SSD caching a HDD is a worthless gimmick

[taltamir]

Also I don't see how GoG could avoid the individual installation process of games. Dragon Age for example creates services and registry entries while installing

Also known as DRM, something GOG doesn't do. Also GOG has a much more limited library of games so you (Voo) should probably be using impulse instead.
The only difference between impulse and steam is that:
1. Impulse doesn't need to run while the game runs.
2. Impulse lets you install games to a directory of your choice.

You like how steam can do an in place update where it just changes missing files? so can impulse.
You like how you can store it in a zip archive? so can impulse.
You can get dragon age on both of those and if you got it from impulse you could choose which directory you want it installed in.
Heck, impulse and steam even look similar.

But it seems like it isn't that critical since you CAN archive the local data with steam, you just install your steam directory into the SSD and when you are done playing with a game uninstall it while saving its files in a zip on the HDD.
Voo, are you talking about hypothetical people here or do you actually keep that many games installed concurrently which you then replay on a regular basis?

Oh, and as I pointed out before... if once in a blue moon you fire up an old game you haven't played in a long time from the SRT volume, it will run in HDD speed not in SSD speed because none of it would have been cached. So there is no reason not to keep your old games installed on the HDD and only the nice new games you are playing regularly on the SSD.

Also consider that SRT is not the only player out there that can do this type of thing. One cheaper example would be FancyCache by Romex which can utilize as much RAM as you can afford to squeeze/fit into a system(and trust me here.. RAM blows SSD right out of the water when it comes to latency and R/W speeds with ANY data types..random or sequential). Then if you want to pick at the fact that most can't afford(or fit) 32 gigs of RAM on their system?.. well.. guess what? You can also use ANY sized SSD to do the EXACT same thing as SRT does and so much more, including write caching as well.

Sounds pretty good actually...
But as far as RAM caching goes, isn't this what Superfetch does?

 

[Voo]

Also known as DRM, something GOG doesn't do

Yeah GOG doesn't have its own DRM, BUT as they surely don't get the Dragon Age (or whatever) source code and aren't allowed to just rewrite it as they like, they'll still have to install those things, because otherwise the game won't run (or don't they allow DRMed games? an interesting stance that would be, although fairly limiting for their library)

I'm not saying that steam is better than the others (it's just useful if you and all your friends have their games on there - especially for multiplayer it has undeniably useful features) and steam sales do keep me busy for a small price. And personally I find the steam DRM itself unobtrusive and problem-free (so I don't really worry about that and it updating/patching all my current games automatically is really a nice plus; who doesn't remember searching patches on some horribly designed websites?), the real problem is the hideous DRM put on top of games by their publishers.

For people who don't have a problem leaving some older games on their HDD having the ability to install games on the HDD is great and I never understood why exactly steam has such a hard time offering a seemingly rather simple feature.

And yes I do have to juggle games around on my SSD - so I can see the point of it being fairly annoying with installing new patches or content that became available and so on. How much of a problem that really is quantitative? No idea I don't stop time that stuff, but it's just one of these small little annoyances that one remembers; bad usability basically (eg "Hey playing a nice round of portal 2 would be fun in between, oh I don't have it on the SSD? Well I'm not going to ah heck with it for an hour or two gameplay")

So I can see the comfort of not having to worry about all this stuff and still getting a bit better performance,

 

[taltamir]

Yeah GOG doesn't have its own DRM, BUT as they surely don't get the Dragon Age (or whatever) source code and aren't allowed to just rewrite it as they like, they'll still have to install those things, because otherwise the game won't run (or don't they allow DRMed games? an interesting stance that would be, although fairly limiting for their library)

They don't allow DRM. Hence why I said impulse would be better for you since impulse does allow DRMed games and have a much wider selection of newer games. It is nice because there are games on their library that are DRMed everywhere else but on GOG they are DRM free.
Your example of dragon age is a game that you can find on steam and on impulse, but not on GOG. GOG = Good Old Games. Most of their library is older games. I am pretty sure I mentioned that, and pointed you at impulse instead in several previous posts.

especially for multiplayer it has undeniably useful feature

What useful multiplayer features?

and steam sales do keep me busy for a small price

Impulse constantly has sales too, with massive price cuts. So does GOG. I don't know about other DD services though... but if you are hunting for deals you might as well check all 3.

