Back in the day when SSDs first came out, Skuzzy expressed concern about running the game on those drives. I don't think those concerns have any validity any more (if they ever did), if that's what's holding you back. Get an SSD for Aces High and don't worry about it further.
Actually, when we were in Beta there were a couple of SSD users who had problems. There were (are?) some firmware issues with some SSD's which caused patches to arbitrarily fail and corrupt the installation. During the Beta test. We had to warn players not to run the Beta on their SSD due to some of them getting corruption during patches.
There is an inherent issue with how SSD's cannot update data. Once data is written it cannot be directly altered. It is a very clumsy thing the SSD's go through, when a file needs to be updated.
They actually have to make a copy of the original file into a RAM disk, then when the file is updated, they copy the file to a temp name on the SSD, then remove the original file, then rename the temp file. During this awkward process, the file is locked which means no further updates can be done until it is complete. This is where or when the corruption can occur.
For each block of data changed in a file, it has to go through this dance. For any given file, a patch can do this hundreds of times. There are firmware issues with some SSD's which cause the errors to happen. There is also a timeout issue which can cause problems when patching large files. None of this is in our control.
To make matters worse, our patch system makes a copy of the file to be patched, applies the patch to that file and then renames the file. Assuming your C: drive is an SSD and you are running the game off the SSD.
1) Make a copy of the file to be patched.
2) Now we want to update a block in that temp file.
2a) The SSD makes a copy of the temp file in system RAM.
2b) The SSD then updates the block in that second temp file.
3) Patch executable closes the file.
3a) The SSD copies the temp from from system RAM back to a another temp location on the SSD.
3b) Now the SSD removes the original temp file.
3c) Then renames its temp file to the original temp file name.
4) Patch executable verifies the patch to the temp file was successful by generating an MD5 checksum and comparing it to what it is supposed to be.
5) Assuming that checksum test passes, the patch executable removes the original file.
6) Then renames the temp file to the name of the file it was patching.
The error we witnessed with a couple of the SSD users (I think it really is a firmware bug with only some of the SSD's) had to do with the multiple block updates being done and the SSD failing to lock the file during its own processes or locking the file and failing a write if it did not unlock soon enough, but not reporting an error back to the OS.
We can fix it and do what most other games do. Not patch at all, just ship the entire file that needs to be updated. It would make patches huge. Matter of fact, in many patch cases, it would be the complete game. So instead of a 100K patch, it would be 1.9GB.
There is really nothing to be gained from running Aces High III from an SSD. We preload everything. If you have an HD, then use it for Aces High III and save the SSD for stuff it can actually make a difference with.
SSD's are great for static data, but Aces High III is not static at all.
