Disk/SSD Storage Space, Archive Strategies, Mac and PC

1611mac

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I'm sure this has been discussed... tried searches but couldn't find the right threads...

I'm only into Trainz a few months and I see that when I did this PC build I didn't get a large enough SSD. My SanDisk is 240MB and it's only got 70gig free. This PC is used mostly for TRS19.

Being a Mac user new to Windows AND TRS19 may I ask about route archiving? (not backups, but "off-loaded" "archives") Know that I also run some of the less demanding routes on my Mac Book Pro (traveling).

Does it make sense to have an "archive" disk that I can hang on my Mac or PC? The machines would have "current" routes and the archive would be less used and larger routes that could be loaded to the Mac and PC only when desired.

And what would these archive files be (CDP files?)

Advice and comments welcome. Thanks in advance.
 
This is going to be a generalisation.

A 240 gig SSD is reasonable for a boot disk and the operating system. I have 160 gigs full of N3V and I don't keep everything. I have a 500 gig SSD which has TANE on it.

First not all SSDs have the same access speed. They are good for small files scattered across the disk as there is no head movement.

Both SSD and hard drives are limited to 6g/sec by the SATA interface. So if the head is over the data the hard drive can feed the CPU just as quickly as an SSD.

Hard drives of 4 gigs or more have multiple platters. This means that the outer tracks near the rim have a fair chunk of capacity and WIN 10 will move the most frequently used files to them. A 6 gig drive has even more storage on the magical outer tracks.

Western Digital have a very good reputation for reliability.

If you need to go external then check your USB ports. USB 3.0 is nice, USB 3.1 is nicer but make sure both the motherboard and the drive support it.

Remember an SSD will only give you about 1% improvement in frame rates but scenery items will pop up faster.

Cheerio John
 
Thanks much... What about archiving seldom used routes? No advantage? Or just keep disk(s) big enough to hold my regular "build" folder(s) and then make sure of reliable backup?
 
Thanks much... What about archiving seldom used routes? No advantage? Or just keep disk(s) big enough to hold my regular "build" folder(s) and then make sure of reliable backup?

You can save things to a .cdp then delete them but its messy. A route has many dependencies which might also be used by other routes. Even wagons might use the same bogey or loads so what would you archive? The dependencies typically are much larger than the route.

On a physical hard drive win 10 will place the most commonly used files together and the other less frequently used files will migrate to other parts of the hard disk but that isn't really what you are after.

Drop it in the suggestion box. Cache the most commonly used stuff on drive X and leave the other stuff on drive Y.

Cheerio John
 
1611mac - 2 Terabyte USB 3.0 backup drives are cheap as chips these days and also enable quick sharing between rigs.
I have each of my Trainz installations and multiple beta versions on dedicated SSDs and back them up fully regularly (by simply copying them lock, stock and barrel) to other multi-terabyte internal hard disk drives - or to an external drive kept elsewhere for safe-keeping.
WIP routes and sessions are saved using CDPs to the external backup drive/ another internal SSD or even sometimes to USB 3.0 thumb drives if portability is needed.
500 Gb and 1 Tb NVMe PCIe SSDs are becoming much more affordable and some offer Read speeds in excess of 3500 MB/s and Write speeds >2500 MB/s. Ideal for your C: drive boot disk and program files.
 
Thanks - both of you. I do backups well. I have a cloud service, PLUS external drives, PLUS bootable pocket drives for my Macs that I carry out in case of fire or theft. Plus, I keep everything in "sync" between my two Macs so they really are a backup of each other. But I've never filled a drive with files for ONE app, therefore, never had to worry about that aspect.

So I guess a couple 2tb's are the answer. That's just too simple. :)
 
newegg.com WD Black 2T drive has 64 mb cache $120 today, 4T $179 has 256 mb cache but more importantly to me has twice the capacity on the outer tracks as it has twice the number of platters. Both have a 5 year warranty.

Cheerio John
 
This is going to be a generalisation.


Hard drives of 4 gigs or more have multiple platters. This means that the outer tracks near the rim have a fair chunk of capacity and WIN 10 will move the most frequently used files to them. A 6 gig drive has even more storage on the magical outer tracks.

Western Digital have a very good reputation for reliability.

