Any advantage to keeping T-ANE SP2 content on SSD?

Hi;
I just re-installed Windows 7 SP1 x64 on the partition where Windows is installed, which is on an SSD.
When I installed T-ANE SP2 from the DVD's, it by default installed in the usual location on the same drive as Windows.
So now I'm wondering whether or not there is any performance advantage to keeping T-ANE's user folder on the SSD.
If not, then I will move it to another (mechanical) drive where I keep data to keep writes to the SSD down.

That said, I wouldn't expect T-ANE to write to the user folder all that much - mostly when saving a route, with most of the activity being reads.

Thanks for your advice

CP

Far better to install TANE to it's own drive / partition separate from Windows. That way you can disable virus scanning of the TANE folder easier.

Any program that does a few things like tane, benefits from multiple drives really.

For absolute optimal LUDICROUS performance... Tane can benefit from 3 ssds, and a slower larger mechanical drive.

1. The os should be on a SSD of its own (and the OS swap file even yet on a 4th ssd)

2. For the program, its self, to run optimally, benefits from being installed on a ssd separate from the windows ssd.

3. Immediately after install, copy the tane default database to yet another ssd. Then change working database location to the ssd you copied the database to, then delete original database to prevent confusion.

4. Yet another slower spinner hard drive for backups of all things.

5 (the windows swap file can go on yet another ssd (the 4th one)



For regular people, putting tane on its own ssd speeds it up and makes backing it up easy, by simply doing a 1:1 drive copy to a mechanical.

TINE said:

Any program that does a few things like tane, benefits from multiple drives really.

For absolute optimal LUDICROUS performance... Tane can benefit from 3 ssds, and a slower larger mechanical drive.

1. The os should be on a SSD of its own (and the OS swap file even yet on a 4th ssd)

2. For the program, its self, to run optimally, benefits from being installed on a ssd separate from the windows ssd.

3. Immediately after install, copy the tane default database to yet another ssd. Then change working database location to the ssd you copied the database to, then delete original database to prevent confusion.

4. Yet another slower spinner hard drive for backups of all things.

5 (the windows swap file can go on yet another ssd (the 4th one)



For regular people, putting tane on its own ssd speeds it up and makes backing it up easy, by simply doing a 1:1 drive copy to a mechanical.

Click to expand...

With a conventional hard drives one of the limiting performance factors is getting the head to the right track. For that reason the more tracks you have directly under the heads the better the performance. So splitting the storage up over multiple drives makes sense. Partitions help keep the files in a cluster so together.

However something like TANE is a little different. Assuming it is installed on a near empty disk the fires will be contiguous meaning they will be swept up with little head movement. There is a small gain in using an SSD but not that much. Same for the content that is installed with the game.

The only reason for using multiple SSDs is to spread them out over different channels. This is much more a high performance database server technique. In practical terms for running TANE it give very little advantage. There is no head movement with an SSD.

The user folder is different. TANE has lots of small files and an SSD can load these up more quickly than a conventional hard drive. Note the frames per second remain about the same. You might see a half frame per second increase but you will notice scenery objects pop up more quickly.

The operating system, well yes it will load more quickly from an SSD when you turn it on but there isn't much practical difference otherwise.

Cheerio John

My guess is the OP has a small SSD and maybe it is SATA2, slow and low capacity... perhaps the main background to why he doesn't see the value of using it for T:ANE. Just a guess.

To answer some of the questions you have posed:
My SSD is 500GB (Samsung 850 EVO) with 2 partitions; Disk Manager reports as follows:
SSD1 (D 292.97GB NTFS
SSD2 (C 172.79GB NTFS
The SSD is on a SATA3 channel.

Other system specs:
MSI P67A with Intel i5 2500 (standard, not OC)
16GB DDR3 RAM @ 1600Mhz
NVidia GeForce 750Ti 2GB (standard, not OC)
Storage:
SSD: Samsung 850 EVO 500GB on SATA3
HDD: 150GB on SATA3
HDD: 500GB on SATA3
HDD: 1TB on SATA3 with 7 partitions (used for data, and an old copy of Windows 7 still resides there)
USB HDD: 1.5TB on USB2. Used for backups only.

I currently have Windows 7 SP1 x64 installed on both of those partitions. The original one (D became corrupt, threw a few BSOD's and has issues that sfc/scannow cannot fix, so I decided to install a fresh copy of Windows 7 on the other partition (C. This is where T-ANE SP2 is now installed, with all of its files on this drive.

I am planning to keep two Windows 7 installs (or one Windows 7 and one Windows 10).
Since I don't have another SSD to work with, perhaps I should have my T-ANE user folder on the other SSD partition (D, where T-ANE is still installed.
That way, I could have all of my content from the old install without having to copy or re-install any content.

