Does SSD vs. HDD matter?

[BKL]

I play a fictional league, 24 teams, highest level of stats details, almanac, and saved boxscores. My saves are usually around 8GB+. I have a high-end machines, i7 Intel processor, 32 GB RAM, and Windows 10.

I generally like to keep my SSD drive for games and things that perform better with extra quick load times. I'm not sure that OOTP would run much differently for me if I just saved it on my HDD drive. Does anyone have any thoughts - is there a noticeable difference between having OOTP17 on an SSD drive vs. and HDD drive. I'm not concerned about loading the game, but am wondering about in-game processing, simulation speed, etc.

Thanks!

[eriqjaffe]

I think you'd see a pretty big improvement, since OOTP writes so many text files as part of the simulation.

[kq76]

Other than much faster load times, I didn't notice any difference when I converted to SSD. That doesn't mean there wasn't a difference, of course, but I've never really been bothered nor impressed by OOTP's speed.

EDIT: Relatedly, on whether OOTP might be bad for your SSD. OOTP17 is better for it than previous versions.

[NoOne]

heh, i wrote this last, then moved it up:
i've chosen to just keep it on the HDD. you can compromise. Set temp/tmp system folders to hdd, and use a custom data path so that ootp saved leagues are on the HDD. the game will load fast from ssd, but not write much to that drive.

KQ is right... load times will be faster. eriqjaffe is off a bit because once it's stored in RAM, it really should not be doing much on a drive -- but it is, currently. unless you have limited RAM and it is using your Pagefile on the SSD often -- which is not likely to be a problem for many -- it shouldn't touch the drive except to save, for the most.

Auto-saving will be slightly faster, too. but, that can only save a matter of seconds per year. maybe 30s if you have a MASSIVE league. like 10gigabytes or something. even a basic hdd will do 100mb/s and average 50mb/s file size and quantity you find inthe ootp directory. most ssd will do about 3x-10x that in most situations (most ssd closer to 3x-5x). ssd handles smaller files and broken up bits better -- no moving parts, no difference for the ssd.

the new one-file message data (sqlite file) has reduced number of files, but fragmentation is the same -- so it hasn't improved write/read performance of the game in any way .

so, 3s autosave on a 1gb+ league on ssd, mayber 10-18s on hdd, ceterus paribus. This would be a very basic 28team league with some histroy. no frills, no extra leagues. so, that would adjust upward for most peoples' leagues.

that other forum post is bogus in ootp 17's current state. it writes 2gb+/season, currently. 4-6gb/season if you keep your Temp/TMP folder (windows environmental variables) on the SSD.
**********************
this might be due to a bug.. which is in the patchnotes today. news/injuries etc weren't being deleted.
**********************

e.g. i had a200 year league (for testing). 1.8gb of the new sqlite text data -- 500mb league files excluding. when i reloaded an old backup for the next test sim, i noticed turning news/injuries/etc to 2 years prevented the league from growing to immense size.

I did not re-verify drive writes, though. at minimum, it will be the save of the auto-save.

Edit:
xxx one thing is for sure, i have never owned a game that wrote so much to the drive, ever. LoL i have hopes it will be improved after this patch. xxx

after this patch, it no longer writes gigabytes of data per year on my pc. so this was all related to a bugfix.

[The Wolf]

I saw a very dramatic improvement.

[NoOne]

it may be due to the changes in recent patches...

i'm down to 2m 15s - 3mins for a season and i am not using the SSD. my time was cut in half after the last patch. i bet i can't save much more than 5-10seconds more using the ssd.

there just isn't much data moving around to create a huge advantage. i'll have to retry with the ssd. 1 gigabyte is nothing. matter of seconds different between an hdd and ssd.

move the game to a hdd and test. you might be surprised by how little it actually speeds up 1 year (include auto-save time - that will be the biggest difference). i'm curious to try now that i am seeing the improved sim speeds in this version.

[Funkasaurus]

I too have seen a major improvement in startup/load times since recently adding an SSD. Granted I'm on 16 still, so I cannot say whether the multithreading in 17 would have a similar effect for users still on a traditional hard disc.

[The Wolf]

I should make a note here that I saw my dramatic improvement on 16 as well.

[NoOne]

load times definitely, but as far as what occurs while simulating a year... mostly the autosave speed will improve from a SSD. all the work the game is doing is in your RAM, which works even faster than your SSD.


Since i edited the above reply i'm going to repeat it... after the patch today, the game is no longer writing gigabytes of data to the drive during the simulation.

i moved my OS temp folders back to the SSD. much better than before.