Cheerio John
I used to think so too, but there were a lot of bad drives made by WD last year according to my local computer shop ( and quite a few of my older WD drives fell over too, the green ones were not very good). This year I've moved to hitachi 4tb server drives , bit hard to tell whether they will be better in the long run, but they came out best when stats came out for drive fails published by a big online data storage company , forget which ,so cannot direct you to the link .
as for ssd's , get the biggest one you can afford as you will soon fill it up .
 
Is it true that you DO NOT ever defrag a SSD, and a SSD has a limited re-write capacity, and eventually prematurely fails ... and that a mechanical disk hard drive lasts a lot longer than a SSD, if not almost forever ... and that the most easily damaged hardware is the plug in jacks, from wear and tear of constant unplugging/re-pluging in USB/mini connectors ?
 
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I used to think so too, but there were a lot of bad drives made by WD last year according to my local computer shop ( and quite a few of my older WD drives fell over too, the green ones were not very good). This year I've moved to hitachi 4tb server drives , bit hard to tell whether they will be better in the long run, but they came out best when stats came out for drive fails published by a big online data storage company , forget which ,so cannot direct you to the link .
as for ssd's , get the biggest one you can afford as you will soon fill it up .


I think one of my 4 Terra byte 5 year warranty drives is a Seagate server drive, two of my external 4 T drives are HGST, there was a space on the shelf where they should be so I asked about them as they were reduced in price. It turned out they were in the back on the wrong shelf. A discontinued drive but I picked up the two they had for less than half price. Staples drop the price on discontinued items until they go. These two were still in the computer as being in the store but had been misplaced. The techie who found them asked me if I really wanted both, if I didn't he was going to buy one. I do have WD drives as well.

SSDs are a subject in themselves. Basically some can handle more writes than others and the speeds do vary. The reason you defrag is to reduce the number of head movements on a mechanical drive. On an SSD there is no head movement. Trim basically indicates which blocks can be deleted or reused and prolongs the life of the SSD. Reads are not an issue. The new C type connectors 3.1 USB are designed specially to be good for I think its 100,000 insertions but many more than the older 2.0 style connectors.

On a conventional hard drive you can predict the life expectancy by how many times the disk had to try to read the block. This has evolved over time to measure much more and these days even win 10 will tell you if a hard drive is healthy or not. If it isn't best to back it up and replace it before it fails. I'm not so sure about SSDs.

Cheerio John
 
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Is it true that you DO NOT ever defrag a SSD, and a SSD has a limited re-write capacity, and eventually prematurely fails ... ?

Well, you asked. The answer is No. Google it and you will see. I only use SSD in all my systems now and I 'Maintain' them (or Windows 10 does it automatically).

Here is an article about it from ZDNet https://www.zdnet.com/article/windows-10-tip-defrag-secrets-for-hard-disks-and-ssds/

In the Dark Ages of computing, defragmenting a hard disk was something you had to do regularly to keep it running at peak efficiency. Those defragmenter utilities typically included visualizations, allowing you to watch as the system painstakingly moved data sectors so that they were contiguous.

Today, your Windows 10 PC is much more likely to include a solid-state drive (SSD) as its main storage. SSDs don't need defragmenting the same way that older hard disks do, but they require occasional maintenance, including the need to have the TRIM utility run occasionally to ensure that deleted blocks are properly marked for reuse.

The good news is that Windows 10 does a very good job of identifying the different types of storage and scheduling the proper optimization for each one. You don't need to perform any special steps to enable TRIM support either.

To check the status of all currently available drives, type defrag in the search box and then click Defragment and Optimize Drives from the results list.

The list of volumes displayed in the Optimize Drives window clearly indicates the media type for each one. Conventional hard disks are still defragmented (sorry, there's no Tetris-style progress map). If you click the Optimize button for an SSD, you'll see a brief status message as it trims the current drive, an operation that should complete in a few seconds. The utility is even smart enough to detect virtual hard drives and manage their usage properly.

But manual intervention isn't really necessary, because the appropriate drive optimization is scheduled to happen weekly. If you're curious, feel free to check in with the Drive Optimizer every so often, just to confirm that fragmentation is holding steady at 0 percent.
 
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