SSD vs. hard drive for DCS?

Looking to free up some room on my SSD, so besides giving a quicker DCS start-up by loading files quicker does SSD improve the overall performance of DCS once flying?

Thank you.

If you have enough RAM then SSD will not boost the game performance.

From my own experience, if you have 16GB of RAM or more then normal HDD will not hinder your game performance. It will only affect loading times.

And by performance I do not mean FPS. SSD would help a bit with stuttering in case your PC would have to use swap. Bearing in mind that the the swap file and DCS are both on SSD.

If you have enough RAM then SSD will not boost the game performance.

 

From my own experience, if you have 16GB of RAM or more then normal HDD will not hinder your game performance. It will only affect loading times.

 

And by performance I do not mean FPS. SSD would help a bit with stuttering in case your PC would have to use swap. Bearing in mind that the the swap file and DCS are both on SSD.

Thanks for the info, I have 32gigs of ram. So it sounds like me having a 2T hard drive I really shouldn't need to be installing any programs onto my SSD.

Keep in mind, however, that DCS is programmed to load gfx assets continuously during the flight. When I played it off the HDD, despite having 16GB of RAM, I still suffered from annoying disk-read stuttering while zooming in on targets/objects on the terrain, or while new clouds were being rendered nearby, and that was already on 1.5.x, let alone 2.0.x, which has much more stuff to load. Bought SSD specifically for that reason.

Keep in mind, however, that DCS is programmed to load gfx assets continuously during the flight. When I played it off the HDD, despite having 16GB of RAM, I still suffered from annoying disk-read stuttering while zooming in on targets/objects on the terrain, or while new clouds were being rendered nearby, and that was already on 1.5.x, let alone 2.0.x, which has much more stuff to load. Bought SSD specifically for that reason.

Point taken...I still have enough space on my SSD to keep things as they are. However, I've moved my Oculus apps over to the hard drive but kept the Oculus program on my SSD with things running smoothly.

Thanks.

My mechanical drive is purely used now for storing videos, photos and the like. All apps, programs, games and of course the OS are on SSD drives. My advice is save up for an SSD that can fit all your programs and games on. NAND prices are not too bad at the moment and if you look hard enough you can find some good deals. You don't need a super fast one. Any SSD from a reputable brand will do. Samsung IMO are the best and have very good warranties also.

Can an SSD boot drive be copied in its entirety over to another larger SSD or will a re-install of everything be required?

Keep in mind, however, that DCS is programmed to load gfx assets continuously during the flight. When I played it off the HDD, despite having 16GB of RAM, I still suffered from annoying disk-read stuttering while zooming in on targets/objects on the terrain, or while new clouds were being rendered nearby, and that was already on 1.5.x, let alone 2.0.x, which has much more stuff to load. Bought SSD specifically for that reason.

OMG! if it wasnt for this comment, i wouldnt remember that i was getting an incredible stuttering while zooming in my HDD. now that i have SSD there no more stuff like that happening.

problems are so gone that i dont even cared to notice that it was an improvement. lol, everything runs fine.

i can just zoom in and out smoothly as it should.

that was killer for me, i zoomed into a mountain and rip, sometimes i got 1 or 2 seconds freez.

Can an SSD boot drive be copied in its entirety over to another larger SSD or will a re-install of everything be required?

Cloning works...15-30 min and you are set. Samsung has a nice tool that does this for you, Samsung SSD supported only !

De-attach the OLD OS-drive after cloning before you boot or disaster strikes if both, old HDD and new SSD, are connected same time upon win firing up !!!!! ( RTFM helps alot )

Can an SSD boot drive be copied in its entirety over to another larger SSD or will a re-install of everything be required?

Yes I went from 120G SSD to a 1TB SSD , I used acronis to copy it over

Took like 5 mins

I used the AS-IS option , so my OS partition stayed at 70G with the rest of the new SSD being ready to for my games partition

Hi, if you have 32 GB don't let the swap/virtual memory on SSD.... just delete it in windows and let it be handled by RAM... if not it's useless to have 32 GB ... (you would just loose non saved data in case of win crash)

in 1.5.x the lags when zooming the first times on HUD are still there whatever ssd or not. In 2.1.x no lags on zoom (whatever ssd or not)

I also have 32GB of memory. What should I set my page file to be? It's at 5GB right now.

