Thinking of HDD upgrade - need advice

[drharvey12]

Hi all,

I've been playing quite a bit of heavily modded Oblivion & Fallout 3, mostly with the large texture pack addons to make them look much nicer and on occasion get some micro stuttering at 1920 x 1080. As I'm running a hex core I7 980X @ 4.2ghz, 2 x GTX 480's & 6GB of triple channel DDR3 I would have thought this wouldn't be a problem. According to the tesnexus forums and the mod developers micro stuttering appears mostly because of low hdd performance. Not specifically that's my hdd is slow (I'm sure it's fine) but because of the amount of texture data involved in these games they recommend either running the game off an SSD or on a RAID setup.

I figure that this will improve performance in all games anyway so I just wanted some advice as to what I should be thinking about.

First off should I be looking at SATA II or SATA III and how much difference will this make? I know SATA III has a potential higher bandwidth amount but do you actually need it at the moment?

Was looking at the possibility of getting 2 of either the following:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/corsa...0mb-s-85k-iops

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/450gb...cache-36ms-ncq

As these will be just game drives I reckon I can limit myself down to around 150 - 175gb so they don't need to be massive.

Has anybody got any suggestions of other drives that are better for around £175 a go? Wouldn't mind spending a bit more if necessary but would prefer not too if possible.

Would I need some kind of mounting kit for the SSD drives? I have a Corsair Obsidian 800D. I already have 1 SSD that I use for the OS but not too sure where it's located!!!

Is setting them up in a RAID format easy to do? ie can a noob like me do it through Win 7 without messing up my current setup? Or should it go back to Scan for them to test & setup? If it did go back to Scan I'd probably ask them to change the liquid in the cooling apparatus anyway since it's been a year and might need doing anyway.

Any advice is appreciated - especially if you think that what I'm doing won't have any appreciable effect on gameplay anyway.

Cheers.

[Jonj1611]

Reading a recent review in CustomPC, micro-stuttering can be caused by SLI.

Regards

[drharvey12]

Hey Jonj,

Thanks for the response. From what I understand this happens to all SLI setups to a certain extent but is far more noticeable when your fps are lower than 60. Since mine are nearly always over 60 unless I use V-sync I'm assuming that at least with the games I am currently playing that this is probably not the issue.

Have played Crysis and AVP 2010 and have not experienced these issues at all. Only seems to be with modded Bethseda games. Dragon Age, Mass Effect 2 and others had no issues but also are probably not as graphically demanding. 3d Mark 2011 is fine too having just tested it and I would have thought that that would show it, especially as some of my fps were well into the 30's and 40's at times.

They also suggest that micro stuttering is near constant and on mine it is far more on occasion. More of an occasional judder really - maybe every 10 -15 secs and then fine for a minute or two, then when encountering a new outside vista another judder or two. Probably shouldn't have used the term micro stutter without finding out exactly what it was.

I still think it is mostly a hdd issue but I'll certainly bear it in mind now I know it can be an issue in graphically intensive games at fps lower than 60fps. I'll just have to run some on 2x AA rather than 8xAA!!!!

Still appreciate any help on benefits of gaming on RAID hdd's or SSD's and advice on which to go for.

Thanks.

[eyezpy]

Don't think HDD or SSD will improve your gaming performance and definately not your fps. It iwll improve loading times, but once a game is loaded its is the same for any storage disk, untill the disk is need to be read again.

Have to say by looking at your spec, I am a bit suprise you have added a SSD to your rig already

Definitely go for a SSD over a raptor and would suggest either the Corsair Force 3 120gb like the one you listed or Crucial M4 128gb £165 (just ordered a Crucial M4 128GB for my self and waiting eagerly for its arrival).

I would say setting up a raid isn't too complicated. But for an SSD unless you want to see those synthetic bench marks, a single drive should be plenty fast to load any application. If 128gb or 120 isnt enought then Crucial M4 256gb can be found for £320.

[drharvey12]

I was mostly going for a RAID SSD option since I need 175gb to 200gb for the games I currently have installed and two 120gb drives are cheaper than a single 240gb drive. Plus I assume it will be faster too.

