Any downside to running a Minecraft server on my main O.S. drive?

[PCJake]

Hey everyone,

I have a Minecraft server running 24/7 on my PC for me and my friends. 90% of the time, no one is on it. At most, we'll have four or five people on at the same time.

My main drive is a Samsung 840 Pro 256GB SSD. However, I have always run the server from my older Intel X-25M 80GB SSD. My logic is that running it on a separate drive (X-25M) keeps my main O.S. drive (840 Pro) from slowing down, since there's already a bunch of stuff happening on that one. At this point, though, I'd really like to remove the X-25M from my system - do you guys think it would be OK to start running the server from my 840 Pro? Would it slow down my O.S., theoretically?

I tried watching my disc activity in the resource monitor while playing on the server, but I didn't learn much, and I couldn't think of any other way to test the hard drive usage of the server. I just lack knowledge of how the server interacts with hard drives, so that's why I'm here.

 

[Elixer]

In theory ? Sure. In practice ? Maybe.
It all depends on how much IO that does.
If we are talking about gigabytes of writes a day, then yeah, it will lower the lifespan of the SSD.

 

[PCJake]

In theory ? Sure. In practice ? Maybe.
It all depends on how much IO that does.
If we are talking about gigabytes of writes a day, then yeah, it will lower the lifespan of the SSD.

Yeah, I guess that's what I'm really trying to figure out - how much IO the server does. Any ideas on how to test that?

And I'm not really worried about the lifespan of my SSD - if I was worried about that, I'd have left it in the box

 

[Red Squirrel]

I would personally have it running on a separate server but that's just me. That way if you reboot your PC it's not affecting it. I actually run a Minecraft server as well and I have a VM on my main server for it. I did find myself having to increase the memory for it at one point as it does use a half decent amount, but nothing crazy. Mine is using about 200MB right now, but it's idle. It's just me and one of my friends that plays on it. I do recall seeing it hit over a gig though with some activity. The VM was originally 2GB so I gave it 4GB to be safe. As far as IO I don't think it's very heavy, but hard to tell as it's mostly out of sight out of mind. It IS java though, so that says a lot about how cpu intense it probably is.

 

[_Rick_]

Just have enough memory, and there shouldn't be any I/O except when starting and shutting down, excepting perhaps occasional reads, but I think an entire world can easily be maintained in memory.
Especially stable-world (i.e. no regular level loading) servers have close to zero I/O because using I/O for anything would be an extremely inefficient and roundabout way of coding things.
Compared to clicking on a big folder and getting files enumerated, it's absolutely nothing at all to worry about.

 

[GlacierFreeze]

Most of the activity should be taking place in RAM, otherwise it'd be pretty slow if it were constantly reading/writing to hard disk/ssd. Doubt it's really that IO intensive, but that's a guess.

 

[XavierMace]

Minecraft isn't known for being resource friendly.

Assuming this is on Windows...

Open task manager, click on processes tab, click on "View" menu then select columns. Check "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes". What kind of numbers do you see for Java compared to everything else and when is the last time the system has been rebooted? How fast are the numbers changing?

 

[PCJake]

Minecraft isn't known for being resource friendly.

Assuming this is on Windows...

Open task manager, click on processes tab, click on "View" menu then select columns. Check "I/O Reads" and "I/O Writes". What kind of numbers do you see for Java compared to everything else and when is the last time the system has been rebooted? How fast are the numbers changing?

OK, this is after exactly one day straight of running the server:

I/O Reads: 322,531 (not sure what units of measurement are being used here - does it just refer to how many read actions have been taken?)
I/O Writes: 2,919,347
I/O Read Bytes: 14,781,771 (thought I'd include this too)
I/O Write Bytes: 1,068,905,859

Whaddya think?

 

[XavierMace]

That's a fairly good amount. That's 1Gb of data written. How many people were on the server during that day? Keep in mind that's going to exponentially increase based on the number of players on the server.

 

[PCJake]

That's a fairly good amount. That's 1Gb of data written. How many people were on the server during that day? Keep in mind that's going to exponentially increase based on the number of players on the server.

No one was on the server that day. I wish I could put those numbers into perspective so I'd know how much it's really affecting my O.S. performance.

 

[XavierMace]

Are you experiencing poor performance that leads you to believe the Minecraft server is causing it? I mean if you can't tell if it's having an effect on your performance, then it wouldn't seem to be enough of a hit to matter.

If you are worried about the lifespan, that's a different story.

 

[PCJake]

Are you experiencing poor performance that leads you to believe the Minecraft server is causing it? I mean if you can't tell if it's having an effect on your performance, then it wouldn't seem to be enough of a hit to matter.

If you are worried about the lifespan, that's a different story.

Nope, I haven't noticed any performance hits. And I'm not worried about lifespan. I'll keep my eye on the "drive health" stat in Magician just in case, but I don't think it'll be a big deal.

 

[Emulex]

you won't have any girlfriends

 

[pcslookout]

you won't have any girlfriends

Maybe I don't want one.

 

[PCJake]

I run my own server. I will have all the girlfriends.

 

[tweakboy]

No downside if you have powerful enough system, 8GB or higher, and i5 or i7 processor my friend. It probably takes 1 or 2 percent CPU power. gl