Hi, if you have 32 GB don't let the swap/virtual memory on SSD.... just delete it in windows and let it be handled by RAM... if not it's useless to have 32 GB ... (you would just loose non saved data in case of win crash)

in 1.5.x the lags when zooming the first times on HUD are still there whatever ssd or not. In 2.1.x no lags on zoom (whatever ssd or not)

Thanks for the tip. After noticing how little of my 32 ram I actually use I decided to do some reading on the subject. There were some pros/cons. I disabled the swap/virtual memory along with scheduled defrag and unchecked indexing for both drives. Since I already use a 3rd party search software I would never use it.

In reality my Alienware system is so fast I doubt I'll notice a difference but if I do I'll post back here.

I'm a little late to this conversation but to let you know about performance, I run 1.5 on my SSD and 2.0 on a HDD. Performance is far superior in 2.0 I'm assume due to the code upgrades so I would suggest there is not benefit given 32GB of RAM other than load times. I love the SSD and would never go back but I firmly believe there are no advantages for game play.

I'm a little late to this conversation but to let you know about performance, I run 1.5 on my SSD and 2.0 on a HDD. Performance is far superior in 2.0 I'm assume due to the code upgrades so I would suggest there is not benefit given 32GB of RAM other than load times. I love the SSD and would never go back but I firmly believe there are no advantages for game play.

Not sure I understand your comparison...

BuzzU as fitness88 said you should just disable pagefile on all drive. It's not a big deal but this way pagefile is handled by faster RAM (my 3200Mhz is 80 times faster in read than my ssd, 40gb/s vs 0.5gb/s) and so with DCS about 24Gb RAM are used including virtual memory.

fitness88 I did the same, as indexing is activated by default on a ssd wich is bad - scheduled "defrag" for ssd on win10 is ok it's just a weekly reset to zero of free blocks, it's quick and good.

Gladman I agree with you but you probably meant "ssd" instead of "32gb of ram" ? but 32gb of ram isn't flagrant benefit for gameplay to...

BuzzU as fitness88 said you should just disable pagefile on all drive. It's not a big deal but this way pagefile is handled by faster RAM (my 3200Mhz is 80 times faster in read than my ssd, 40gb/s vs 0.5gb/s) and so with DCS about 24Gb RAM are used including virtual memory.

fitness88 I did the same, as indexing is activated by default on a ssd wich is bad - scheduled "defrag" for ssd on win10 is ok it's just a weekly reset to zero of free blocks, it's quick and good.

Gladman I agree with you but you probably meant "ssd" instead of "32gb of ram" ? but 32gb of ram isn't flagrant benefit for gameplay to...

Do you have superfetch and prefetch enabled or disabled? I don't see an option to enable or disable for just the SSD or HD.

Did some reading and it seems it's a good idea to leave them on as it uses your ram for speeding up the loading of files quicker than a SSD would do by itself.

Do NOT turn off swap !

I have 32GB and use swap on all my 5 drives.

The OS decides which drive to use when it needs to.

Read carefully before you do a thing that worked half-way with XP and earlier versions of windows.

With 7/8/10 there is no need to turn it off, rather not.

Before you turn it off, read some funded papers about what you are doing !

edit*: ..one of the better explanations why not..and there are even more reasons why NOT to turn it off::

quote:

No matter how much RAM you have, you want the system to be able to use it efficiently. Having no paging file at all forces the operating system to use RAM inefficiently for two reasons. First, it can't make pages discardable, even if they haven't been either accessed or modified in a very long time, which forces the disk cache to be smaller. Second, it has to reserve physical RAM to back allocations that are very unlikely to ever require it (for example, a private, modifiable file mapping), leading to a case where you can have plenty of free physical RAM and yet allocations are refused to avoid overcommitting.

Consider, for example, if a program makes a writable, private memory mapping of a 4GB file. The OS has to reserve 4GB of RAM for this mapping, because the program could conceivably modify every byte and there's no place but RAM to store it. So immediately, 4GB of RAM is basically wasted (it can be used to cache clean disk pages, but that's about it).

You need to have a page file if you want to get the most out of your RAM, even if it's never used. It acts as an insurance policy that allows the operating system to actually use the RAM it has, rather than having to reserve it for possibilities that are extraordinarily unlikely.

The people who designed your operating system's behavior are not fools. Having a paging file gives the operating system more choices, and it won't make bad ones.

There's no point in trying to put a paging file in RAM. And if you have lots of RAM, the paging file is very unlikely to be used (it just needs to be there) so it doesn't particularly matter how fast the device it is on is.