 

[Hacp]

I'm not sure what this fancycache is, but I have always stated that SSD caching can have real benefits if implemented correctly. The bottleneck has always been small file read and writes. Get the small files to read and write to the SSD only and you will have lagless performance with an SSD/HDD hybrid.

 

[Voo]

They don't allow DRM. Hence why I said impulse would be better for you since impulse does allow DRMed games and have a much wider selection of newer games. It is nice because there are games on their library that are DRMed everywhere else but on GOG they are DRM free.

You mentioned that GOGs library was smaller, but there could be other reasons for that as well, so no I didn't make the connection of them not allowing any DRM before (though I remember something about Witcher 2 and GOG). Seems like an attitude I'd like to support, so I'll give them a closer look (that is for single player games, see next point for why steam is useful for mp stuff).

What useful multiplayer features?

Simple stuff, but really useful if all your friends do have their games on steam. So I go online, see that a friend or two are already playing a game and in a matter of minutes I've joined them. Now that's obviously a textbook example of "group pressure" so to speak, I agree - but what can I say - it works.

Impulse constantly has sales too, with massive price cuts. So does GOG. I don't know about other DD services though... but if you are hunting for deals you might as well check all 3.

I didn't want to imply that the other DD services didn't offer them, just that I've already quite some backlog of cheap games. It's not that I'm really on the lookout for anything, it's more that I open steam, see something nice at a great price and heck there we go again.

 

[moriz]

I'm not sure what this fancycache is, but I have always stated that SSD caching can have real benefits if implemented correctly. The bottleneck has always been small file read and writes. Get the small files to read and write to the SSD only and you will have lagless performance with an SSD/HDD hybrid.

fancycache is a nifty program that allows you to make a hybrid drive out of anything. most commonly, it allows you to make a hybrid drive with your system RAM and the storage media of your choice. it is theoretically possible, for instance, to make a hybrid drive between system RAM and a floppy disk, and you'll have a 1.44MB volume that can read/write at upwards of 6000 MB/s. it's pretty wild.

 

[fuzzymath10]

fancycache is a nifty program that allows you to make a hybrid drive out of anything. most commonly, it allows you to make a hybrid drive with your system RAM and the storage media of your choice. it is theoretically possible, for instance, to make a hybrid drive between system RAM and a floppy disk, and you'll have a 1.44MB volume that can read/write at upwards of 6000 MB/s. it's pretty wild.

Forgive me if I'm wrong (I haven't used the program) but I assume that the main problem with it (and superfetch) is that you need to load up the RAM every time you boot up because it is volatile. The bootup process is one of the reasons an SSD is awesome (because it hardly breaks a sweat loading all those programs when you login).

So, you'd work around the volatility by keeping your system on or letting it sleep rather than shut down. However, the usage pattern in many (not all) of those situations largely eliminates the need for an SSD. Basically, two different sets of needs.

Also, SSDs in practice will often be CPU bound during their workload, so any faster speed may not be realized. The difference going from 1MB/sec to 50MB/sec for a random operation is much more significant than the next step to >1GB/sec except for number bragging rights.

 

[Hacp]

Forgive me if I'm wrong (I haven't used the program) but I assume that the main problem with it (and superfetch) is that you need to load up the RAM every time you boot up because it is volatile. The bootup process is one of the reasons an SSD is awesome (because it hardly breaks a sweat loading all those programs when you login).

So, you'd work around the volatility by keeping your system on or letting it sleep rather than shut down. However, the usage pattern in many (not all) of those situations largely eliminates the need for an SSD. Basically, two different sets of needs.

Also, SSDs in practice will often be CPU bound during their workload, so any faster speed may not be realized. The difference going from 1MB/sec to 50MB/sec for a random operation is much more significant than the next step to >1GB/sec except for number bragging rights.

If you're using ram, that won't be much of a problem. The cache will write to the hdd as sequential and load up as sequential. For ram, you probably only want to store small files, <128k, so there shouldn't be more than 50mb of stuff in there.

 

[groberts101]

Fancycache will flush to disk and reload anything critical that is needed upon reboot. The rest is trash and probably not needed or easily recached if needed later anyways.

