Aces High and the Hard Drive

[BoilerDown]

I could give a rats tushy if someone wants to beat up thier SSD.  All I can so is warn folks about the potential problems you are asking for.  If you chose to run AH on an SSD, and you do have problems, it is not because someone did not try to tell you.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?&v=om7O0MFkmpw

I'm hoping that the modern SSDs when run with all the features previously mentioned will be more resilient.  I didn't just buy a SSD so it can sit there and look pretty.  I bought it to increase loading speeds and to remove game stutter, and there definitely is game stutter in Aces High and other games caused by loading things from the hard drive.  Maybe a year from now I will determine that it just wasn't worth it and I shouldn't have bought a SSD in the first place, but for now, on with the beating up.

Anyways if it goes to hell in a year it'll still be under warranty .

[Skuzzy]

The 'year' was/is an arbitrary time frame.  It will naturally vary.

I have never had any type of stutter in the game due to hard disk accesses, on any of my computers, including a pretty low end office system.

[Krusty]

Just to add a little more to the sample size...

I've been running a Revo X2 100GB PCIe as my primary with AH installed on it since about April. No problems that I've noticed. Nothing bad happening. I put most of my stuff on the 1TB secondary, but for AH I put in on the SSD.

Skuzzy: Would you have a particular scan or check that you recommend to see if there really is anything happening to the SSD? Something to either prove or rule out that I'm mistreating the SSD?

I don't mean to take on side or the other just yet, I'm just curious what to check/run on my system to better help share info on the matter.


P.S. Running Win7 x64, with trim enabled.

[Tigger29]

I remember playing Aces High on my old system when the old hard drive was trying to go out on me.  It still worked just fine but had crawled to a snail's pace.  Even WD's diagnostic software would not yield any problems but the tests took days to finish!

When it would load a skin or a texture it would see a pause of a couple of seconds.  It was pretty crazy!

I had no problems getting a replacement though.  I spend a few bucks to ship it to them and I had a nice shiny new (probably refurbed) drive with three times the capacity in less than a week!

But yeah.. on a healthy drive there shouldn't be any stutters due to hard drive access...

[skribetm]

ah uses prefetch on an hdd to load everything on to memory, like skuzzy said.
there's also a few more loads happening aside from the prefetch.
i think its mostly the custom sounds/skins.

have installed it on my old 7200rpm hdd and playing on it.
other windows apps just work too slow.. editing pictures, loading, etc..

[YamaRaja]

I guess I'll see to. 7 or 8 months with no issues yet on two OCZ Vertex 3 120GB in raid0.
I do let them idle at the bios screen overnight at least once a week for garbage collection to work at its optimum, usually 2 or more nights.
Trim does not work in raid on any ssd I've found yet.
Perhaps that's the issue, trim not being able to keep up with the read/writes.
Speed requires maintenance in any type machine (cars, boats, motorcycles etc)

I used the ssd array for my only operating system installed on my machine.
As I've said before using Acronis for C:drive backup just in case.

I came to ssd's from 2 Raptors in raid0, there no comparison for speeding up your machine overall.

But Skuzzy is "the man" when it comes to AH, so if it fails I buy more, lol.
 

[TequilaChaser]

I do let them idle at the bios screen overnight at least once a week for garbage collection to work at its optimum, usually 2 or more nights.

Trim does not work in raid on any ssd I've found yet.

This is why I posted :

using Windows 7 64 bit, it has  GC ( Garbage Collection), Trim & SMART  abilities............ and I have not experienced any slow down as of yet...... ( I play more steadily on the Intel PC than I have on the AMD since July...... 

now, I do recommend people doing a reboot more frequently than you might when using a old platter/disc  type  Hard Drive......

your SSD does the Garbage Collection &/or Trim at the start up of one's computer......

I too noticed that after I went from (1) SSD to (2) SSD's in RAID 0 mode on my Intel  i7-2600k PC , that the TRIM stopped working/ initiating, although it still does gargage Collection ( and S.M.A.R.T. still works ) , same as YamaRaja has posted

on my AMD Phenom II 975 quadcore PC rig, with just (1) SSD, that all functions are working properly  TRIM, Garbage collection & S.M.A.R.T. functions.......


I will probably drop back to just the (1) SSD in my i7-2600k PC, with just the 1 SSD, it was already so fast booting up that I had to go into my BIOS and initiate / set a  10 second pause during bootup....... without it, the PC would barely flicker a glimpse of the bootup sequence and not even fully load the windows 7 is starting black screen before I would be seeing the login screen where you enter your password...... it booted up in like 6 to 8 seconds max......... once password was entered/clicked it instantly popped to my desktop with everything started/loaded/showing ( icons, etc...)

putting 2 of these SSD's in RAID 0 was more of the "lets see how well it works / performs now?  experiment......  in which it is just overkill ( outside of having 256 GB;s of space minus the 100 MB reserve it uses up for System Reserved instead of a single SSD's 128 GB capacity )

TC

[skribetm]

gah. i'm back to my ssd.
hdd? ne. ver. again. 

[eagl]

Aces High does a lot of updates to config files while it runs.  Never, and I mean NEVER, run Aces High from an SSD.  Long term, it will hurt your SSD as those devices do not do well when an application constantly writes and updates lots of small files.

There will be those that come along stating they run the game from an SSD just fine.  Ask them how they are doing in a year.  IT WILL WREAK HAVOC with any current generation SSD.


Generally, a 7200RPM drive will give better game performance for loading, but it also helps for the writes.

Since SSDs are becoming more mainstream, when will AH become more SSD friendly?  Or will "antique computer" become part of the hardware requirements for the game?  I'm being a bit snide, but AH runs really well on older hardware but not at the expense of the newer stuff, except for this issue.  It almost sounds like old hardware will be an explicit game requirement.

