Trainz on SSD

Hi Everyone

I've just upgraded my PC with a 250GB SSD and 1TB HDD to replace a previous SSHD that died. Currently I have the OS on the SSD and all my data (documents pictures etc.) on the HDD. My question is whether it's worth putting Trainz and its data onto the SSD?
Also if I where to put Trainz on the SSD would you recomend creating a separate partition from the OS for it?

I currently think around 100GB is required for my Trainz installation.

Thanks for your thoughts
Ed

TANE has two parts, the first is the program, if its sitting in adjacent tracks it will load fairly quickly from the hard drive. The second is user content, these are small files best suited to an SSD. The SSD will give you about another frame per second so speed wise not much but what it will do is load the small content files much faster so scenery etc will load quicker in the game. So put the user content on the SSD.

Cheerio John

I have multiple TANE installations: most are on a decent 2TB WD hard disk and one is entirely on an SSD. During game play (running a session) there isn't a lot of difference between an installation on the HDD and the SSD. Both run about 45fps to 60fps during game with 60fps being the norm but with occasional dips to the 30's when loading heavy poly scenes. But loading a session can vary a lot. It took two minutes to load the ECML - Flying Scotsman session from the HDD and about 57 seconds for the SSD version.

My TANE SP1 installation on the SSD is about 60GB but I don't download that much. I imagine it would be very easy to get to 100GB or more.

I don't see much value in partitioning the SSD as you lose flexibility. I might partition if I were going to add another O/S.

I now run TANE exclusively off its own SSD and I no longer encounter the caching or frame-rate problems, including buffering, that I had on a standard HDD running TS12.

I have the T:ANE application and data files on the same SSD as my Windows 10 operating system and enjoy the speed and responsiveness. My second drive (D:\) is also an SSD, but not as fast as the larger, C:\ drive.
Most of my other data files (and TS12, etc.) reside on a 3Tb 7200rpm enterprise WD HDD.
What you'll notice with an SSD is the faster database repairs and much faster route and session loading times.
To get better frame rates, upgrade your graphics card, not your storage solution.

PC_Ace said:

I have the T:ANE application and data files on the same SSD as my Windows 10 operating system and enjoy the speed and responsiveness. My second drive (D:\) is also an SSD, but not as fast as the larger, C:\ drive.
Most of my other data files (and TS12, etc.) reside on a 3Tb 7200rpm enterprise WD HDD.
What you'll notice with an SSD is the faster database repairs and much faster route and session loading times.
To get better frame rates, upgrade your graphics card, not your storage solution.

Click to expand...

With SSDs becoming more reliable, this can be a nice option, however, the cost for large SSDs is still well out of reach for many consumers.

Since T:ANE as two parts, I put the program on my SSD and my data on my 3TB hard drive.

JCitron said:

With SSDs becoming more reliable, this can be a nice option, however, the cost for large SSDs is still well out of reach for many consumers.

Since T:ANE as two parts, I put the program on my SSD and my data on my 3TB hard drive.

Click to expand...

I would do it the other way round. The throughput on the hard drive is roughly the same as an SSD and if its just reading big chunks then its practically as fast as the SSD. It's only when you want to pull bits from all over the drive that the SSD shines, there is no head movement moving from one track to another and the data fires are small files typically scattered across the drive.

Cheerio John

johnwhelan said:

I would do it the other way round. The throughput on the hard drive is roughly the same as an SSD and if its just reading big chunks then its practically as fast as the SSD. It's only when you want to pull bits from all over the drive that the SSD shines, there is no head movement moving from one track to another and the data fires are small files typically scattered across the drive.

Cheerio John

Click to expand...

You are forgetting the most of the "program" comprises of the builtin content in the resources folder which is also small files so unless you only use downloaded content and not builtin then the increase is probably nullified by the buitin content being loaded from the slower HDD

It's actually a balancing act between using an i7 CPU multithreading with 32GB quad channel RAM and oodles of HDD for storage along with some decent GPUs to run multiple HD monitors at 120Hz with no sync.

