Blimey: ran out of space on my games partition!

[Bikerdude]

Well this is a first, may have to finish off and uninstall a few of those steam games, doh.

 

But what prompted this I hear you say, well I've just bought BioshockInfinite: season pass and the bloody thing wants 41GB of free space to install itself and the game

 

I think at some point in the future I will be buying another 256GB 840pro and settingh up a raid array (fyi - I run the OS and Games off the SSD and the Data/Downloads off the HDD)

[Lux]

I haven't been keeping up with the times but used to be you couldn't pass TRIM commands to members of a RAID array. Used to be the controller couldn't do that.

 

Have they overcome that obstacle now?

 

Personally I'd rather have a 512 for games with games getting bigger and all. I realize you'll get nearly 1GB/sec transfer rates with 2 of them in RAID 0 but for me its unnecessary complications. Single drives are just easier to deal with.

Edited April 1, 2014 by Lux

[Xarg]

Sounds like it's time to add the HDD as an install location for Steam and put all the old games that don't require high perf on it. Or, back up games you don't play and store on the HDD I guess.

[Bikerdude]

• I haven't been keeping up with the times but used to be you couldn't pass TRIM commands to members of a RAID array. Used to be the controller couldn't do that. Have they overcome that obstacle now?
  
• Personally I'd rather have a 512 for games with games getting bigger and all. I realize you'll get nearly 1GB/sec transfer rates with 2 of them in RAID 0 but for me its unnecessary complications. Single drives are just easier to deal with.
  

• They have overcome trim via the driver on itel chipset based motherboards atleast - http://www.anandtech...ards-we-test-it
  
• I was about to say they are still too pricey @£300+ for a single drive, but I just found a 480Gb curcial M4 for £170 on amazon BLIMEY! While not as fast as the Samsung, at that price point, I could get rid of the mechanical drive I use as my data drive...!!!
  

[Deadlove]

Isn't RAID the one that puts half of each file on each HD?

 

In my experience, don't do RAID unless you can backup EVERYTHING. I had a RAID config and one HD failed so the other was worthless.

[Shadrach]

Getting a RAID array working is perfectly simple if you remember that there must be exactly three terminations: one on one end of the cable, one on the far end, and the goat, terminated over the RAID array with a silver-handled knife whilst burning *black* candles.

[Lux]

• 480Gb curcial M4 for £170 on amazon BLIMEY! While not as fast as the Samsung, at that price point, I could get rid of the mechanical drive I use as my data drive...!!!
  

 

That's a good deal though its more than likely triple level cell but once you start getting size up there, TLC is about your only option (and less expensive). Provided when you partition you leave about 10% of the drive unpartitioned, it should be fine for 10 years or more and it will probably be replaced by then.

 

And don't get rid of your HD! Use it for backups! (I know... you know...)

 

Oh and hey, while we're talking about hardware, thank you so much for mentioning the Creative Z series in that other post a ways back. I did a few months of research and finally got a ZxR and o-m-g I absolutely love it. The separation and clarity is really amazing. Best sound quality I've ever heard from a pc sound card and I've had a number of them over the years (sitting in a box upstairs). I sincerely appreciate you bringing it up or I'd not known about it. Thank you! So thrilled to be finally off my onboard awful audio.

 

 

@Deadlove, backup images when running RAID 0 are a must because you've doubled the likely hood that the drive is going to fail but there's always RAID 5 though you need at least 3 drives for that.

 

RAID 0 is a striped set and the "half" of each file isn't really half of a file. Its a stripe or chunk of data, of a file, e.g. 32KB, 64KB, 128KB, etc. that the controller breaks up every file in to. So there could be 1,000s or millions of pieces depending on the file(s). Think of it like a drum-roll, tap tap tap tap tap, back and forth between drives, chunk chunk chunk chunk all data being broken up and written to each drive simultaneously. Also read back the same way.

 

With mechanical drives you could not see a double performance gain with RAID 0 because of mechanical drives seek time overhead but with SSDs its nearly double.

 

I used to run two 150GB raptors in raid0 but now that SSDs are out, its just too much trouble and complexity where its not required anymore, IMO. For business databases or webservers a redundant striped array or something similar would probably help out, but for loading games and applications on a PC, going from a few seconds to half of that isn't worth the effort, at least for me.

 

Samsungs EVO series is also TLC and their 500GB drives are pretty reasonable as well. Crucial or Samsung are the two I always buy as well.

[At0mic]

This is one of my issues with Steam - you can't sell or transfer games from your Steam library if you have no interest in them anymore (maybe you've played them to death, maybe they're boring or ended up being total crap, whatever). Hence you find yourself tempted to have them all installed at the same time "just in case", bloating out drive space. But I suppose even ignoring the fact Valve would prefer people bought new copies of games rather than "used" from other accounts, there's also some security issue about being able to mess with one's library in such a way, particularly if an account is compromised. Such is life in digital distribution.

 

Also remember of course, as has been mentioned - RAID, no matter which way you have it configured, is NOT a backup. It's redundancy. Should you happen to fuck up the actual files on the array on the system level (accidentally overwrite for example), said fuck-up will be dutifully replicated onto all drives. Always remember to make the occasional backup to something away from your RAID. Heck it was apparently World Backup Day a few days ago - figured it was a good reminder.

[chakkman]

Hm, i always thought it was better to run the OS from the SSD, and games from the HDD, so the system doesn't have to read/write from the same device. Haven't heard of games which require such a fast data reading, that they have to be run on a SSD... sounds like bogus to me, frankly.

[Lux]

Bogus? Hehe, install a game on an SSD and watch your level load times. Level loads are many many times faster on SSD. Now if we didn't have to deal with level loads or clicking an icon and starting the game in the first place, games wouldn't benefit from SSD load times but as it stands, it makes a massive difference.

 

Put your OS on an SSD, put your games on a different SSD, put all your temp/pagefile/browser cache on a 3rd.

[chakkman]

Sure thing. I just wonder if it can cause the typical loading lags with the games nowadays. I have Windows on a SSD, and my games partition on a HDD in my new computer, and i haven't noticed anything like that. Ok, haven't checked really recent games yet, but i guess it won't make that much of a difference. But concerning loading times, you're right of course. I see that with Windows, it's booted in like 10 seconds.

Edited April 9, 2014 by chk772

[Xarg]

Only having a 120gb SSD, I have a small number of games installed on it that typically have long loading times. I even ran a few tests before installing it, so I'd have numbers to compare to.

 

It halved the time to launch DayZmod from desktop to lobby, and shaved almost a minute off the total process of desktop to ingame, a saving of nearly 50%. It took Shogun2 from launching to main menu down from 2m30s-3m to 26 seconds, an 80% saving. Path of Exile went from 1 minute desktop to menu, down to 15 seconds, and zone changing went from 10 seconds to 2. SSD's make a massive difference when there's a lot of loading in play.

 

Meanwhile I leave my OS on the mechanical, because I typically only load it once a day, games spend far more time loading than Windows does.

Edited April 9, 2014 by Xarg

[Lux]

In BF4, on a level like Paracel Storm for instance, when the map changes I can get in a boat and on to the first island capping a point before some people have even loaded the map. Hax!

 

I only know this because we've played with a couple guys before that were loading off traditional drives and while they were still loading the map, we were capping points.

 

They should institute a wait time at the beginning of the map I guess but where's the fun in that?

Edited April 9, 2014 by Lux

[Xarg]

Let the mechanical storage for games peasants cry