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

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...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..)

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..)[/url]

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.