtually no response time data on USB flash drives anywhere on the internet.

This is true for both platter drives and flash media, and the data can be organized on a platter drive to remove the randomness by defragmenting the drive. With flash media, once the data is written, it remains in that spot and cannot be moved without using special utilities, and even then that degrades the drive. Remember defragmenting a hard drive is a read then write process. The very act of writing on a flash drive or SSD degrades the cells, so defragging flash media is a no-no.

John
 
Yes John that is correct. My point was that given the intended usage of flash drives (namely storage), all reviews on such devices only cover sequential speed and capacity. We don't have any data on the response times of both USB2 or 3 flash drives. We could test this ourselves and see what's what but at present I'm busy IRL so perhaps someone can look into this if they're interested.

Fen_tiger may be on to something, if flash drives really have a better response time than hard drives (not IOPS of random 4k read/writes) then this can be a very cheap solution to boost Trainz performance. Of course, such an implementation would only be suitable for a small number of users. Considering the drawback - much slower sequential speeds - any operation such as installing, committing, database repairs and general loading will take a very long time and thus would work best only on small-size Trainz installs.

Cheerio,
Nicholas
 
Installing Trainz and its service packs onto a small USB device will take a lot longer than expected, and more time than otherwise installing the game into a HDD as the write speed of a USB 2.0 device is about 4.8mb per sec (?). Then again not all USB devices will have the same write / read speeds though. My 64Gb Sandisk cruzer glide (with in-built activity indicator led light) takes a fair while to install a service pack, so patience is a virtue. Other than that, the game itself boots up a little bit faster than if booting up from the HDD. Route loading is slower than if from HDD, but when the route has loaded, everything for the route appears a little faster than from HDD. I'l still have to check trainsoptions.txt after SP4 goes in, to optimize it to my Intel graphics card.

This info about game start-up speeds, etc is from my own testing carried out. If anyone was to also attempt an Trainz install to a USB device, 64GB capacity is the minimum recommended. I noticed when SP2 was going in, free space went down to 88%, but once the pack had finished, free space on the device went up to around 94%. With this, SP4 should still give me around 80% free space once the upload has finalised. All downloaded DLS content will also go to this USB stick eventually and for back-ups, all my DLS content will be backed up onto another 32Gb device along with the already stored service packs on there.

I'm sure that someone on here will test the read/write speeds for a 2.0 USB device with the possibility of installing trainz onto external media and trying this method for themselves. I can't see why not though if it could be attempted as the plus side for me is my HDD indicator light no longer flickers at all in game (HDD is inactive, except for any in-game mouse and keyboard input).
 
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Still, it is worth mentioning again John has a good point regarding the lifetime of such products. You should keep in mind that flash drives were never meant to be used in this manner; constantly thrashed by a program with a horrid database system. SSDs are designed to last 10, maybe 20 years under regular usage, flash drives probably aren't especially if they're like $20 a pop. The Cruzer will tide you over for a couple months or so, but sooner or later it would be best to switch up to an SSD, especially with prices dropping each day.

Cheerio,
Nicholas
 
I'll keep a close eye on the sandisk for any potential problems that may arise, but other sandisks that I have, these have never failed me for data storage, except for when I removed them without first disconnecting them properly. I always get into the habit of making emergency back-up copies of important files whether with my iTunes or with my Playstation2 game saves on the PS2 memory cards.

Many thanks so far for all the very useful information from all other people on this thread about the pros and cons of using an alternative means for running the game.

Andy.
 
I seem to remember an external device that had an actual video card in it, where you could plug in an external hard drive into the device ... and plug that device into a low end laptop USB port ... and you would get a great video card display of a game, on your low end laptop PC ... Anyone heard of this device
 
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