Depends how much data you want. A maxi instal of TANE without DLC will exceed 2TB now and is growing rapidly. SSD that size is still very expensive. I currently have dual OCZ SSDs in RAID0 as my C:\ drives but that's only 500GB. All my TANE data is currently on 2TB HDDs but I'm fast running out of storage and SATA connections on all my PCs. One of my maxi installs recently reduced a 1.81TB useable storage down to 10MB free space. On a previous occasion I had that happen in C:\ drive.

TANE caches the data for the selected game but this is not OS cache. It is still on same HD or SSD as TANE application. So when field of view changes and TANE needs to pull in new assets and re-render the scene that's when you get the micro-stutters. TANE is a lot better than Trainz in that respect.

Also be aware that the backup setting in TANE defaults to 7 days. Excessive in my opinion and a definite gotcha situation unless you set it lower. I use setting at 1 day, but even there you have GBs of backups. Even worse is that if you don't close TANE for several days the backup is not purged as this appears to only happen on first loading TANE. I have had to manually delete 4 days of backup to recover from 'Out of Memory' situation even though I had virtual memory equal to my RAM on all my HDDs.

A possible solution I want to try is a hybrid such as a small Adata SSD heading a multi terabyte HDD in a RAID combo. I have that on one PC, but unfortunately it is an AMD CPU that doesn't run the best. I can't afford to update that to an Intel CPU at moment.

My current project is to integrate a NAS onto my LAN. I have a small Synology NAS with two WD 8TB red NAS HDDs running in Synology hybrid RAID. This solves my current shortage of storage and allow for future growth. I have a portion of this as NAS Share mapped to each of my PCs as Z:\ drive. This is great and very flexible. However I'm finding a few quirks as I learn about NAS.

For example:

1. MS help files .CHM open OK but have no text. You need to do some registry hacks to get it to work from a NAS drive. In my case a workaround for now is to run the AssetX Help file from a copy on another PC.
2. My NAS only has a single 1Gbps ethernet. Slow work copying a 2TB instal across my LAN.
3. TANE uses a text file TANE userdata-redirect-map.txt in order for TANE application to find the TANE Userdata location. This resides in appdata on each PC but not on a NAS. So it keeps defaulting to appdata location when you update TANE build. Current workaround is to run TANE application on a PC and Userdata on the NAS. Seems to work OK even with the 1Gbps bus limitation.
4. If you are running AssetX/PEVTOOLS with or without TARDIS there is an issue with setting the variable %tetdata% which defines the shortcut to the TANE resources\validation folder, and in particular to find the text files for Category-era and Category-region. Yet to resolve. Probably just my ignorance in defining filepaths across a network.

I didn't want to ramble on so but I think it is important that you consider what you want to do with your TANE instals now and in the future. I do extreme testing so I need grunty solutions with speed and lots of storage capacity. And I have multiple TANE instals for beta testing. With smaller instals there are many other combos you can use. It also depends very much on your budget. My pensions NOW and in the foreseeable future have to support me, my daughter and granddaughter, so many of the grand schemes I had a few years ago for upgrading my hardware have had to be drastically cut back.

Hi all
How could I move user files to a SSD disk and leave the program in c disk?
Thanks

charlyMac said:

Hi all
How could I move user files to a SSD disk and leave the program in c disk?
Thanks

Click to expand...

Yes, you can have the user files (data) on a separate disk, while leaving the program on your main hard drive.

charlyMac said:

Hi all
How could I move user files to a SSD disk and leave the program in c disk?
Thanks

Click to expand...

Go to Trainz settings on the splash screen, install tab, and follow the instructions for moving your data files.

Cheerio John

Over the last couple of years I have moved my Trainz data from a hard disk to SSD, and then back (size issues). I can't say that qualitatively I noticed that much difference in performance while running a session, or editing a route.However loading a route is quite a bit faster off an SSD. But not really an inconvenience ( I take a time out to pat the dog).

Your 100GB Trainz installation is a large proportion of your SSD's capacity. My understanding is that SSD's should not be run too close to capacity. My situation is not that dissimilar to yours, and I have opted tor use the SSD for the OS and Trainz application files, and the hard disk for Trainz data.