SH3 on SSD

[Firebird]

Did anyone try to run SH3 on a solid-state disk? I'm curious as to what the effect on load times would be :).

[mr chris]

Not yet but im getting two 60GB SSD to run my OS. Going to set them up in RAID 0 format. Was thinking about getting a massive one to use for games but was advised to forget about it as it would only improve load time slightly. But if you have money to burn and want the game to load up as fast as possible SSD is the way to go. In a year or so they should start to come down in price a bit they have come down 40 odd pounds since i have looking over the last few months.

[Firebird]

Yeah, for new games it probably wouldn't make a huge difference, but consider:
- SH3 has over 25000 relatively small files (0 - 100 KB) of which 7500 smaller than 10 KB. Reading those has quite a performance impact on regular disks due to the access time incurred, but that's much less of an issue on SSDs (access time reduced by two orders of magnitude)
- loading isn't optimized as it is in SH4. It really seems as if the HD is the bottleneck because it merely reads the files (configuration data and textures?), parses them and stores the data into RAM.
Correct me if I'm wrong, I'm merely trying to guess :).

[mr chris]

You more than likely right mate. I quite new to computers really. But i was told that if you had a velcoraptor hard driver replacing it with a SSD would only make the games load slightly faster. Would be a different matter if you were just replacing a standard HD. I look forward to the results when someone does try either SH3 or SH4 for that matter on a SSD.

[irish1958]

I listen to the current month's war radio broadcast while the game is loading.