So, i wouldn't worry about using this game on an SSD. you can always keep saved games off the SSD. before this patch, it was an SSD killer. 2-3 years and kaput! lol.

[RchW]

Been using OOTP on a SSD for close to 4 years. Zero issues. Even if a few issues were reported no blanket statement about suitability could be made without way more data.

[kq76]

Originally Posted by NoOne

...

eriqjaffe is off a bit because once it's stored in RAM, it really should not be doing much on a drive -- but it is, currently. unless you have limited RAM and it is using your Pagefile on the SSD often -- which is not likely to be a problem for many -- it shouldn't touch the drive except to save, for the most.

...

the new one-file message data (sqlite file) has reduced number of files, but fragmentation is the same -- so it hasn't improved write/read performance of the game in any way .

...

that other forum post is bogus in ootp 17's current state. it writes 2gb+/season, currently. 4-6gb/season if you keep your Temp/TMP folder (windows environmental variables) on the SSD.

...

I'm trying to understand this better so bear with me (thanks in advance). So the SQL thing means the game should be writing to the memory a lot more and the drive a lot less. However, something's wrong and it's not, but you think it can be fixed. Is that correct? Before your post I had just assumed it was still writing everything to the disc so this is good news.

And when you say "that other forum post is bogus" are you talking about Markus's post in the thread I linked to saying that OOTP didn't write much anymore are you referring to some other post?

Finally, you say fragmentation is just as bad. Why is that? I thought fragmentation had to do with wasting cluster space and with a single file instead of countless, wouldn't you have a lot less wasted space? That's how I interpreted this post of Andreas's at least.

Oh, one more thing. At first I thought it'd be faster to read a smaller file than a larger file. But now I'm thinking it might be the reverse because the large file is still in memory so it doesn't have to read again or as much. But you said it hasn't improved read/write performance. Really, why not? It sounded like Andreas's whole reason for switching to this was to try to squeeze whatever speed improvement out of it that he could. Is it because of that problem you alluded to and once it's fixed we should see better read times?

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by kq76

I'm trying to understand this better so bear with me (thanks in advance). So the SQL thing means the game should be writing to the memory a lot more and the drive a lot less. However, something's wrong and it's not, but you think it can be fixed. Is that correct? Before your post I had just assumed it was still writing everything to the disc so this is good news.

And when you say "that other forum post is bogus" are you talking about Markus's post in the thread I linked to saying that OOTP didn't write much anymore are you referring to some other post?

Finally, you say fragmentation is just as bad. Why is that? I thought fragmentation had to do with wasting cluster space and with a single file instead of countless, wouldn't you have a lot less wasted space? That's how I interpreted this post of Andreas's at least.

Oh, one more thing. At first I thought it'd be faster to read a smaller file than a larger file. But now I'm thinking it might be the reverse because the large file is still in memory so it doesn't have to read again or as much. But you said it hasn't improved read/write performance. Really, why not? It sounded like Andreas's whole reason for switching to this was to try to squeeze whatever speed improvement out of it that he could. Is it because of that problem you alluded to and once it's fixed we should see better read times?

I don't have permission to view that link.. so i cannot read it.

well, i am getting long winded, so short and sweet first, then what i started to write is found below... if needed.

---"So the SQL thing means the game should be writing to the memory a lot more and the drive a lot less":

not neccessarily. so, nothing is technically wrong nor a severe hinderance.

--"And when you say "that other forum post is bogus" ":

I was wrong, see below about pataches fixing the problem. ootp 17 definitely writes less per sim-year than ootp 16 -- but only after the 2nd patch.

About fragmentation questions:

I attached an image of the sqlite from two different saved games.. one is older. you can see that even though it's one file now, it's still 'like' having 2900 smaller files, relative how the HDD works with it... how the game uses it is a different matter that we won't get into. 2400pieces of a 145mb file... that is not going to be copied quickly relative to a normal chunk of 149mb. if you keep news/transaction/injury logs this size will grow to a point where it is a noticeable slowdown in load times etc. that 149mb is supposedly keeping none of that stuff... either other things are in there (likely) or i need to continually switch between keep 2 years and keep none to clear it out. That's how i fixed the HUGE file size after the 2nd patch.. my sqlite file was 1.7GB (AND two fo these files exist while playing - 3.4gb - so 1.7gb was written just to make the copy to start.. then constant writing during use) and the rest of the league files were 500mb. the 2nd patch has cleared this up.

fragmentation is not a problem for an SSD - no moving parts, but it will slow down a HDD. fragmentation occurs due to a file being split up on the physical disk. when you loook at a HDD spec, it will show sequential data speeds and random data speeds at diffent sizes. the smaller the size of random data (*just like a large fragmented file), the slower the drive goes. continued below, if needed....