[Bizman]

Since SSDs are becoming more mainstream, when will AH become more SSD friendly?  Or will "antique computer" become part of the hardware requirements for the game?  I'm being a bit snide, but AH runs really well on older hardware but not at the expense of the newer stuff, except for this issue.  It almost sounds like old hardware will be an explicit game requirement.

IMHO SSD's aren't going to become mainstream in a long time. Not before their price/GB drops to the same level with these "antique" rotating disks and their capacity is measured in terabytes. As for now I consider them mostly as status symbols for the forerunning elite.

Don't get me wrong, though. I'm by no means against the new HDD technology, vice versa. Heck, I remember when the flash memory sticks started to come into B2B markets. The prices were stellar, about 30 Eur a Meg roughly converted into today's value of money, the sticks being 32 and 64 Megs! Today they give 1 GB sticks away when you buy three blocks of chocolate...

Every now and then someone releases a game which can't be played with full details on any existing build. They are used as benchmarking tools for new rigs by gamers' magazines, serving as guidelines for what to wish for next Christmas. Aces High has never been such a tool and hopefully it never will become one. In this manner AH has given us average Joes an opportunity to spend our spare time with a quality game without sacrificing our children's welfare.

<Edit>The new SSD's are much more lightweight as the traditional 3.5 inchers, aren't they? I just dropped one old HDD on my big toe and now the toenail is black. Much less pain with an SSD, i suppose...</Edit>

[Skuzzy]

Since SSDs are becoming more mainstream, when will AH become more SSD friendly?  Or will "antique computer" become part of the hardware requirements for the game?  I'm being a bit snide, but AH runs really well on older hardware but not at the expense of the newer stuff, except for this issue.  It almost sounds like old hardware will be an explicit game requirement.

If you want to give up features, no problem.  I suppose the game does not need to know what the last field you launched from was.  You could tower back to the same field every time.  Why would plane loadouts need to be remembered?  Just go back to the tower and configure the loadout every time.  Get rid of the rearm pad as well.  No need for it.  Probably pretty silly that each plane is allowed its own views configuration and allowing it to be changed whenever you want.

[MrRiplEy[H]]

If you want to give up features, no problem.  I suppose the game does not need to know what the last field you launched from was.  You could tower back to the same field every time.  Why would plane loadouts need to be remembered?  Just go back to the tower and configure the loadout every time.  Get rid of the rearm pad as well.  No need for it.  Probably pretty silly that each plane is allowed its own views configuration and allowing it to be changed whenever you want.

I hope you're not referring once per sortie writes as 'all the time' writes here? The SSDs are rated for 40 GiB/day writes for 5 years. AH will have a heck of a time writing ini files to achieve that. Trim and garbage collection will take care of the stale blocks those ini writes may leave behind.

Older generation ssds were really problematic in this area, basically when the cells were written over once the performance of the whole disk just collapsed. Not anymore. Also sandforce based ssds used to have a problem with their firmware that could render the whole ssd useless arbitarily. This also has been fixed.

All current review sites use benchmarking tools that stress test the drives writing them full of data and then remeasuring the performance. Older drives collapsed in this test, new drives lose 10 percent or so performance, async memory module ssds excluded which still take a heavy performance hit.

The 'proper' model such as OCZ Vertex3 do not degrade in this manner but the async model Agility3 will suffer from severely degraded performance once it fills up close to 50% or more.

Oh, and if you wanted, no ini writes are necessary to save player loadout and location info, they can be saved server side.

[Skuzzy]

Server side, for some files, is rather problematic.  We do server side, when it makes sense.  

SSD's do not do well with small file writes, of the same files, over and over again.  It has a tendency to kill those cells faster than a write-once file, with occasional updates.  It is the nature of the current technology.

I agree it is better than it used to be and it gets better with each generation.  We are only approximately 2 generations away (possibly less) from having the same data integrity as hard disks have now, where it absolutely does not matter how many times you write, truncate, or expand any given file.

I remember when SSD's started coming out and people were saying how much better they were than hard drives.  Looking back, we all know that was a crock.


There is no need to rationalize why you want to use them.  I get it, but I am also bound to making sure the game runs as reliably as possible, on as many machines as possible.  To that end, I stand by my assessment and I really do not care if anyone agrees or not.  In the end, people will do what they want.

[eagl]

If you want to give up features, no problem.  I suppose the game does not need to know what the last field you launched from was.  You could tower back to the same field every time.  Why would plane loadouts need to be remembered?  Just go back to the tower and configure the loadout every time.  Get rid of the rearm pad as well.  No need for it.  Probably pretty silly that each plane is allowed its own views configuration and allowing it to be changed whenever you want.

Can't that stuff be buffered and dropped to the HD on either a schedule or on FE shutdown?  I mean, HTC really goes to great (and greatly appreciated) efforts to ensure that the game runs on older hardware that has been abandoned by most other game developers, but maybe that doesn't have to mean that the game kills new hardware too.

I was gonna put AH on my laptop since I'm going to be going through a slow paced training course sometime next year, but it has a "cheap" SSD and I'm not going to risk it for a game.  For that matter, every new build I ever make from now on will probably have an SSD, now that I've seen and experienced firsthand how much more responsive my computer feels with the SSD.  Is AH going to have the electronic equivalent of "product manufactured in a plant that also processes peanuts" stamped on the box?  Because that's sort of what it sounds like.

I'm not picking a fight just to pick a fight or be nasty, I'm seriously wondering if I'll be able to put AH on my computer in the future as planned, if it will kill my SSD.

[BoilerDown]

Can we feature request an optional file path to write frequently-written data that is seperate from the static game files, to make AH more SSD friendly?