Solid State Drives and Gaming

New expensive hard drive substitute called solid state drive is hitting the community of game machines.

SSDs are nice but too expensive.

6000 for a hard drive that loads faster?

Originally posted by Tyler Lowe I was thinking that installing 8GB of System RAM and running on a 64bit OS would pretty much eliminate the need for swap file use while gaming at a tiny fraction of the price.

That is correct.  I read an article where they did this, I think on tomshardware.

My motivations are

a)  I'm a poor college kid, paying for the new OS and 6GB of ram would cost me.
b)  This would be a neat project.

I got my 4GB compact flash, the adaptor and a new rounded IDE cable for $90 bucks.

The advantage to doing this, rather then getting 8GB of ram would be

a) If you buy a bigger compact flash card, you can load your OS on it, making boot up much much faster.

b)  A larger card could have individual games on it.  Take a game like witcher, that has very long load times.  Install it on this hard drive and make them load in fractions of a second.

I have a bit too much to do here, but in a few days I'll update this with a report of how well it works out.

Originally posted by SunfighterLC Ive been hearing rumors though that having 8GB of ram seems to make your system fairly unstable. I was considering having 8GB of ram myself till i started reading up on it. Plus DS only has 8GB of 800 ram =(.

I think the typical reason for this is that motherboards cant support the voltage required to run all of that ram at high speeds, or at all. At least, voltage requirements is the only real reason Ive ever seen for not being able to use 8gb of ram on a motherboard that supports it.

Also, theres nothing wrong with 800mhz. The speed difference isnt that incredible between that and the 1066, and the fact that youve got 8 gigs of it kinda peaks the enthusiasm meter anyway.

...I dunno.

I thought you guys might like to see how my project turned out. 

Building:  I got the adapter mounted into the 3.5in bay but the distance between the master/slave wasn't great enough to go from the cd rom drive to the device.  I very much so recommend that you get the sata version if you undertake this project.  So it is dangling all ghetto like...until I buy some velcro straps to attact it to my case.  (Note I just super glued my mesh drive bay covers on...if I didn't do this, I could prolly hook the cd rom to the bottom bay and it might have reached.)


I gathered the following stats from the program HD tach.

                       Random Acess/Avg read
DSO 250GB                13.3ms/55.6mbps
RaptorX                       8.3ms/75.5mbps
USB flash stick              .6ms/28.9mbps
Built SSD                      1ms/43.6mbps

Note that the read speed of the SSD is constant throughout.

I installed an older game, hitman 2 on it, and the game loaded near instantly, both for level load and startup.

This went so well that when I get a job I might purchase a sata version and put a 16GB card on it.


Edited by cronedog - 01 Apr 2008 at 11:52pm