ARMA with SSD / Flash drives ?

Hi,

there may have been some posts yet but i couldn't find a thread on this topic ? Is anybody running Arma on a Solid Stae Disk / Flash Drive ? If yes, what is your experience ? I remember a statement that Arma's performance also depends on a fast harddrive as it loads lot of data from it.

Maybe a next brithday present !

thanks!

I once opened a topic with the same question but only got "theoretical" answers and not real life experience onces.

Hopefully someone has one and will share his/her experiences with us.

I could test it in a heartbeat by copy-pasting the Arma folder to a drive.

But sadly I do not have a 45gb flashdrive!

Well RAID 5/0 is another option.

Fast access times and much cache for the HDD.

yes yes...raid 0 ftw.

I'm able to host a private dedicated server, which we play all coop stuff like Evo, Domination, WarFare ect ect, while I play on the same pc.

The Raptors@ 10,000 rpm's do make a difference.

Quote[/b] ]I once opened a topic with the same question but only got "theoretical" answers and not real life experience onces.

Yep,i remember that,but there was a link to test which showed that ssd was not faster than normal disk.So best option is to wait until WD launches raptor 20000 rpm disk.

Thanks for your answers. Yes, RAID is an alternative, but i just wonder how these SSDs run with Arma. Can anybody confirm this saying about the massive harddrive reloading of Arma ?

By the way, just searched the net today for SSDs and Gaming, the latest tests of the brand new (and brand expensive) SSDs by IBM show in fact an increase in minimum FPS for Crysis.

Now i consider to buy one of the latest 32GB OCZ SSD Core 2 drives for a current 100 €s in Germany (120 $ ?)...

My SSD, is faster than my raptors on loading. Installed ARMA on the SSD(64gb) but not the OS. Its my Steam version/Atari. Not sure how to really measure the diff, but it does seem seamless on loading up a ACE multiplayer game, and joining. It is noticeable.

I will make this SSD(gskill_mlc) my Steam drive now, then i can just mount it on any OS install and recheck at Valve.

But i still get the lil jerkys in the intro...not nearly as bad as it has been. more testing now.

Thanks for your testing. Is this steam version comparable to the normal version or are there major differences ? Did you notice any slight increase in FPS ? As far as i read tests about SSDs and Gaming, i guess that Arma could benefit of 2-3 fps on the minimum fps. But i believe it's definetly hard to benchmark this.

Sounds right, a German mag tested the SSDs with Games and the gain was rather tiny in like 2-3 frames + and a few seconds less loading.

However if the PC needs to do something while you play then it seems the impact is lot lot less than on a normal HD.

For example they tested how the game runs while antivirus searches and the fps loss was minimal.

Personally id say wait till they reached a lot better Price/value segment.

I could test it in a heartbeat by copy-pasting the Arma folder to a drive.

But sadly I do not have a 45gb flashdrive!

You don't need to copy ALL those mods too :-)

Sounds right, a German mag tested the SSDs with Games and the gain was rather tiny in like 2-3 frames + and a few seconds less loading.

However if the PC needs to do something while you play then it seems the impact is lot lot less than on a normal HD.

Most games are built so that a map and everything is completely loaded in memory, textures and the lot. With such games a faster drive will have neglible benefits.

Other games where streaming data is frequent, like arma or elderscrolls or such it may be quite significant.

The question is if arma is streaming a lot of stuff off the HD, which seems likely because there's a ton of data and the frequent fps drops as you move around are indeed significant. (not the fps drops related to overdraw, mind)

So it's not really the average fps that should increase, but the minimum fps due to hd trashing caused Not by the OS/antivirus/etc, but by the game itself.

Again arma is hard to compare with most other games, and it's rare you see performance benchmarks on much other than the usual box shooters.

My take is... too expensive still, but I'm very interested to hear the results too.

SSD looks like a promising tech, but what you need to remember when reading about their claimed 220Mb/s data throughput, is that they get slower over time.

When some hardware sites review SSD drives, they do it on fresh installs on new drives.

There's a problem with this though, SDD drives get much slower when the individual sectors have been written to once. The next time a sector is written to, it has to first clear the previous data, which takes a while. Some (more thorough) hardware sites claim a typical SSD drive will only be running at half speed when it's been used for a while.

I'm certain they're working on fixing this, but until they do, i recommend holding on to your money. If you can't wait, get a Velociraptor from Western Digital. A much better investment, especially if you use the money saved to upgrade other components.

Dont if i have misunderstood the topic, but a similar question,

if i attach an external harddrive via eSATA and use it for the game, will i loose speed... For me its the loading speed that is most important...

Theoretically i have the feeling you can not do such thing.

I say this because i have ArmA installed on a HD partition D:\, so far so good.. but if i format C:\ Partition, i will no longer be able to run and play ArmA that was installed on partition D:\.

That said i experienced and believe you always need an Operational System as support in order to run Armed Assault. Same thing happened with OFP and who knows Armed Assault 2.

Its a really annoying situation. Hope BIS can fix and solve this crappy thing.

It is caused in the registry. You can't run Ofp/ArmA without an entry of your cd key in the registry. So You can install arma 1.0 and then just copy all your stuff over it. But you can't install ArmA on a hdd and run it without a registration on another computer.

best regards

Well it does need a checker, hence why i use Steam/Atrai Arma, with my SSD. Its much easier to chk than my Metiboli install.

But that requires you to install Steam and sign in... ect on any new C:/. I guess a CD version would be best once you know the reg. and hidden secrud stuff to copy too.

I run ArmA on an external, I have a computer that can barely run it, so I can't say much about performance loss.

If you ever have to reformat and don't want to loose you CD key and have to reinstall, just back up your registry.

Go to the Start > RUN

Type in "REGEDIT"

Then find

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE/SOFTWARE/Bohemia Interactive Studio/ARMA

Then highlight the three files in there (KEY, MAIN, and (default))

go to File > Export and then save it on a flash drive or external drive.

After you reformat just run the .reg and you should be good to go again with your CD key and install directory.