How much of ssd space can I use?
February 4th, 2020
If I have 200gb installed on a 250gb SSD, will it function efficiently?
Is there a way to direct the games (like Crisys 3, Metro Last Light, Combat arms etc) installed in SSD to use the HDD for its temporary read/write?
Please advise.
There isn’t any limit (well anymore so than with a hard drive) as to how much space can be used.
For games, I would install them on the hard drive; most games don’t have an option of where the temp files are stored.
This doesn’t impact speed as they load what they need into RAM for the most part, and use the temp files for caching etc
This doesn't impact speed as they load what they need into RAM for the most part
Now, you got me confused because all of what I read says that SSD makes everything very fast or may be I did not understand it correctly hehehe.
Or is it just in the loading that made the ssd faster than hdd? Like when you boot the pc Or when start a game? But when the game is loaded and ready to play, everything will be the same in terms of speed whether you are using ssd or hdd.
Please enlighten me.
Thanks.
Exactly!
The games reside on whatever type of drive, and load the files they need into ram or temp. The initial load would improve if the files were on a SSD, and once started subsequent files are generally pulled from the temp cache or ram.
You of course could see some marginal speed increase depending on the game was programmed, but unlikely really.
is right – but it also depends on the game and how they worked it.
Some games load the textures as you enter new areas (like the texture flick in on Fallout 3 or the low res texture when you turn suddenly on Rage) – for these, a SSD will speed it up massively.
For games that load all the textures of any one level into video ram then system ram (when vid ram runs out), a SSD will only speed up the initial reading.
Either way, it WILL speed things up.
Demonstration:
I have two i7 computers – an i7 Haswell laptop and an i7 2600 dektop.
The lappy is on a MSata SSD and the deksy has a 7200 rpm 1 gig hard drive.
Boot time on the lappy is about 4 seconds from power to desktop (sometimes 7 – I don’t know what it’s doing those extra 3 seconds..??)
Boot time on the desky is about 25 seconds, power to desktop.
Now – I KNOW different motherboards, different systems (the desky has more) and such will alter the speed, but the SSD has a big influence too.
RAM I find is more important for the textures; in fact, for these temp files, and if you have RAM to spare, create a RAM drive.
I have a semi-permanent one (loads on boot and saves contents on shutdown) where I keep files / folders that I want to be uber responsive.
So in a gaming situation, I might create a 4G RAM drive and install the game there. (only do this when you KNOW how to create and save that drive, otherwise your installation will be pointless as on a reboot it will go poof).
RAM to RAM faster than SSD to RAM faster than HD to RAM at the same time
costs: RAM>ssd>hd
That’s not a bad idea!
Good for testing if you like a a game (pity that some need a butt load of space) – ANd if you like it you can save the ramdrive to an image.
You could have a dozen ram-images of the games you like, and load the one you like.. neat!
Question: Have you looked into the different ram dives and found a “best” one? which?
They pretty much all use the same driver, and I have not seen any appreciable difference between the ones I have tried.
http://reboot.pro/files/file/284-imdisk-toolkit/
Uses the ever stable but gui ugly and unfriendly IMDISK but gives you a prettier GUI.
I personally skip the gui but I’m still one of those that has withdrawal symptoms if I don’t see the cmd prompt at least once a day.
Thank you guys for all the sharing.
This helps me a lot.