Final quesiton: sorta explained in the mess below and the stuff above. the storage device just holds stuff.. all work is done in ram - it's all about data integrity. so the hdd only has to push data to ram, relative to our discussion. file size obviously affects this rate, but fragmentation is a major part of that equation. if a 1000mb file is fragmented into 1mb bits... then it is very similar to working with 1000 1mb files as opposed to 1 ~1000mb contiguous block of sequential data - from the HDD's point of view.

This is why SSD can only increase load times or anytime it is moving data into and out of RAM. no real work is done on the SSD (let's ignore pagefile.sys and temp folders for simplicity)

___________________ offtopic

Want to do something cool with extra RAM - look into a "RAMDisk" software. it's temporary each time you load your computer, but it will blow an SSD out of the water.

just move the game over to the temp RAM disk each time you boot, then run from there. make sure to move league directory off RAMdisk before turning off the PC,

load times will never be faster... since this game uses a gb of ram, plus your normal OS use, you can guesstimate how much extra RAM you need for this to be plausible. 8gb probably enough, but more comofortable at 12gb+ i assume. a 4-6gb ramdisk for ootp should cover most people's game size.

people that have insane amounts should definitely do this... extra RAM helps no one. it just sits there empty. as long as you only use 1/2 to 3/4ths of RAM during normal use and after creting the RAMDISK, you have enough to operate with.

______________back on topic, mess below if you want more info. i stopped writing this without care... so if something trails off it's written better above.

fragmentation:
you might see 80-150mb/s on most avrage HDD - it ranges because of physical location on disk - it is spinning more data during the same 1 revolution the further from center you go. At 4mb random data (whether it's many 4mb files or a large file fragmented to many 4mb pieces, the HDD simply doesn't care) it's down to ~20-50mb/s. that's a noticeable drop for anyone. (i don't spend my days readin spec sheets, so a bit of a guess). that's the only reason fragmentation is bad.

most defrags will allow you to ignore fragmentation under a certain megabytes... you pick a chunk that your HDD can handle well as the minimum. no need for 100% drive defragmentation. i think the built in one with windows sets it at 50mb even though you cannnot see it???


First the bogus part... i was right, then i was wrong. after the 2nd patch, something was changed to correct the situation. after moving temp files back to my SSD i no longer see 2gb per season host writes. that's why i re-wrote that retraction in 2 spots in this thread.

i should have waited for more patches to come out before making that statement, but not because i need more data. it's not my fault software developers release 80% completed software, nowadays. i keep telling myself to wait until it's fully completed before buying it.. but no i can't. i'm a dummy.

despite richw's assertation, i can easily track host writes of my SSD and i know my starting point before installing the game. i think it's quite obvious when nearly as much data has been written to disk in 5-6 days vs 1.5years of previous use.

it was even worse before the First patch and i had the entire game on the ssd at that time. before the First patch, i was seeing 6gb writes per season. we are talking 1+ terabyte of info written to my SSD in 5-7days... vs. 1.5tb in 1.5 years. actually it was 1.2TB (1,200 gigabytes) in about a week. no game or program in the time i've owned my ssd has done such a thing... that's why i said it was bogus... but the problem was a bug, not normal operation. I've 6-boxed an mmo and never seen this type of activity on the drive, lol. (6 game clients running in parrallel on the same PC and a couple 3rd party softwares and macros to help control all 6 game clients.)

before the first patch: 6gb/season. After first patch, it dropped it to 2gb/season, and after the second patch it's not noticeable per season. i think it took 30-50years to get to register the next 1gb? (e.g. if it was 2310.4gb ("2310" visible), only 100mb or writes needed to show "2311gb", so it's not as clearly seen as the 200gb or 600gb writing while using ootp before the patches) whatever it is now, it takes a long time to reach 1gb from simulating years. and before the writes were so large it's impoosible to attribute to anything else other than ootp. (sim times are down to 2.5 to 3mins / year after the recent patch and very slowly escalate as years go by... before the patches, they escalated to 10-12mins after about ~80 years (think i was still under 4mins after 80-100years of simming, as it presently works - but only keeping league history/stats and retired players that made the mlb.)

