Ridata SSD - Reads up to 128MB/s - fast enough for 5 boxing?

[Owltoid]

Another noob question:

If I run 5 copies of WoW on the Ridata SSD will the read/write times be quick enough? With my extremely limited knowledge of the product, I understand that seek times are virtually eliminated, but I can't tell if there is a bottleneck in the transfer rate.

http://www.ritekusa.com/include/ssd_producttable.html ('http://www.ritekusa.com/include/ssd_producttable.html')

Thanks again! I really am reading everyones advice. I'm taking some and changing my decisions, while others I'm guessing their correct but I have the new car feeling overwriting cheaper sensibilities :)

[Owltoid]

For those interested, the following is a blurb about a test between OCZ Core SATA II SSD drive and a VelociRaptor:


The test compared a 64GB OCZ Core SATA II SSD drive to a 300GB Western Digital VelociRaptor SATA II mechanical drive, using HDTach and PCMark Vantage on an Asus P5E3 Premium motherboard featuring the Intel X48 chipset. The results give a surprising winner in read performance – the OCZ SSD, which managed 140MB/s sustained transfer rate across its entire 64GB volume and bested the already pretty nippy VelociRaptor by 8 percent.

The story takes a sudden shift when it comes to write performance, however: the SSD drops to 87Mb/s while the VelociRaptor shows almost exactly the same write performance as it did read performance, beating the SSD by a wide margin at almost 130Mb/s. Clearly SSDs are great for data that is often read by seldom written, but you wouldn't want to keep your swapfile on one – longevity issues aside.

The more real-world test of PCMark Vantage showed some impressive figures, too, with the OCZ SSD beating the high-performance VelociRaptor in almost every test thanks to almost instantaneous seek times and that little edge in read performance. Some tests that rely on rapid random access showed almost unbelievable differences in speed: one test involves importing a selection of photographs into the Windows Photo Gallery, and shows the SSD outperforming the VelociRaptor by 280 percent; another test, which simulates gaming activity, shows the OCZ SSD scoring some 602 percent higher than its mechanical counterpart. In fact, the only test in which the VelociRaptor got one over on its opponent was the Windows Media Center [sic] test, in which the mechanical unit scored 20 percent higher.

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2008/07/21/ocz-ssd-vs-velociraptor/1

This is not the SSD I'm thinking about buying, but I do believe the RiData was released after this article so I'd hope the performance is just as good. In the review it seemed like the SSD got its butt kicked in reading and there was mention of the swapfile. How often is the swapfile (pagefile?) used in 5 boxing and does this look like the SSD may actually be a bottleneck? Please note that I plan on having 12 GB of ram with the new computer.

[Sam DeathWalker]

OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12529')

read my last reply.

You dont put the swapfile on the SSD as the write times are horrible, just the wow folder read data.

[Owltoid]

OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..) ('http://www.dual-boxing.com/forums/index.php?page=Thread&threadID=12529')

read my last reply.

You dont put the swapfile on the SSD as the write times are horrible, just the wow folder read data.

Thanks for the help, Sam. I'm slowly trying to learn about all this hardware stuff, but I'm basically at step 2 of 10.

In my rudimentary understanding, the swapfile is used when the PC is out of RAM (correct?). If that's the case, and I have 12 GB of RAM, then can I get away with keeping it on the same hard drive? Also, what kind of performance degradation are we looking at? If I follow your link from the other thread (http://www.hkepc.com/1955) then the statistics are showing:

SSD vs Maxtor
1024KB Write 54. 8 MB/s vs 57.6 MB/s
File Write 49.1 MB/s vs 57.6 MB/s

Although the Maxtor is faster, it doesn't seem like the differential is enough to add the extra complication of having the swapfile on a different drive. However, it's very likely that I'm looking at the wrong statistics or that I should be comparing to Velociraptors instead of the Maxtor.

[Mukade]

Actually windows uses the swap file regardless, kind of like the prefetch on vista, and if left on auto it ususally uses about 1.5-2x the amount of ram you have for swap.

With 12GB you should have no problems disabling the swap file completely though. It's caused none for me with 8GB.

[Sam DeathWalker]

You can shut off swap file with 12G. Swapfile seems important but its not for our purposes. In fact with 12G you can make a ram drive in the ram which is faster then SSD. But you have to read the wow folder to the ram drive everytime you start up.

Just get the swapfile out of the picture, put it on any old drive and be done with it. The wow folder is what needs to be fast. Wow does NO WRITING after you enter the game, its all reads.