Since my system has 16GB DDR3 RAM, I don't think I really need a swap file, but I am going to move it to one of the mechanical (spinner as you call them) drives so as to avoid unnecessary writes to the SSD.

Since I installed T-ANE SP2 on the SSD back in August last year, I have noticed a performance boost in loading routes, but I haven't been playing the game enough to know whether there is also a scenery boost as well.

Couple of observations I'd make - The Samsung 850 EVOs have excellent durability and lengthy total bytes written (TBW) life-expectancy, so don't fuss too much about 'excessive writes'. Mine (the OS drive C: one) has so far written only 15.8Tbs total over the past 2 and half years and it is warrantied for more than 150 total Terabytes written. That's with at least one of my T:ANE installations (current beta Build 92487) and frequent Windows Insider OS installations on C:.
My other T:ANE installations are on another SATA 3 SSD drive, D: - including their Userdata folders, because SSDs do make a noticeable difference in loading times/ database repairs and in-game responsiveness.
Make sure you have provisioned it with sufficient unused space (overhead) so that the active partitions don't wear so quickly.
My next OS drive SSD will be PCIe and NVMe instead of SATA 6Gb/s.

As you do a lot of video work, a PCIe SSD would be highly desirable for you too, for sheer speed and their capacity to multitask capture operations whilst still delivering steady game-play.

Regarding swap files - Windows 10 gets by with minimal allocations these days, but our collective beta-testing experience with earlier T:ANE builds had some of us over-provisioning virtual memory and swapfile space allocation on every drive containing an instance of T:ANE due to CTDs (and even blue screens of death) generated by certain T:ANE utility operations. (Don't know if there is still a need, but I have still got much more Virtual Memory assigned just in case).

Must be getting close to time for many Windows 7 users to consider ditching that increasingly risky OS too... Windows 10 is demonstrably faster and more secure than any previous Windows OS.
Runs T:ANE (and most other simulators) better too.

PC_Ace said:

Must be getting close to time for many Windows 7 users to consider ditching that increasingly risky OS too... Windows 10 is demonstrably faster and more secure than any previous Windows OS.

Click to expand...

But see, old versions like 95 and NT 4, that date back when new versions of Microsoft products actually largely meant real, objective improvements instead of additional bloat and change-for-change's-sake, ran well on hardware far, far slower than what's typical today. Not to mention those old OSes also required much less disk space than newer versions. Kinda doubt Windows 10 (or 8, or 7, or Vista, or XP...) would run well on something like a < 200 MHz Pentium, if at all.

The "telemetry" in 10 that sends to MS who-really-knows-what information alone undermines the idea of 10 actually being so "secure". Not that telemetry is necessarily bad per se, but we're talking MS here and the era mentioned in my first sentence is long gone. Have good (in terms of doing its job) security software installed, use an ad blocker, and browse with caution/stay out of shady parts of the web, and you'll avoid a lot of the crap out there malware-wise, on an older or a new OS.

And on top of the extra bloat (Metro "apps", Cortana, etc.) and privacy concerns, I'll take an OS with a fairly well-designed user interface (and options to largely change to the no-fluff (but quite customizable) classic style if one prefers) over the dumbed-down and cluttered user interface of 10, thank you.

Retro00064 said:

But see, old versions like 95 and NT 4, that date back when new versions of Microsoft products actually largely meant real, objective improvements instead of additional bloat and change-for-change's-sake, ran well on hardware far, far slower than what's typical today. Not to mention those old OSes also required much less disk space than newer versions. Kinda doubt Windows 10 (or 8, or 7, or Vista, or XP...) would run well on something like a < 200 MHz Pentium, if at all.

The "telemetry" in 10 that sends to MS who-really-knows-what information alone undermines the idea of 10 actually being so "secure". Not that telemetry is necessarily bad per se, but we're talking MS here and the era mentioned in my first sentence is long gone. Have good (in terms of doing its job) security software installed, use an ad blocker, and browse with caution/stay out of shady parts of the web, and you'll avoid a lot of the crap out there malware-wise, on an older or a new OS.

And on top of the extra bloat (Metro "apps", Cortana, etc.) and privacy concerns, I'll take an OS with a fairly well-designed user interface (and options to largely change to the no-fluff (but quite customizable) classic style if one prefers) over the dumbed-down and cluttered user interface of 10, thank you.

Click to expand...

If its not connected to the internet win 7 and lower are fine. If its connected then don't do you banking on it and consider it infected. Win 10 you can set it up not to use many of the features, the new drivers though really do mean you get better performance on the same hardware. Considering I think it is run on a raspberry pi these days it does not require that much processing power.

Cheerio John