SSD v's Conventional HDD

Hi Big_b
Personally, I've got Trainz running on a dedicated SSD drive for Trainz (a fairly large one, of 1TB), which is running quite well. I also have a few installs on a faster HDD, which still perform quite well.

I do find that installing/managing content is faster on the SSD, as is precaching after installing new content. But I'm not sure I've really seen a major performance difference myself.

Regards
 
I have found data base repairs and caching to be significantly faster. No much difference with regular operation. But SSD's do cost a lot, and do wear out.
 
SSD's great for Trainz....

Platters are better for backup and Storage...... Look for 7200 RPM if available.....Back in the day, they made 10000 RPM for large networks, Scuzzi Drives, I think those are gone now with the advent of SSD's and M-2 SSD style drives.......

SSD's are wonderful, only thing, they Read Write limits over time are limited by Memory Cells, VS Platter HD's.

Windows boots and works much faster with SSD's over Platter Drives.....!

However, that needs a good Balance of Ram, and GPU power too.....

I run 32 Gigs of Ram,,,,,,,,,,GPU Nvidia with 4 Gigs of Video Ram onboard, with ASUS ROG STRIX Laptop........Hope that helps.....


https://www.intel.com/content/www/u...ry-storage/solid-state-drives/ssd-vs-hdd.html

https://buyersguide.org/hard-drive/...D Drives&lp=79525&li=&nw=s&nts=1&tdid=8993144
 
Is trains better suited to a ssd or conventional hdd for a full install


I run on an SSD but performance wise there is little to choose in frames per second. You might get a 2% improvement but what you will get is scenery objects appearing faster and Trainz loads faster. For the most part trainz is not writing to the disk, it's reading from the disk so I wouldn't worry about disk writes and SSD life expectancy.

Cheerio John
 
Have the basic TRS19 on a traditional HD 10000rpm
but the local folder on an m2.SSD (SSD direct on the motherboard)
When you just drive trainz its mostly reading, there the extra speed for loading/reading helps
When you work on a route/session, trainz also writes a lot:
-it opens your route/session for editing
-it makes a backup (see you backup dirs)
so it really matters where your local dir is placed.
greetings GM
 
Back in the day, they made 10000 RPM for large networks, Scuzzi Drives

SCSI drives are still around and still amazingly fast 15000 RPM but are used in servers as RAID drives. They are expensive and not too big. Most are just 500GB. Our mail server had 18 of those drives in a mirrored raid 10 configuration. They were $250 each to replace. I only ever saw one server using SSD drives and it wasn't a production server but was used as a test platform for the programmers to test code only before rolling out an update to their production server.

William
 
SCSI drives are still around and still amazingly fast 15000 RPM but are used in servers as RAID drives. They are expensive and not too big. Most are just 500GB. Our mail server had 18 of those drives in a mirrored raid 10 configuration. They were $250 each to replace. I only ever saw one server using SSD drives and it wasn't a production server but was used as a test platform for the programmers to test code only before rolling out an update to their production server.

William


That is so cool,

Didn't know they had ones at 15K Turbo Speed, guess it was above my Pay Grade........:hehe: I worked in IT for long time but was Field work, to maintenance, install, update Etc...........

Been away from it for 10 years now, so I imagine lots has changed......:eek:

It's too hard to keep up with all the Software and Hardware Developments ongoing these days......There are so many Gadgets out there.It boggle the mind.......:confused:

Thanks for sharing.,,,,:wave:
 
SCSI drives are still around and still amazingly fast 15000 RPM but are used in servers as RAID drives. They are expensive and not too big. Most are just 500GB. Our mail server had 18 of those drives in a mirrored raid 10 configuration. They were $250 each to replace. I only ever saw one server using SSD drives and it wasn't a production server but was used as a test platform for the programmers to test code only before rolling out an update to their production server.

William

Yup SCSI drives are wickedly expensive still today. I have an old workstation I was thinking of bringing back online and setting it up as a server, but I little did I know I was in for sticker shock when I went looking for hard disks. The price you are paying for the 500 GB is about what I paid for 8GB drives back in the early 2000s for SCSI drives. These were the IBM Death Star drives that would seize up and were constantly swapped out under warranty. We eventually replaced those with Seagate drives that worked so much better and we had little failure with those.