It's designed/intended to be used as an OS volumes constant use ramdisk. It does so much more than SRT and configuration options are nearly endless. Not saying it's perfect(after all.. it's still in beta-testing after a year of introduction).. but I would easily take it over SRT any day of the week.

http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fancy-cache/

 

[GotNoRice]

It's pretty silly to say SSD caching is a gimmick because it clearly works. I load up a game the first time and it's somewhat slow loading from the mechanical drive. I load up the game a 2nd time and it opens in the blink of an eye.

An SSD caching a HDD means completely relinquishing your control as to what is on the SSD and what is on the HDD to an automated algorithm.

It benchmarks as having "almost the same speed as an SSD", that is, it has actually lower performance than the SSD by itself.

For Intel SRT it works out to about 95&#37; the performance of running on the SSD directly. is 5% really worth getting worked up about, considering the benefits?

Also, if you use an SSD by itself, you have no choice but to go for the largest drive you can afford to try and fit as much stuff on there. With SRT you can get a smaller, faster drive instead, since the size of the SSD is less of a concern. That could very well end up being faster with SRT than the slower SSD on it's own.

I think it's worth it to have your OS on your SSD, but do you really want thousands of files on your SSD that you will never use? I play World of Warcraft, and it's game directory is almost 30gb these days. That includes gigabytes and gigabytes of textures for zones that I never visit. SRT doesn't cache the entire 30gb directory but instead only what I use. There are lots of FPS games that I keep installed for multiplayer reasons - do I really need the entire single player campaign on my SSD too?

It can never cache more then the SSD's size so it can only give you near SSD performance for as much data as you could have placed on the SSD and anything beyond that must come from the HDD.

Intel SRT is block-level caching so even if you have a 2gb texture file, it's only caching the portions of that texture file that are actually read. It's pretty efficient and Intel has proven it works well even with as little as 20GB set aside for cache.

Current implementations suck extra hard by limiting you to 40GB AND limiting you to read acceleration only.

SRT max is 64G and it certainly does support both read and write acceleration (in Maximized mode).

And if you had opted for running the SSD and HDD as separate entities as I said, and put the game on the SSD, it would have loaded even FASTER than 20-30seconds. Making the SSD caching a worthless gimmick.

Again with SRT we're talking about 95% the performance of an SSD on it's own when accessing cached files.

I should point out that SRT isn't something your average user can set up. And managing an SSD separate from an HDD is.

Installing an SSD, the SRT software, and clicking the accelerate button is hard?

the problem with SRT is that it's already done: it's called fancycache. it allows you to form a software based cache between anything. yes, you can make a cache between a compactflash card and a floppy disk if you really feel like it. what's more, it can form a hybrid drive with system RAM, allowing ridiculous transfer speeds upwards of 6GB/s.

in light of this much better alternative, intel's SRT looks pretty useless, especially since fancycache runs on any windows based system, regardless of CPU/chipset.

SRT has bios integration, which allows you to do things such as removing acceleration before ever getting into windows, and if you run in Maximized mode (aka SSD write caching), it will do automated cache recovery on next boot if you lose power instead of just junking the data.

There is no reason to have over a TB of installed games simultaneously, there has never been. I have yet to see an explanation as to WHY you would install 1TB+ of games at once.
"I want inferior performance just because" is not an argument in favor of actually doing something like that.

When you go to something like a LAN party, you really never know which games are going to be played. Geforce LAN 6 this weekend for example, is going to have dedicated servers going for games as old as BF1942 - and you better bet I'm going to have every one of those games pre-installed before the LAN.

Sure you could use a cheap MLC SSD, but I don't know if I'd want to as I assume as cache contents change a lot, it's gonna get written and re-written continuously, which is the long-term bane of typical MLC SSD's. Heck, people complain/worry about using the Win page file on their little SSD's, and yet its suddenly OK to use the same MLC SSD's in a manner that is far more rigorous to the drive than the Win page file will ever be?

