A few questions about SSD's and partitions

[Dorkenstein]

I found that a possible cause for horrid texture pop-in in certain games might be that all 3 of my physical drives are partitioned in 3 pieces. So, 9 drives in windows. Crazy, I know, but I wanted to keep some semblance of organization and I didn't know of any harm.

Is there a way to remove those partitions with a live linux distro or something and not destroy any data or am I power-hosed?

Next question, let's say I decide to wait on getting an SSD due to money constraints. Is there a platter drive that will improve random access times over a horridly partitioned Samsung F1? Thank you very much for any help on this, it's been bothering me.

 

[jkresh]

There are some programs that can merge partitions (acronis disk director can and works pretty well) but there is always a risk of loosing date (you should backup whatever you can first). As to improving access time a raptor will be better then any traditional drive (but nowhere near a good ssd (intel or ocz vertex)).

I am thinking about picking up an ssd for my windows 7 install, as I can't install it on the raid and don't have enough free space on the velociraptor, but I am not sure yet as while they are a lot faster the price is still kind of high (the 80gig intel/120gig ocz are still a bit more then I paid for my velociraptor a couple of years ago (and its a lot bigger).

 

[Dorkenstein]

Thanks for replying. I guess I won't remove any existing partitions, but I can remove my oldest drive and replace it with something dedicated to only games to prevent mixups and clutter. How much faster than a Velociraptor is an SSD? Like night and day difference? Thanks.

 

[rcpratt]

The anandtech Intel X25-M review provides benchmarks that includes a Velociraptor. It's fairly significant, but I suppose it depends on what you do with your system.

http://www.anandtech.com/stora...howdoc.aspx?i=3403&p=1

 

[Dorkenstein]

Ok, thanks again. Is there any benefit to having two SSD's in RAID for games or is it just not worth it due to lost space? Just curious.

 

[rcpratt]

Sure, there's a performance benefit in RAID 0, and no lost space.

Eh, nevermind on those benchmarks, something is wrong with them. But yes, the performance is nearly double in RAID 0. There are some reviews floating around somewhere, I'll try to find some.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Great! Do you need a good raid controller, though? Or will motherboard do?

 

[rcpratt]

From what I've read, the onboard ICH10R controller does just about as well as any other controller.

 

[Dorkenstein]

All right, thanks for your continued help. I got caught up reading a thread at hardforum that SSD's are "synthetic" benchmark kings and in the "real" world, Velociraptors do just as well. I'm not really inclined to believe that statement, but can anyone comment on it? Thanks again.

 

[rcpratt]

Never used a velociraptor, but I'm definitely not inclined to believe that either. I've noticed a huge difference from my caviar black.

Most of the benchmarks in HDD tests ARE real-world situations, anyways. Boot time, time to launch a certain application, time to run a certain task, etc.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
I found that a possible cause for horrid texture pop-in in certain games might be that all 3 of my physical drives are partitioned in 3 pieces. So, 9 drives in windows. Crazy, I know, but I wanted to keep some semblance of organization and I didn't know of any harm.

Is there a way to remove those partitions with a live linux distro or something and not destroy any data or am I power-hosed?

Next question, let's say I decide to wait on getting an SSD due to money constraints. Is there a platter drive that will improve random access times over a horridly partitioned Samsung F1? Thank you very much for any help on this, it's been bothering me.

Just having multiple partitions is NOT going to slow anything down, unless you did something silly like have the pagefile split among all the partitions, or something along those lines. The pagefile should be on 1 partition, and should be a fixed size, that uses 1 contiguous block.

A badly fragmented drive can cause those issues that you talk about though.

More than likely, you either need more system RAM, or video RAM.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Okay, here's the thing.

