SSD vs HDD question

Funny part about that. High performance SSDs can run hotter than HDDs… lol

One single trip to Disney World, I took something like 3,000 or 4,000 pictures. I have taken several more trips than just that one. :slight_smile: So, I have a 4TB HDD for “long term” storage. Pictures, Documents, Music … stuff where an HDD’s load speed is just fine.

OS & non-game software go on the SATA SSD.

Games go on the M.2(PCIE) SSD.

Pff, with enough RAM you don’t need a Swap file at all anymore. :slight_smile:

All Blizzard games now use the CASC encapsulation system. Because of how the data is structured and how it patches the data and index files during a patch cycle, an SSD is almost mandatory if you don’t want to sit at a loading screen for minutes at a time. With a regular spinning platter drive, your loads will be far more arduous and you’ll experience constant pop-in, and in the case of other players being in the same instance as you, you’ll see “invisible” players because their textures can’t load for a long time on non-SSD drives.

If your system can only take another 2.5" SATA SSD, then you should get one of those. Samsung has very reliable TLC SSDs for a reasonable price, and other vendors came in even cheaper. If your system has an available slot for an NVMe drive that won’t take away your SATA ports, that’s a better bet as NVMe IOPS are far greater than standard SATA SSDs’ IOPS. CASC is the most inefficient filesystem around for games, so the faster your storage the better your game experience will be. Avoid regular HDs at all costs.

that is not how windows works

I definitely had that issue with the last open beta. By the time the server slam had come around, I had new 500GB external ssd for my laptop, and the difference was huge!

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No, you can still do this. I used to disable the swap file entirely. But these days I usually have a small swap file set, just for compatibility reasons.

But you should only do this if you have extra memory. Because if you have a fixed size swap file (not dynamic) or no swap file, and you managed to fill the memory enough to overflow to your swap file and fill that too, well, then you would crash.

But I haven’t seen that happen in over a decade in a half. Even when I used to turn off the swap file while having 4GB of memory back in the XP days, (when 32 bit could only address 3.5GB of memory). lol

The only advantage to this at the time, was you kept your program memory data from being thrown on a HDD and slowing down the system. These days, there isn’t much of a reason to do this anymore. I have yet to do this with my new build, but previous computers, I have. I just cap the swap file to like 1 or 2GB and that’s it. Some programs look to see if you have one, and if not, they get sorta mad about it. lol

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This PC has exactly 0 swap file, and 32GB of RAM. It’s been running just fine for 3 years.

So, um … yeah it actually is how Windows works.

SSD lifespan is measured in Write cycles. Fewer writes = longer lifespan before needing replacement. :slight_smile:

And after 10 years, I have never had to replace an SSD because it wore out. I have had a couple that have simply died, but not due to writing too much.

Do you disable drive indexing on yours? That will murder them faster than the swap file. LOL

Anything that is hard coded to use swap will crash if there is not a swap…even if you have TB of ram. Some devs still hard code that. When you run into one of those have fun with your crash.

Samsungs have 5 year warranty why would you be using a drive longer than 5 years.

Apparently you can’t read beyond the first part of a post:

But to add to that, no I have never seen a crash with a swap file disabled. Ever. But some programs get mad if there isn’t one.

???

Its not like the damn drive has an expiration date… Good lord.

neither do CPUs or graphics cards…I still won’t use one 7 years old lol

I didn’t say I was.

I said:

I didn’t say I used one for 10 years. *facepalm

Usually they got replaced because I upgraded, not because they were old. Hell most went on to live in another system and are still working fine.

SSD is a monumental upgrade over HDD…upgrade your SSD storage!

The first open beta i was on an HDD and i saw a lot of micro studders while walking around and major (1-2+ sec) while walking into the major town.

For the slam i bought some cheep sata ssd and no studder at all. Easyily worth it.

Did that before nixing the swap file. :slight_smile:

Followed by an immediate refund. :shrug: If some two-bit developer wants to make a boneheaded decision like that, then I don’t WANT their software running on my hardware. Who knows what OTHER stupid choices that made …

Because I’m not made of money, and I can’t necessarily afford to replace every drive after only 5 years.

… because there, technology moves forward at a fast pace. But storage? Storage is storage. You still could go with a pure HDD setup, and it would work, for example.

1tb M.2 SSD (x 2) and no SATA. Heaven.

Funny part about that is SSDs don’t have bearings that fuse together when they get hot…lol

Damn…I was under the impression that everyone is on 2 m2.'s by now…

Damn, what kind of HDDs were you running? Raptors?? 10k-15k spindle speeds? LOL