[Owltoid]

You can shut off swap file with 12G. Swapfile seems important but its not for our purposes. In fact with 12G you can make a ram drive in the ram which is faster then SSD. But you have to read the wow folder to the ram drive everytime you start up.

Just get the swapfile out of the picture, put it on any old drive and be done with it. The wow folder is what needs to be fast. Wow does NO WRITING after you enter the game, its all reads.

Ah, this is what I was looking for. Thanks, Sam! This puts my worries about write speed when playing WoW out of the picture. I wasn't sure if WoW was constantly writing little bits of info.

That RAM drive idea is interesting... could save me on purchaasing an SSD since WoW is all I'm using it for (movies, music, Microsoft Excel, etc will all be on the separate data drive). However, I don't want to be the groundbreaker on putting WoW into RAM since I wouldn't have a clue how to troubleshoot if things go wrong :)

Disabling the swapfile is the way I'm going to go! Thanks again everyone.

[softflow]

I just wanted to add that symlinking the WoW data folders instead of using separate installs will speed up quite a bit of the reads as well. I had a main directory with 2 separate directories for toons 2-5 previously non-symlinked and Shat was a killer back in the day. Once I symlinked the WoW data folder (as well as my interface folder...not necessary though), Shat gave me zero problems. This is all on a Raptor drive. I could only imagine the awesomeness of doing this on an SSD.

Dual Core with 4GB RAM fyi.

[Owltoid]

Would separate installs help if using an SSD drive? If the access time is near instant then I would think you can get away with one folder and nothing symlinked.

[softflow]

By separate installs I meant that only the data (maybe cache and interface) folders are symlinked. The rest of the full WoW directory structure is indeed separately installed. I ran 5 WoWs on 3 executables if you want to call it that.

Others may have more input on this part, but I'm pretty positive that reading it from RAM for the other 4 WoW instances via symlinking will still be noticeably faster than having the 4 instances read the data all over again from an SSD. I don't think that matters if they are all from the same install directory/executable or if they each have their own install/executable. The data still needs to be read by each instance.

[Freddie]

In my rudimentary understanding, the swapfile is used when the PC is out of RAM (correct?).
Correct. Moreover, this is one of the very few things in your PC where you can easily see exactly when it's being used and exactly how much it's being used. Every single time the computer has to slow down for an instant due to lack of RAM, the operating system generates something called a hard page fault. You can watch the number of hard page faults per second on Resource Monitor. If it's zero while you're playing, then the page file isn't getting used. I think this will be the case with 12 GB of RAM. If it's not getting used then there's no point in adding RAM or worrying about which hard disk the file is on. And if it's not getting used there's no point in disabling it.

By the way I disagree with people who advise disabling the page file. If you want less paging, I think the best way to accomplish that is with more RAM and fewer programs running.

[Bovidae]

To further derail this thread, my system behaves quite peculiarly in the area of the Pagefile.

I run a Q6600 X38 system with 8gb of ram on Vista64, but while even running only 1 copy of wow for under 2gb of total memory used, I still see page faults and up to 2gb of pagefile usage while running only 1xWoW and Vista.... it's been pissing me off for over a year now. [/derail]

[Owltoid]

To further derail this thread, my system behaves quite peculiarly in the area of the Pagefile.

I run a Q6600 X38 system with 8gb of ram on Vista64, but while even running only 1 copy of wow for under 2gb of total memory used, I still see page faults and up to 2gb of pagefile usage while running only 1xWoW and Vista.... it's been pissing me off for over a year now. [/derail]

Heh, I don't think it's derailing at all since the real question is if a pagefile is needed. The SSD has poor write times and I'd assume if it's utilizing the pagefile then some of that time is spent in the writing phase. If Windows uses the pagefile regardless of if there is free RAM, then disabling it may increase performance on an MLC SSD (slow write time as opposed to an SLC SSD with fast write time).

Freddie, if it's true that the pagefile is still being written to even though there is available RAM, then would you still suggest keeping it enabled?

[Freddie]

I run a Q6600 X38 system with 8gb of ram on Vista64, but while even running only 1 copy of wow for under 2gb of total memory used, I still see page faults and up to 2gb of pagefile usage while running only 1xWoW and Vista.... it's been pissing me off for over a year now. [/derail]
Have you identified the programs that are using memory and causing paging? Windows gives you a few tools for that purpose -- Task Manager, Resource Monitor, and PerfMon. If you identify the programs you can probably shut them down.

