Hardware Question

[rockmedic109 0]

I play WOFF on a 3.5 year old laptop. 

 

If I installed WOFF on a USB3.0 External SSD, would the load times be any better than what I have now with it installed on my HDD?

[Hellshade 110]

I wouldn't have the foggiest idea, sir but it's possible.  Certainly SSD is faster than regular hard drives.    But the question is does your 3.5 year old laptop have a USB 3.0 connection?  If the laptop doesn't support 3.0, it will run at the very slow USB 2.0 speeds.

[rockmedic109 0]

Thanks Hellshade. 

 

My laptop does have a USB 3.0 {Two of them}.  I didn't know there was a USB 3.0 when I bought it. 

 

I went ahead and pulled the trigger anyway.  I was running out of space.  I figured if I was going to get an external anyway, might as well. 

[Hellshade 110]

Let me know how it works sir.  Just an FYI, this forum is pretty much a ghost town for WOFF now.  Everybody's mostly over on SimHQ. 

[Tamper 9]

Particularly if you have a fast SSD (the speeds do vary broadly), even USB 3.0 is liable to slow the drive down.  People don't realize that, while USB might be portable, etc, it's not really "fast", even USB 3.0.  Sure it's faster by far than 2.0, but USB in general is popular because it's portable, external (easy to attach/remove) and widely implemented...not really for being "fast".

 

If you want fast, check to see if your laptop has an eSATA port.  If it's eSATA 6Gb/s, even better.  It's not all that rare, even though a lot of people don't know what it's good for.  Some laptops even have eSATAp, which even provides the 5v necessary to power an SSD (though you'd want to consider the hit on battery life, and maybe use an externally-powered unit).  eSATA provides speeds consistent with being an internal drive on the native SATA controller (because that's essentially what it is).  Stupid fast compared to USB, if you have a fast SATA 6Gb/s SSD and an eSATA 6Gb/s port.

 

If you don't have an eSATA port, check to see if your laptop USB 3.0 supports what's called UASP,   Even if you don't have eSATA, UASP will definitely improve speed beyond typical USB 3.0.

 

Sources:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ESATAp

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_Attached_SCSI

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA24G28M5597&cm_re=uasp-_-17-707-312-_-Product

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=9SIA29716C8573

 

Finally, depending on your laptop, I'd strongly consider buying an SSD to replace your internal drive (I'm assuming you don't already have this).  If your drive is full due to storing a lot of content, I'd consider getting an external drive for storage, and put a 250G SSD in your laptop; they're not terribly expensive these days and it's a fairly adequate amount of storage...if you're even just somewhat selective about what you install on your boot drive, 256G would be enough, and you can store huge files on a big terabyte-plus platter drive externally, where speed isn't crucial.

 

Another reason I say this is I'm not sure if some games/apps will be happy if they're installed on a removable drive that's not always there, or maybe has the drive letter it was installed under taken up by another USB drive you plug in.  Just a thought.

 

Good luck, HTH

Edited May 21, 2015 by Tamper

[Tamper 9]

Below is some testing I did a while back, to illustrate what I'm referring to above.  I used ATTO disk benchmark to compare various scenarios involving USB 3.0 enclosures, SATA 3.0 G/s and 6.0G/s SSDs, UASP performance, and eSATA performance.  (Yes I realize benchmarks are synthetic, but this is all comparative)

 

Top left; SATA 3G/s SSD on USB3.0 enclosure.  Numbers roughly equivalent to the same drive on an internal SATA controller.

Top center; SATA 6G/s on same enclosure, port, etc. Although the drive is faster, the enclosure's internal ASM-1051 SATA controller is limiting the drive to SATA 3g/s speeds.

Top right; A higher-quality USB enclosure than above, same drive/port/pc: Now internal SATA controller allows faster speeds (though still not even close to what drive is capable of).  Enclosure is UASP-capable but it is disabled for this test.

Bottom left; same enclosure as Top Right, but now with PC's UASP support enabled.  Note much faster read speeds (about 35% for larger data sizes) but still not at full speed SATA 6 is capable of.

Bottom right; same drive/enclosure, but now on eSATAp 6G/s port.  Note further read speed increase (additional ~6% for total of 43% over 'normal' USB 3.0 on same drive, even with high-quality enclosure).

Note that I focused on read speeds, because where SSDs and especially games are concerned, that's where your money is being spent.

Also, if you don't already have an internal (boot) SSD, I cannot recommend it strongly enough.  Don't let enyone tell you that it won't improve performance of your games other than loading levels, that's rubbish perpetuated by people who, at the time, hadn't already adopted the technology.  They claimed that SSDs only improved load times since that's the only time the hard disks were being used - which is baloney, of course.  The real issue was that most of them couldn't accept that technology had come out that kicked the living daylights out of the shiny new WD Raptors they just paid a lot of money for :)

A good SSD will improve the overall performance of any computer over a conventional hard disk, because it speeds up *any* hard disk read by many times, even up to 100x what platter drives can do.  This includes any OS files (such as paging files) and also DirectX and other elements your machine uses to run your favorite games.  Games do not just read data from the hard drive when levels are loaded; this is particularly true of flight sims, where you're moving around and the computer is constantly having to 'load' things like terrain, buildings, and aircraft skins as they come into view/higher LOD, etc.  All that stuff is *not* loaded into memory every time you load a mission, therefore it must be read from somewhere in 'real time'...therefore the faster you can read it, the better.  Less 'stutters' from loading textures.

[rockmedic109 0]

Well, I haven't loaded WOFF on it yet.  But I have loaded Dragon Age Inquisition.  The load times on the game are MUCH faster.  I purchased a Samsung T1.  Specs indicated it was the fastest of the portable SSDs.  If there is a bottleneck from USB 3.0, it is still faster than the HDD I have in the laptop. 

 

Thanks Hellshade.   I usually look up things over at the SimHQ boards but for some reason I was unable to post anything even though I was logged in.  I would hit the New Thread button and the page would just refresh.

[rockmedic109 0]

Just re-installed WOFF onto the Samsung T1.  It works great.  Quite a bit of improvement over the load times of the internal HDD.  I've only played two missions but the load times were about 12-20 seconds {at a guess}. 

[Tamper 9]

The Samsung T1 has UASP support, as I described above - not a surprise, given it's performance reputation.  It won't perform as well on a 'regular' USB 3.0 connection - that's what UASP is all about. 

 

The SSD itself (a Samsung EVO 850 series drive, internally) is capable of the bitrate of the SATA 6G/s interface - 540read/520write, according to Samsung.

 

The T1 drive claims 450MB/s (which looks to be fairly accurate): http://www.anandtech.com/show/8885/samsung-portable-ssd-t1-review(but I think that's with a UASP-capable host).

 

What brand/model of laptop are you using?