Oracle uses SSDs as scratch disk devices in their Oracle Database Appliance computer (ODA). The rest of the storage is on small 2.5-inch size drives. All of these drives are hot swappable and are held in place with small pushbutton latches to makes swapping out a drive quick and easy and on the fly. This is unlike the old Compaq/HP Proliant servers with the clamshell drive enclosures that would dispatch a mean blood blister when inserting a replacement drive, or when the installed drive decided to work its way loose on random occasions.
 
Yeah, I retired 2 and a half years ago. I spent my last few years working in the datacenter. Swapping out failing hard drives and keeping old gear alive. We were scrapping real servers after we cloned them and turned them into virtual servers. I just checked HP's lineup and they offer servers with ssd drives in the RAID now. They still want an awful lot of money for them. I guess they hold up to the workload.

William
 
John,

I had an Amiga 2500 in 1986 that had SCSI interface and I put a 1 GB drive in it and paid $800 for it. That was a sweet box. It had a 68040 running at 40 MHz and 40 megs of ram. I was doing 3D graphics for video production companies around town because I could make big prices fly around the screen and the car dealers loved big flying prices. :) That box may have been the most powerful computer in Alabama at the time.

William
 
Indeed, the Amiga was one of the best, if not the best computer line for its time. It's too bad they did not stay in the game, what they could have had by now may have amazed us all....
 
Those Amiga computers were impressive in their day and that particular setup was similar to the Sun workstations at the time. I have a couple of Sparc workstations sitting in my basement. One is a Sparc 5 and the other a Sparc 10 as well as an Ultra 10. The Ultra 10 supported PCI bus cards and I could easily put in an older Adaptec SCSI card in there if I wanted because the card is supported natively by Solaris 9 and 10. (You got me thinking... I might drag those up from the basement and set them up. The 22-inch CRT monitors weigh about 120 lbs. if not more. The pizza-box systems alone weigh in at about 15 lbs. and are built like bricks.

What I like about SCSI drives is they are much, much faster than the ATA and SATA equivalents. This is due to the highspeed buss and the controller allowing for multi-seek and data queuing that's not available on regular drives. This multi-seek and command queuing is what makes these drives and systems shine for video and 3d modeling, and for film output for imagesetters. During final rendering to disk or to film, the output has to be contiguous, otherwise, there are glitches that will cause a buffer under run. This is an issue that my old company ran into with marginal controllers and hard disks. The output to the digital proofing system and imagesetter, used for plate and filmmaking, has to be done in one shot, otherwise, there are bands or other problems, and this is why stand hard disks can't cut it.

Those server-quality SSDs are beyond what we can afford. They have the drive size we would like and a speed that far outruns our SSDs on our system, but the prices are astronomical.
 
I also worked with Suns (Early ESRI GIS) and Macs with SCSI drives. I can't recall ever having an issue with SCSI. I am curious, what is the normal lifetime expectancy of an SSD running intensive stuff like Trainz? I have seen regular hard drives go bad often enough.
 
At this point I don't think anyone knows how long a SSD will last. There is a theoretical limit to the number of times that you can write to them but there isn't enough data to prove that number. It may be like the old 5 1/4 inch floppies. They were made as double sided and double density but if one side failed testing then they became single sided single density. ;)

William
 
Old fashioned spinning drives are still (In my opinion) still more reliable as the technology is mature.
SSD drives have come a long way and I have changed all my drives (6) to them over the past 3 years.

However, a couple of tips:
- BACKUP/COPY important data frequently if it changes a lot, or less frequently if not so volatile, but BACKUP.
- If you lose a 960GB (1 Terabyte drive unformatted) you have lost a lot of data.
- No need to defragment an SSD as the access time is the same for each block of data and Windows will likely warn you if you try.

On the bright side, SSDs are becoming more reliable year after year and will eventually become as reliable as the spinning drives but there
will be a newer drive technology along before then that is larger and faster and the game starts anew....

;)
 
Thanks for the tips. I have plenty (about 15B) of external drives for backup and some content, but I would like to get a BIG (~4TB) internal drive for TRAINZ and for MSFS2020. I don't think the external USB blue connections perform as well as internal.
 
Back
Top