You can do as you want it's not a big deal.

Swap is always used, having lot of RAM or not.

With 16Gb in DCS you have all you need. So if you have 32 and don't want them to sleep you can let RAM handle the pagefile, even if no big difference in performance.

Fitness88 I don't know what superfetch and prefetch are.

Do NOT turn off swap !

 

I have 32GB and use swap on all my 5 drives.

 

The OS decides which drive to use when it needs to.

 

Read carefully before you do a thing that worked half-way with XP and earlier versions of windows.

With 7/8/10 there is no need to turn it off, rather not.

 

Before you turn it off, read some funded papers about what you are doing !

 

edit*: ..one of the better explanations why not..and there are even more reasons why NOT to turn it off::

 

quote:

No matter how much RAM you have, you want the system to be able to use it efficiently. Having no paging file at all forces the operating system to use RAM inefficiently for two reasons. First, it can't make pages discardable, even if they haven't been either accessed or modified in a very long time, which forces the disk cache to be smaller. Second, it has to reserve physical RAM to back allocations that are very unlikely to ever require it (for example, a private, modifiable file mapping), leading to a case where you can have plenty of free physical RAM and yet allocations are refused to avoid overcommitting.

 

Consider, for example, if a program makes a writable, private memory mapping of a 4GB file. The OS has to reserve 4GB of RAM for this mapping, because the program could conceivably modify every byte and there's no place but RAM to store it. So immediately, 4GB of RAM is basically wasted (it can be used to cache clean disk pages, but that's about it).

 

You need to have a page file if you want to get the most out of your RAM, even if it's never used. It acts as an insurance policy that allows the operating system to actually use the RAM it has, rather than having to reserve it for possibilities that are extraordinarily unlikely.

 

The people who designed your operating system's behavior are not fools. Having a paging file gives the operating system more choices, and it won't make bad ones.

 

There's no point in trying to put a paging file in RAM. And if you have lots of RAM, the paging file is very unlikely to be used (it just needs to be there) so it doesn't particularly matter how fast the device it is on is.

If all of this is true, then why do I have significantly WORSE performance with a system managed pagefile in DCS, compared to NO pagefile or a small pagefile?

Reading about page swap on the internet, there's a lot of mixed opinions from people in the know. Monitor your memory usage for a while [Task Manager] and see what it's actually doing. In the mean time I recovered 4 gigs on my SSD by turning it off and for what it's worth, saving my SSD the write cycles. Of course the newer SSD's have greater write longevity.

If all of this is true, then why do I have significantly WORSE performance with a system managed pagefile in DCS, compared to NO pagefile or a small pagefile?

Any benchmarks?

Any benchmarks?

Benchmarks don't work exactly, because the type of slowdown that occurs can only described as "stuttering" or "hitching" and don't really affect the FPS counter.

If all of this is true, then why do I have significantly WORSE performance with a system managed pagefile in DCS, compared to NO pagefile or a small pagefile?

That is a good question indeed.

Since I have not built nor installed or ever worked on your rig I have no idea. One thing could be that you changed a few things that now interfere with your DCS/Swap constellation.

But you say "None or Small Swap", a small swap is not No Swap, so it seems to work..partly.

What are your other drives ? How full are they if HDD based ? Many variables.

Just re-checked my settings, in fact I have 2 x PF only on my 2 x 2TB HDD drives, no swap actually on any of the 3 SSD's, but I had it on all 5 before and there is/was no difference or handicap in my workload scenario with either 2 or 5. Must have turned the SSD's off some month ago, dunno.. but HHD's seem to be fast enough on my end.

What many, including me do, is to set the PF to a FIXED SIZE, say lower & upper limit both 8192MB for each drive, or different values for different drives, mine on HDD are all set to 8GB fixed size. This frees the disk/ssd from resizing the PF, it's said to speed things up when done in proper sizes.

FYI: Windows picks the drive with the least I/O currently and uses that as PF if needed. So giving it more choices makes life easier.

If you have 2 drives, make a PF on each one with 4 or 8GB fixed size and see if you still have hiccups. IMHO 16GB is by far not enough to turn PF completely off, unless you really only do single-tasked light workloads.

P.S.

Putting a PF on a RAM-Disk makes less than zero sense, then you better actually turn PF off and save the overhead from the RAM-Disk management, and save the bandwidth shuffling it back and forth from one die to another on the same RAM-module, really, that is pure nonsense.