I know that for most games this is overkill. Most run flawlessly but for heavily modified games with large texture packs ie Oblivion & Fallout 3 I think that the game does refer to data on the hdd quite a bit. At least the hdd access light seems to be on a lot. It's really for these and upcoming games I'm thinking about doing it.

Thanks for the advice re: SSD choice. I've heard really good things about the M4 but the read / write speeds seem slower than others. M4 = Read 415mb/s Write 175mb/s. 120Gb Force Series 3 Read 550mb/s Write 510mb/s. And the Corsair Force 3 is £6 cheaper.

Am I missing something?

[jim]

Yeah, to a point, you are.

They normally print the headline speeds, i.e. sequential read/write.

When you play a game, the problem you'll often suffer is random read. If you're going through a town, and you draw your weapon, you aren't pulling every tree from the directory one after the other (sequential). You're pulling character data from one area, then buildings from another, then weapons from another, then back to the character when a new character comes into the area. So random read is more important there than the sequential. On the headline, you're only seeing the sequential, not the random.

You need to look at a bigger review to get a good idea of which drives are best, taking into account a variety of factors - and the M4 is a terrific drive.

RAID isn't really the best idea, because it (unless something has recently changed) inhibits the operation of TRIM.

I would definitely look at an SSD rather than an HDD, differences between HDDs are pretty minimal, whereas HDD to SSD is huge. I also agree with the previous poster that SSDs don't really make a big difference to gaming, but Oblivion engine with large texture mods isn't a typical scenario, and whilst I don't *know*, I suspect that it could actually help.

[drharvey12]

Thanks Snooty - looks as though getting two SSD's to RAID properly is a bit tricky because of the TRIM issues you mentioned. Looks as though a single high capacity drive would be easier.

Would you recommend this one:

http://www.scan.co.uk/products/cruci...-write-260mb-s

How big a space am I likely to get once formatted for NTFS in Win7? Should be about 220gb?

Do I need to buy a mounting kit to put it into my PC and does it connect via the same way as my Caviar Black 1TB drive? Be nice and easy if it's just a case of screwing it into a drive caddy on my Corsair Obsidian 800D and plopping it in place!

[jim]

Probably more like 230GB.

If you only have 3.5" bays available, you may want to buy a 3.5" to 2.5" adapter - something like this would be fine - http://www.scan.co.uk/products/scyth...-into-a-35-bay

Mine just sits in a conveniently sized gap, but my case is falling to bits and under my desk so aesthetics aren't a primary concern - your call. They don't need to be really securely bolted in since there aren't any moving parts.

Connections are exactly the same as an normal hard drive.

[drharvey12]

Cheers Snooty. Doesn't seem to be letting me thank people at the moment, probably need to post more, but appreciate the help

[jim]

No problem

Re: post counts, yeah, you're right - Funkstar put together a rough guide here: http://forums.hexus.net/welcome-hexu...r-rewards.html

[Jasp]

Have you tried the fallout stutter remover before you start throwing money at new HDs, the oblivion and fallout engines are now quite old and don't cope that well with mods.

http://www.fallout3nexus.com/downloads/file.php?id=8886

[drharvey12]

Hi Jasp.

I use the Oblivion Stutter remover and it does seem to make quite a difference. Seems to stop it crashing quite a bit too. Haven't had a crash to desktop in the last 15 hours or so of play.

Tried the Fallout 3 stutter remover but didn't notice any difference and since the game seems pretty stable I prefer to run it with the least amount of mods as possible so I removed it. Just run NMC's texture pack, DarnUI, Fellout, EVE, Project Beauty and all the unofficial patches for the game and dlc's. Mostly just a graphical overhaul.

The tweaks from the tweak guide with regards to multi threading and RAM settings actually seemed to help quite a lot though. Now there's an occasional glitch outside when accessing the HDD but it's not particularly noticeable. Think the only way to get rid of those is to run it off an SSD which I don't want to buy now that the issues are significantly reduced. Apparently I won't notice much difference with RAID or Raptors either so I'll probably just be keeping things mostly as they are for the time being.

If nothing else I've learnt a lot more about RAID systems and SSD's from the posts giving me ideas about what to research so thanks everybody again for all the help