[Freddie]

Freddie, if it's true that the pagefile is still being written to even though there is available RAM, then would you still suggest keeping it enabled?
I don't know why the operating system would do that, but if it does do that, I'd want to figure out the reason and see if it's slowing down the programs that I care about. Maybe it's doing it for some reason that doesn't involve page faults by WoW and has no effect on WoW's speed.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I dont see any disadvantage of keeping it on just put in on a hard drive. If it needs it its there. I have read that pagefile is used even though ram is available though, so I don't know I would try with off then if things seem not good I would turn on.

I use a single wow for all 5 my guys (times 5 computers) and have for years. I know that a lot of people use the symlink though but I've seen no need for it. If he is suggesting that you only have seperate wtf folders well thats fine, but I just dont see, with a low access time ssd drive why a single wow folder (interface and all the other folders) is slower then a symlink one but Im no expert at it and those who are say it is, at least on hard drives. I do know that if you make 5 fully seperate wow directories, its worse, according to Lax.

[Freddie]

I have read that pagefile is used even though ram is available though...
Do you happen to know what it's used for in that situation?

The reason I ask is that it's the faulting that slows things down, not the page file itself. Faulting means that the app asks to read a piece of its virtual memory but the contents of that memory aren't currently in RAM so the OS has to retrieve them from disk. It slows things down in the sense that if the data had already been in RAM, the retrieval would be much faster. (And it would have been even faster if the data had been cached in the CPU, in which case the CPU wouldn't have to retrieve anything from RAM.)

If what you've read is correct and the OS is reading and writing the page file with non-WoW threads for some reason while WoW is running, I don't see why that would necessarily affect WoW's speed unless the reads and writes happen while WoW is accessing the same disk to load new zones or something of that sort. Because it's WoW's faulting that slows WoW down, not the OS using the page file. In other words, if WoW faults then the OS has to read disk. But the converse isn't true. Just because the OS is reading or writing a file doesn't mean WoW is faulting or slowing down in any way.


so I don't know I would try with off then if things seem not good I would turn on.
I agree. It never hurts to try. That's the best thing really.

[Sam DeathWalker]

Probably a poorly written application may assume that there is less system ram then there is. Also under XP anyway a spicfic application cannot address mre then 2G I think it is. So even if the ram is available the programe cannot use it. 64 bit systems are better I am sure. but 32 bit OS its like 2G max for an application so ....

[Bovidae]

Yes, the poorly written application that is causing pagefaults when there is available ram is....WorldofWarcraft..dun dun dun

Maybe it's just my dated hardware, but when I disable pagefile, I get out of memory bluescreens after booting, nevermind actually running anything. With my budget, I'll be using this machine at least another year, so no experimenting for me.

[Owltoid]

When the new system arrives (3 weeks ;( ) I'm going to start with everything default and see how it runs. If it looks like there are any delays, then I may start tweaking depending on what the issue may be. I'll keep the pagefile enabled until there is a reason to disable.

[Freddie]

Probably a poorly written application may assume that there is less system ram then there is. Also under XP anyway a spicfic application cannot address mre then 2G I think it is. So even if the ram is available the programe cannot use it. 64 bit systems are better I am sure. but 32 bit OS its like 2G max for an application so ....
Seems to me that if a program thinks there's less RAM available, it's less likely to use additional RAM, not more likely, so it's less likely to cause paging.

Also about the 2 GB limit. It's actually not quite as limiting as it seems (because applications get a benefit from memory in the operating system's and device drivers' address spaces) but like every limit, it causes less RAM use, so it reduces paging.

I think 64 bit Windows is more likely to page than 32 bit Windows, not less, because 64 bit Windows uses more RAM due to the fact that every integer and pointer in the operating system requires 8 bytes of RAM instead of 4. (That's what 64 bit means -- it means those objects are 64 bits wide -- 8 bytes.)

[Freddie]

Yes, the poorly written application that is causing pagefaults when there is available ram is....WorldofWarcraft..dun dun dun
Could I ask how you're determining that there's available RAM? What number exactly on Task Manager or whatever are you using to measure that?

The reason I ask is that the memory numbers on Task Manager and Resource Manager are labeled in a very misleading way. [Edit: I should have said some of the numbers.] For example, the "Page File" number is actually the Commit Charge, not the amount of Page File used, and Commit Charge includes both physical RAM and Page File use. Etc.


Maybe it's just my dated hardware, but when I disable pagefile, I get out of memory bluescreens after booting, nevermind actually running anything. With my budget, I'll be using this machine at least another year, so no experimenting for me.
Well that shows you don't have enough RAM in the machine even to boot. This makes me very doubtful that you have any free RAM in the machine while playing WoW. Almost certainly your machine needs to page constantly no matter what you're doing because you have less RAM than the minimum used by the machine.