It's always been okay to run a pagefile on an SSD. IF you wear out your drive that fast it's probably because the drive is a cheap POS (should have bought intel instead)

 

[YBS1]

You don't have to go through the trouble of constantly moving games back and forth from a SSD and a HDD. Install old and infrequently used games to the HDD, and install new games and games you expect to play frequently to the SSD. Once you become tired of the game on the SSD cut and paste it over to the HDD and use something like Hard Link Shell Extension to create a junction to the original install location. This will prevent the uninstall/install routine, and services like steam see and patch the game just fine. Hell, I took it a step further. I'm running a 240GB SSD for my OS/programs/non steam frequently used games, a 2x128GB SSD RAID0 solely dedicately to my steam installation, a 1TB WD Green for storage purposes, and a 1TB WD Black which it's purpose is nothing but older game installs and game/steam overflow via the above mentioned hard links. If anything ever goes wrong it's all backed up to 7.5TB worth of WHS goodness anyway.

 

[Zap]

Here's my opinion on it.

Is there a performance gain (however little or big) from SSD caching? Yes.

Do people find that it suits their needs/expectations (not always the same thing)? Yes.

Ergo, it has value.

 

[KingFatty]

This reminds me of an analogy to manual transmission vs. automatic transmission.

How "slow" is the caching algorithm when you switch to a non-cached game? Wouldn't it be able to cache that game the first time you play it, thereby being more efficient overall to the non-cached scenario where you would have had to reinstall that game to the SSD after having uninstalled it? For the analogy, wouldn't you waste more time manipulating the clutch and stick than the time you saved by driving slightly faster by shifting manually (e.g., shifting before you got to a hill to be in the optimal gear before the engine was loaded etc.)

 

[mvbighead]

Here's my opinion on it.

Is there a performance gain (however little or big) from SSD caching? Yes.

Do people find that it suits their needs/expectations (not always the same thing)? Yes.

Ergo, it has value.

This.

To me, spending $200 plus on a sizeable SSD hurts a lot of people's pocket books.

Spending <$100 for a drive to be used for caching that users simply configure once and are done with it is absolutely worth it.

As a technical individual, I don't mind managing some of that myself and not setting up caching. But if I were to configure an SSD + HDD config for the wife, I'd set up SSD caching. Set, forget, and no need to explain. Most non-technical people like just sitting down and clicking "Download pictures" and not having to think about where to store them.

 

[taltamir]

(I haven't used the program) but I assume that the main problem with it (and superfetch) is that you need to load up the RAM every time you boot up because it is volatile. The bootup process is one of the reasons an SSD is awesome (because it hardly breaks a sweat loading all those programs when you login).

While it is true that RAM has to be refilled every time, it is still very effective.
1. The boot process accesses the same files many times, superfetch actually greatly improves the boot speed by loading those files into ram and keeping them there.
2. While you DO need to reload the RAM every time you boot, it is a rather quick process, it also happens in the background and it doesn't slow you down.
Read this: http://www.osnews.com/story/21471/SuperFetch_How_it_Works_Myths

Also, SSDs in practice will often be CPU bound during their workload so any faster speed may not be realized. The difference going from 1MB/sec to 50MB/sec for a random operation is much more significant than the next step to >1GB/sec except for number bragging rights.

Oh my... no this is not even remotely close to reality. The SSD is not ever limited by the CPU. The CPU is limited by the SSD/HDD though; this is why RAM exists.

>1GB/sec is what RAM gets and the CPU most definitely needs these kind of speeds. (DDR3 for example, does between 6.4GB/s and 17GB/s

Originally Posted by taltamir
There is no reason to have over a TB of installed games simultaneously, there has never been. I have yet to see an explanation as to WHY you would install 1TB+ of games at once.
"I want inferior performance just because" is not an argument in favor of actually doing something like that.

When you go to something like a LAN party, you really never know which games are going to be played. Geforce LAN 6 this weekend for example, is going to have dedicated servers going for games as old as BF1942 - and you better bet I'm going to have every one of those games pre-installed before the LAN.

I stand humbled. This is a legitimate reason indeed.
So for that kind of usage scenario SSD caching will be useful.

I think it's worth it to have your OS on your SSD, but do you really want thousands of files on your SSD that you will never use? I play World of Warcraft, and it's game directory is almost 30gb these days. That includes gigabytes and gigabytes of textures for zones that I never visit. SRT doesn't cache the entire 30gb directory but instead only what I use.

Jeez, 30GB? WoW got huge. Yea, I can see the potential benefit there too... however I strongly suspect that because of its size and the limited size of the acache, WoW will get much less than 95&#37; you claim. There is only so much space on the SSD to cache things and many others programs are vying for a spot.

