does that have an impact on that, i do wonder ... my first thought would be that it wouldn't i only see an improvement in other games when loading levels, nothing more
Generally speaking you want a SSD for your operating system, to speed up booting times and application start up times. They can potentially decrease loading times in certain games as well. But they of course aren't without disadvantages. They obviously offer less space per dollar, and cheaper SDD's can be worn down by improper use such as writing large quantities of data regularly. More expensive SDD's are starting to get more durable, and in the near future SDD's probably won't have any issues with performance degrading anymore.
i've been running SSD's for a few years now, the cost has gone down considerably. Important things to remember with SSD's is , never defrag them (no point), make sure that you use a very small swap file, some choose to disable it completely, but i've found some programs can go a bit haywire if it's switched off, and i don't like the idea of a swap file on volatile storage (aka RAM disk), if you make sure you have TRIM on for them , the performance degradation is not that noticable/large. Oh and steer clear from OCZ SSD's, they're cheap, but break down fast (had one , died very quick) in games like BF3, there is a noticable difference when loading maps, i'm always one of the first few people to enter the map, but again it depends on the game.
Why not both? Hybrid drives are awesome. Large amounts of space for a better price than an SSD, with your most commonly accessed files being moved onto an SSD partition for those decreased load times. Though I don't think PA will benefit that much from one since this game is more CPU/RAM intensive than anything to do with your hard drive.
It all comes down to bottlenecking in your mainboard, or bottle necking somewhere. SSD will improve data read times considerably, but if your Mainboard or ram or videocard or PCIe cant handle the data rates its useless. I would improve Mainboard to one with high FSB rates and PCIe with the highest bandwidth, RAM speed and capacity, and Videocard to one with the highest GPU clock and VRAM clocks you can afford. Evenly matching these rates on quality hardware gives amazing performance for gaming. In example, Mainboard 1333mhz capable and atleast 1 PCIe (x16) Processor any above 2ghz that run @ 1333mhz fsb (Dual core or better) Videocard ,, any with a GPU clock higher than 600mhz and atleast DDR3 ram Standard sata HDD 7200rpm
I've always used OCZ and never had to reinstall for any other reason than hardware/ software changes, plus there not cheap but can you tell me your retailer? Everyone I know has either an ssd or 2 or more ssd's in raid. The biggest thing that comes back is the jump between hdd and ssd is vast.Plus to date none of these people have had one go pop.
Your right you've got to have everything but my point is you don't put a hdd with a 3930k and a asus sabertooth unless its storage. I haven't had an operating system on a hdd for 3 years.
Things don't from CPU to RAM via the harddrive. They just don't. Unplug all your drive and turn on the computer. It'll happily run up until the point where it tries to look for an OS to boot. Now plug all your drives back in, and remove the RAM. See how far you get. I think you're a bit mistaken. You might be thinking of loading things from non-volatile memory into RAM. That's a whole different kettle of fish to making something new inside the CPU and putting it in RAM. And besides; not every computer needs a hard drive. Nor do they need any non-volatile memory (like an SSD, or flash memory). Most happen to have that, and that's because few people for such setups.
I got it at Alternate, it's a dutch/german company don't think you'll know it. I had a OCZ Agility 120GB, they were notourius for hanging and crashing, had something to do with the sandforce controller. I now run a samsung 830 and a crucial M4 , never had any issues with those. RAID-0 on a consumer desktop is fairly useless, unless you're into video/audio stuff. Yes you gain a higher throughput with large sequential writes and reads, but most of the computers interactions are random and small in size, and for that case , it's better to use a single SSD, where the RAID computations that need to be made before each write and read are slowing the array down if you're using (software) RAID. People assume they don't use software RAID because it's on their mainboard, but that's still in large part software based RAID.
Nope, you can load operation system directly to RAM though network boot. You can even run all your OS in RAM. But I'm said exactly about Planetary Annihilation and all game assets use less than 1GB. Even slow HDD can read at ~50MB/second, it's mean all game content can be loaded into ram for about 20 seconds. Some open world games like Skyrim might perform better on SSD because they use tons of data, but this not true for PA.
Current gen ssd's have longer lifespans than hdd's. Just dont let utorrent save your downloads on your ssd and trust me it will outlast the hdd by far. Its just the cost and the fact that ppl still think ssd's break down faster than hdd thats keeping them back. But time will fix that. All our systems in our house run on ssd's and we never had problems with them and they are crazy fast. Even our super slow atom laptop speeded up alot when we putted a ssd in it and it no longer freezes. Best setup you can have atm is having a ssd with your OS and programs on it and a hdd with movies, music etc. on it. hdd is more than fast enough for that.
i am missing why this discussion is contributing to beta discussion at this point as stated by SXX, SSD's will have no noticable effect on PA.