1file vs many:
no, that wouldn't necessarily affect when it writes (sql file vs many)... it would still handle the 1 or 1000 files in memory before writing back to disk (whenever it normally does so in its process).

i am guessing that it writes it incrementally, because the file is still fragmented as if it was thousands of little txt files. which, may or may not have been their goal for the change. i bet there are far more important reasons. using sqlite may offer more and/or easier control/manipulation of data.

Fragmentation is NOT a problem on an SSD. no moving parts.. no problem. on an HDD it is a minor hinderance to load times and such (getting data into RAM or copying it to a new location etc).

[kq76]

FWIW, I found this on the benefits of SQLite and it mentions SSDs:

Better performance
The application only has to load the data it needs, rather than reading the entire file and holding a complete parse in memory.
Small edits only overwrite the parts of the file that change, reducing write time and wear on SSD drives.
In many cases, loading content from an SQLite database is faster than reading individual files from disk. See Internal Versus External BLOBs.

https://www.sqlite.org/aff_short.html

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by kq76

FWIW, I found this on the benefits of SQLite and it mentions SSDs:



https://www.sqlite.org/aff_short.html

yeah, that explains the fragmentation. i wasn't far off. all work is still done in RAM. hdd/ssd is storage only. sqlite just allows the program to be selective about it.

On my pc, somethign related was defintely not working properly... until patch 2. now it's right as rain.

%$#@!ing computers, am i right? every year i get closer to packing things up and going feral, lol. already got rid of the cellphone... baby steps.

[RchW]

Wow a lot of verbiage that doesn't change the fact that OOTP works fine and faster on SSD drives.

[NoOne]

i'll try to keep the verbage to a minimum.

are you just trying to be argumentative? obstinate? at least this time you're within the context of the thread. the whole .400 player thread reply you made was akin to arguing with thin air about the sky being blue.

i'm going to write this response because sometimes i find your emotionally driven responses to my posts amusing.

... petty ... richard petty ...That's the name i couldn't think of earlier! whew, that was bothering me. now, back to the topic at hand.

ofc it works fine on an SSD... and this just in, water is wet. although before patch #1 and #2 it was really hard on any drive, especially an SSD, whether you understand why or not.

Yes, it does work "faster."

load times... save times...but nothing else improved by an SSD to any noticeable degree in regard to OotP. is the horse dead, yet? whack! whack!

don't believe me? check your resource monitor while simulating. if the SSD isn't working, or hardly working, how can it be helping.

wow, look at all that work it's doing... oh wait it's not doing much at all. At 4-5mB/s there isn't a noticeable difference between an SSD and HDD. But, you'll save those few seconds each auto-save.

you probably saw a big difference before patch #1 and #2, if you tried to compare ssd vs hdd. i did... but i also knew something bunk was going on based on the gigabytes of host writes occurring each sim-year on my SSD.

---------

I learned to read using a computer keyboard. i could type properly and quickly before i could write in cursive. i really do know a thing or two about them, despite not using my CS degree. i'm not a big hardware guy, but i know enough about SSD for this conversation.

Shout out to all my fellow commodore 64/c64 fans!! Woo Wooo! (highest-selling single computer model of all time!! F@## yeah!)

Legacy of the Ancients = coolest game ever! (at least as a memory, maybe not actually playing it today, lol). open-world game before people knew what an open-world was!

***but not the commodore c128 folks no shout out to you(s) guys and your suck computer.

Edit: http://homepage.cs.uri.edu/book/cpu_...cpu_memory.htm

so you can brush up on a lil computer knowledge, richw.

Originally Posted by RchW

Wow a lot of verbiage that doesn't change the fact that OOTP works fine and faster on SSD drives.

[rudel.dietrich]

I made a switch many years ago and saw a huge performance increase.


I would have to really dig but I think but Markus stated in a thread several years ago that 90% of the hardware behind OOTP is reading and writing to disk.
Processor speed and RAM play a role but OOTP reads/writes off a disk a lot.


Unless this has changed in the last few years then I would still think it would be an improvement.


Is it worth buying a new system or upgrading just for OOTP?
Probably not
But if your in the market for parts or a new system and looking for ways to make OOTP faster then it would be a good option.


Also of note
When I play I choose to save every single box score from every single league for the entirety of my leagues universe. This means even more reading and writing to disk.


SSD read/write speeds are 8-14x faster than mechanical HDDs so of course OOTP is going to benefit.
Pair it up with a semi modern to modern CPU and 4-8 of semi modern RAM and OOTP should fly even with the biggest leagues.