I would be interested in seeing benchmarks of how cache handles such a massive game.

Is there a performance gain (however little or big) from SSD caching? Yes.

Actually, the whole point I made was that no there isn't. You LOSE performance.
The performance gain is only if you compare a HDD to an SSD cached HDD.

The assertion I made was that there ISN'T a performance gain, there is a performance penalty.

This is because we are not comparing an HDD to an SSD cached HDD. We are comparing an SSD + HDD as seperate devices vs SSD cached HDD.

Why are we comparing those two? Because a HDD with SSD cache vs HDD and SSD as seperate is a difference of software configuration of identical hardware.
While a HDD alone is less hardware (and thus cheapeper).

The question I was aiming at is "If I buy a vertex 3 and a 1TB WD caviar blue, and a Z68 mobo, should I enable SRT software or leave it disabled". My answer is "leave it off"

Do people find that it suits their needs/expectations (not always the same thing)? Yes.

People find use in Homeopathy too. Doesn't mean it has worth.

I would like to point out that despite the two above counters, I am now reconsidering my stance on it based on what GotNoRice.
There are situations (ex: lots of games installed simultaneously when going to a lan party) where it has value and use.

This reminds me of an analogy to manual transmission vs. automatic transmission.

That analogy is faulty for several reasons.

First, the performance difference is greater than that.
Second it only applies if you have a scenario where you need lots of games installed simultaneously. For which I already conceded it is more practical than moving games around.

But unless you are going to a lan party or have very bizzare gaming habits you don't need that many games installed at once.

And if you don't install a bunch of games simultaneously with no idea which you are going to actually play then it is better to use caching.

 

[Meghan54]

This.

To me, spending $200 plus on a sizeable SSD hurts a lot of people's pocket books.

Spending <$100 for a drive to be used for caching that users simply configure once and are done with it is absolutely worth it.

As a technical individual, I don't mind managing some of that myself and not setting up caching. But if I were to configure an SSD + HDD config for the wife, I'd set up SSD caching. Set, forget, and no need to explain. Most non-technical people like just sitting down and clicking "Download pictures" and not having to think about where to store them.

Sums it up nicely. Thx.

 

[fuzzymath10]

Oh my... no this is not even remotely close to reality. The SSD is not ever limited by the CPU. >1GB/sec is what RAM gets and the CPU most definitely needs these kind of speeds.

Just to be clear I didn't mean that ssd transfer speeds bottleneck a CPU, but the job driving those transfers can. For example zipping a folder (if the files are big and few even a hard drive will keep the CPU busy), or adding a folder of music to a media player will not be a whole lot faster in RAM because of the additional CPU overhead from the software to complete the operation.

For pure transfers, 1GB/sec is nothing or else we would be happy with PC133 ram.

 

[DaveSimmons]

Here's my opinion on it.

Is there a performance gain (however little or big) from SSD caching? Yes.

Do people find that it suits their needs/expectations (not always the same thing)? Yes.

Ergo, it has value.

I agree. I have just over 100 GB on my games HDD, which is separate from my OS drive and only includes games I'm playing right now. So at the moment if I went with pure SSD instead of SRT I'd need a 160-250 GB SSD, plus have the hassle of uninstalling games whenever I wanted to add new ones.

For at least the next year or two SRT will still make sense for some people. But eventually the $/GB cost of SSDs will fall enough that no one will bother.

 

[SocalMark]

Just built my system 2600k and z68 board and installed the OS on a 120ssd drive and plan to install the games to my 2Tb drive this system is just for Gaming would using the ssd for caching work better...Thanks

Oh and how would I get the OS to the 2Tb drive?

 

[LokutusofBorg]

I stand humbled. This is a legitimate reason indeed.
So for that kind of usage scenario SSD caching will be useful.

I'm surprised it took this long for you to concede that just because you don't have a usage profile that benefits from SRT that someone else out there might.

Take any large amount of data (a game install, a bunch of movies, all my photos, whatever) and a usage scenario where you are using a subset of that data, and you have a use case for SRT. Not everybody can afford an SSD that can house *all* of their data. Not everybody wants to have to shuffle things around to make use of a smaller SSD that is only big enough to house part of their data.

There are tons of use cases for tiered storage. Just because you don't have one (or are willing to do manually what SRT does for you automatically) doesn't mean others don't (or are masochists too).

