SSD and Trainz

[llebrez]

Today I have configured two OCZ Turbo (30 Gb each) in Raid 0. Any route, pre-made or made by me, loads in seconds! Certainly this is the biggest improvement you can have. Windows XP also loads in no more than 6 seconds! Highly Recommended.

 

[AussieNightcrawler]

Yes, *if* you have the money to invest in SSD's (Solid State Drives) then they are the way to go. Here down under we are looking at $200 for a 30GB SSD, so two (2) for a RAID-0 config would be a nice $400, well you would not get much change.

For me, 60GB is way too small, considering this system has two (2) 250GB in RAID-0 giving me 465GB usable space, I have used near half now, so for me to swap over to SSD's I would not get much change from $1900.

 

[poppins122325]

i have concidered buying a ssd for my os drive and use regular drives for the rest but the price and the sizes were what made me pick a regular drive.

Currently have
1 x 160gb os drive
1 x 160gb win 7 os drive
1 x 160gb tv tuner recordings
1 x 750gb for my games and more tv recordings.

and in my "unmanned" pc
1 x 250gb for long term storage.

worst of all almost all of them are full or approaching full so im gonna have to archive some of it onto dvds or buy another one

 

[Capt_Scarlet]

Yes, *if* you have the money to invest in SSD's (Solid State Drives) then they are the way to go. Here down under we are looking at $200 for a 30GB SSD, so two (2) for a RAID-0 config would be a nice $400, well you would not get much change.

For me, 60GB is way too small, considering this system has two (2) 250GB in RAID-0 giving me 465GB usable space, I have used near half now, so for me to swap over to SSD's I would not get much change from $1900.

Yes they are expensive but the price is coming down fortunately. From what I have been reading recently about them the best use of a SSD is for the OS and the most used applications. All other applications and media files etc would be a waste on these drives.

The other thing that you should be aware of is that you do need to make sure to disable defrags, prefetch, and superfetch on them especially if you have Vista.

When Win 7 is released you may need to upgrade the firmware for them ( depending on the make ) to enable TRIM functionality as that OS will allow TRIM commands to be sent to the drive but until Intel update their RAID drivers you have to use the microsoft drivers and not the intel versions.

If you do set up raid in WIN 7 with these drives they use the intel drivers and therefore no TRIM commands are used. In case you dont know TRIM is a process that maintains the speed of the drive when it is in a used state.

John

 

[llebrez]

Thank you all for the info. For the time being, I use XP, and very happy with it. By the way, I installed 09 fresh, and went directly to the latest update without any problems. It works like a charm without any of the problems the other members are reporting.. Touch wood.. I think Auran should investigate why some people have problems and why others don't.

 

[Capt_Scarlet]

Again from my recent investigations re SSD ( I am planning to get a 80GB IBM 2nd gen SSD when I get WIN 7 ) it is important to do a bit of research before buying a SSD as they are a moving target in regards development and not all drives behave the same way. So getting a cheap one may not be a good investment in the long run and Brand does currently matter.

The drives are dependent upon the controller they use and the good ones currently use either a IBM or Indilinx controller and the ones to avoid are Jmicron and to a lesser extent Samsung ( though that does depend on generation and make of the drive as the problem with some of the Samsung drives is the inability to upgrade the firmware). Anyway here are two very good articles on SSD's that if you plan on buying one you should read even if they are quite long.

But in the end SSD's can give you the biggest improvement in system performance today but they aren't cheap and need to be treated differently than mechanical hard drives.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=1

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

John

 

[SuperFudd]

A quick look at prices 11/28/09 comes up with this:

32G $158
64G $277
128G $480

There are larger ones.

I might get a 32G in a new system. I expect it would be enough for Win7 and TRS2010. What do you think?

 

[pommie]

You need 16gig free to install Win7, after installation it only takes 5gig.
So you start with say 30gig formatted, minus the 20% left free for speed 6gig, minus 5gig for Win7, then 2gig for the swap file (virtual mem) so you would have 17gig free before you start adding drivers, say 2gig, leaving you with 15gig for programs.
If the system has lots of ram then the swap file could be 1gig, or even on another slower drive as it is not used very much with over 4gig of ram

Cheers David

 

[SuperFudd]

Shouldn't 15G be enough for most TS2009ers?
I am currently running XP pro and TRS2004 as well as a few other programs on a 10G HD. My virtual memory is on a 2nd 10G HD. 900meg of RAM. 500MHz P3. Hey, what do you expect on a 10 year old PC?

 

[pommie]

Simple answer ... yup

Cheers David

 

[johnwhelan]

Shouldn't 15G be enough for most TS2009ers?
I am currently running XP pro and TRS2004 as well as a few other programs on a 10G HD. My virtual memory is on a 2nd 10G HD. 900meg of RAM. 500MHz P3. Hey, what do you expect on a 10 year old PC?

TS2009 does texture compression so keeps two copies of the texture file. My TS2009 folder is currently 75 gigs. The newer assets seem to take up more room as well.

Cheerio John

 

[itareus]

Shouldn't 15G be enough for most TS2009ers?.....

My TS2009 folder is 22gb. If I were you I would go for a 64gb SSD to be safe.