[NotMuchTime]

I have two SSDs, but don't install games on either one. One boots Windows 7, the other boots Linux. I don't put non-essential software on these SSDs, but that's my preference. It's no mystery that it will run faster on a SSD, especially since it's disk write intensive. As rumor has it, that isn't good for SSD longevity. I've been in IT for over 30 years and I don't know what to believe about that 'rumor'. However, my Intel SSD toolbox has a percentage of life left indicator (if that means anything). Anyway, it's not the sole reason I don't install games on my OS drives.

I have no complaints with the speed of OOTP running from a HDD and I have every league loaded and use 'very high detail' in every league. Then there is box scores and logs, etc... I don't skimp on anything. However, I don't have anything to compare the speed with, but I am running it on a 5960x at 4.5G with 64G of memory. I haven't messed around with the number of helper threads to use for OOTP, I might up it 32 to see what happens.

I'd say, depending on system specs and game settings, you might notice a huge difference or very little at all. You should do what's best for your system.

[NoOne]

The resource monitor doesn't lie.

neither did markus...

but, if the rate is 3-6mb/s read/write... i'm pretty sure it won't be a big increase.

i'll do a sim of the same year on ssd then hdd... and report the findings. i'll copy the game directory and league - it will be exactly the same.

i don't see it getting much lower than the 2 and 1/2 mins i see now for an initial year... it does slowly increase, so it has to be the same year in the league's history.

2.5 is a first year sim time... with 16k players and 103yrs of history it only jumps to 2.75 with the HDD. since i didn't run a first year on the ssd, i can't tell you for sure on that difference... but that isn't the test... test is in next post.

[NoOne]

Edit: if you have 2 ssd, you really need to look into setting up RAID 1? think raid 1... You will get even faster speeds than you do now, plus some additional data integrity protections. ofc, you get 1/2 the space though.

How to Set Up RAID on Your PC | PCWorld

edit: just started sim from 2016... same league/settings - forgot to check however, 2017 took 2minutes on the hdd. so 103years of history and 16k retired players adds about ~40seconds - no news, but keeping mlb stats/splits in case it aids the AI. (28t 156g league with default full fictional minors)

----------------------------------------------

side note: there are ~16,000 retired players. no news/logs etc kept... the # of players should be similar to at least a bit of news. stats and history are 103 years deep(2119 is test year). so, there's a bit of fat to aid the test. the custom data path was pointed to the correct drives each time. since i merely copied the game directoy. "user" folder is on OS, but i'm not re-installing an os on the hdd for this test... also, most who have an ssd will have the OS on it regardless.

ssd took ~6-7sec to load to main menu and about ~5s to load my league. hdd took ~6-7sec to load to main screen and ~5s to load the league.

I can admit when i am wrong... absolutely no difference loading the game or league.

jan 1 through autosave completion. Every settings, player, team, ALL is the same, including the year of the league -- except one difference. one is on the ssd, one is on the hdd.

SSD Run:

Start-5:09:06

End---5:11:43

Total 2:37


HDD Run:

Start--5:15:45

Finish-5:18:31

Total 2:46

an entire 9s saved... not too far off my prediction of a matter of seconnds, eh? the game likely fluctuates a bit by nature. maybe give a +/-2s to that total per year with similar settings.

even thogh i have all that stuff not being stored, it still writes all that stupid news / transaction / injury logs during the year.. then it's cleared during the end of year processes, i assume. so those read/writes are still occurring. keeping those logs will ONLY affect the auto-save time... as i said during processing of the simulation virtually zero perfomance gain.

Relative to more normal gameplay - playing day-to-day or simming smaller portion of the year until a personal message interrupts - the savings are so insignificant. a human can not distinguish any performance gain while playing out 1 day,r 1 week, or likely 1 months for that matter... 9s spread out over a sim-year...

Long-term simulations will have a modest benefit. it will finish a little faster... but your likely not staring at a pc in these situations... i know i come back to it long after it finishes already.

The earlier you are in your league, the less the savings - educated guess. this was 100+ years of history and retired players. sim times on the hdd were ~15s less at leageu inception. (edit, wrong ... about ~40s less on hdd)

i could predict this because i know more than just the spec sheet when it come to real world results. specs are 'theory' not reality. in many cases they are total BS - relative to what they feed the consumer... behind closed doors 'they' know better, but they understand the importance of marketing... if someone else says it's 6gbits/s then they also have to say so even though that pathway on your pc will never reach it... ever.

I'm sure richw can find something to argue about or why he is actually right regardless of these pesky facts. don't let reality get in your way, bud. you know your right because you can "feel" it.