 

[taltamir]

I'm surprised it took this long for you to concede that just because you don't have a usage profile that benefits from SRT that someone else out there might.

Because it took that long for ANYONE to come up with a viable scenario.
And I would bet money that the overwhelming majority of people do not fall into that specific user scenario.

(a game install, a bunch of movies, all my photos, whatever) and a usage scenario where you are using a subset of that data, and you have a use case for SRT. Not everybody can afford an SSD that can house *all* of their data.

1. Have you even read my posts? Where did I suggest you put ALL your data, including movies and photos on the SSD? In fact I explicitly stated you should not.
2. A game install goes on the SSD for max benefit. MANY games installs, too many to fit on the SSD, that you are actually going to play, that benefits from SRT.
3. Movies and photos (not software icons, photos you took) do not benefit in any way shape or form from SRT.

There are tons of use cases for tiered storage. Just because you don't have one (or are willing to do manually what SRT does for you automatically) doesn't mean others don't (or are masochists too).

There has only been one, exactly one, usage scenario that anyone here was able to come up with where SRT has a use.
If there are so many how come nobody can name them?

 

[bunnyfubbles]

OS and most important apps/games go on my 128GB Crucial M4

my huge Steam collection (over 400GB) and other less important games go on a 1TB Samsung F3 accelerated by 64GB Microcenter rebranded ADATA Sandforce SSD cache.

true, in a few years we'll have 1TB SSDs and/or gigabit internet that will allow users to willynilly install/uninstall huge games at a moments notice without much down time, but until then SSD cache is amazing for my purposes

/thread

 

[videopho]

I've got roughly 30 games (steam & window live plus some others) worth approx. 250gb on my 1TB WD BC HDD.
The greatest benefit I have seen is definitely flight sim ones and I've got about 8 games of it that I'm presently playing. Load time now is much more fluid and humanly acceptable than old HDD, if I have to guess, improvement is easily 400-500&#37; time over.
Even FPS games are improving as well, for example: Crysys2 load time (1st time) is roughly 5-10 sec vs 1/2 minute.
Yeah it is well worth it...my 64 gb SSD costs me $71 (Microcenter branded) and the 1TB HDD costs $89.00 so I'm sure you start seeing the picture.
Is it as fast as SSD? Hell, NO WAY!
Is it faster than HDD? You know the answer.

 

[videopho]

Just built my system 2600k and z68 board and installed the OS on a 120ssd drive and plan to install the games to my 2Tb drive this system is just for Gaming would using the ssd for caching work better...Thanks

Oh and how would I get the OS to the 2Tb drive?

Install all your games to the 1TB first just like you normally would...
Download all latest SRT driver from your mobo web site.
At bios turn on RAID (AHCI).
In Windows (I assume W7), install SRT utility/driver.
Run SRT from windows then follow the instruction.
Allow sometime for caching to up the speed.
I chose "enhanced" mode for safety, though write speed is compromised but in gaming write is not that important.

 

[MobiusPizza]

Fancy cache is a software layer which takes over the Windows driver in implementing a application transparent RAM based caching of user specified HDD/SSDs. Basically you can specified how much RAM is dedicated for caching on which drive, and wether the caching is read only / read and write. If you use benchmark suite like Crystal mark you can see crazy transfer rates like 6000MB/s due to RAM caching.

I had performed real world benchmarks with fancy cache, it cut the load time of Shogun Total War from 1 minute 30 seconds to 1 minute but only after repeated loads.

With RAM so cheap nowadays, I think these kind of software is great. I have 16GB of RAM. Windows superfetch does not use that much RAM and as MS said, unused RAM is wasted resource.

But as a cache, it only helps if you have repeatedly accessed the same resources. Fancy cache has 2 algorithmns, Least Frequently Used or FIFO (first in first out). It can also defer and consolidate writes so lower write amplication on SSDs
For example, If I write a block of data [1 2 3 4 5] to disk, then some calculation or process updates the data to [1 2 7 4 5], normally you have to write the disk twice but Fancy cache keeps the copy in RAM and Windows see the data as on disk.

Of course this delay writing will cause problem if sytem failure or power loss occurs. Fancy cache only flush the writes after a user specified period, e.g. 5 seconds, or when system is powered down