I have a Q9550 oc'ed to 3.6ghz

8 gb of DDR2 1066

GTX 285 SSC edition

I defragment more than once per month and I keep the game directories in shape with defraggler. But I still get nasty texture popup in games like Bioshock and Fallout 3. Bioshock I can understand because it's based on the unreal engine. But with Fallout 3, whenever trees, buildings and other structures come into my view, the game stutters hard.

What else can I do? By the way, my page file is a fixed size, but what size should it be for 8gb of ram? Is it wiser to make 2 or 3 page files on different drives so the least busy one can pick up the slack? Thanks.

 

[Elixer]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Okay, here's the thing.

I have a Q9550 oc'ed to 3.6ghz

8 gb of DDR2 1066

GTX 285 SSC edition

I defragment more than once per month and I keep the game directories in shape with defraggler. But I still get nasty texture popup in games like Bioshock and Fallout 3. Bioshock I can understand because it's based on the unreal engine. But with Fallout 3, whenever trees, buildings and other structures come into my view, the game stutters hard.

What else can I do? By the way, my page file is a fixed size, but what size should it be for 8gb of ram? Is it wiser to make 2 or 3 page files on different drives so the least busy one can pick up the slack? Thanks.

With 8GB of RAM, you only need around 512MB-1GB for the pagefile.
Does it still stutter if you knock back the resolution?
That sounds like it is trying to load the gfx from main memory to the vid card, and I don't know how much VRAM that card has.

I also assume you are running a 64bit OS right? You should also enable triple buffering in the nvidia control panel.

 

[Dorkenstein]

It has 1gb of vid memory. I'm running a 64 bit os, yes. I can try knocking down the res, its doing 1600x1200 right now.

 

[rcpratt]

You shouldn't be having video card memory issues with 1GB at that resolution.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Yeah, that's what I thought. Still looking at options for now.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Would having my game partition on the same physical drive as windows be a problem?

 

[Nothinman]

all 3 of my physical drives are partitioned in 3 pieces. So, 9 drives in windows. Crazy, I know, but I wanted to keep some semblance of organization and I didn't know of any harm.

That's what directories are for...

Would having my game partition on the same physical drive as windows be a problem?

Doubtful but I guess it would depend on how much I/O Windows is doing while you're running the game.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Yeah, I should have just used folders. I also didn't want defragmenting each partition to take an age so I split them up. Looking back, probably not worth it. So if I back my stuff up somehow (not sure what I'll do), should I remove some of the partitions on each drive?

 

[Dorkenstein]

Actually, how much of an improvement would I see if I just got a separate hard drive for games with nothing else on it? And does having too many drives slow things down at all? Thanks.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Anyone know? Thanks.

 

[Idontcare]

Originally posted by: Dorkenstein
Actually, how much of an improvement would I see if I just got a separate hard drive for games with nothing else on it? And does having too many drives slow things down at all? Thanks.

Newegg has those 3-platter hitachi 1TB drives for $76 shipped right now, just bought some myself.

Nothing happens just because you have more drives. If you have search indexing services running then your system can slow down some as the total amount of data in your system increases, likewise for background defragmenters.

The biggest slowdowns I have experienced come from the drives getting loaded up beyond about 70% and then they get really slow for doing just about anything after that point.

 

[Dorkenstein]

I didn't think Hitachi was that good of a brand, has that changed? Thanks.

 

[taltamir]

to go back to the original question... texture pop in is a FEATURE of the UE3 engine (unreal engine 3). It allows the game to drastically reduce loading times, at the cost of having texture pop in. The alternative is much longer and frequent "loading" screens. Ideally your game would have just used more ram to avoid the problem (you are using 64bit OS and 64bit exes of games when available, right?)

But the alternative is just to get really really high read speed for the drive on which the game is installed. quality SSD or a RAID0 array are both ideal solutions for such a thing.

 

[Dorkenstein]

Would 2 x Western Digital 640gb Caviar Black drives in RAID 0 be a good start or is it vastly outclassed by a velociraptor? I can't really afford two velociraptors but I can always wait.