this post was submitted on 29 Jun 2024
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The Sales Will Continue (lemmy.world)
submitted 4 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 0 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

Did you know that you can move things between drives? No one plays their entire Steam library at the same time, but I can store much of it ready to play on large-capacity HDDs, which are dirt-cheap. If I suddenly got back into Skyrim again, I'd spend a few minutes moving it to one of my SSDs.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (1 children)

  1. Congrats, you have just invented caching, but worse

  2. SSDs have limited write endurance, so moving a lot of large files on and off of them will wear the nand flash out shortening its lifetime and potentially killing it

  3. If yoh DO want to run off of a HDD, it is a good idea, but for older games that were designed to run on them, modern games are more reliant on fast drives

Edit:

  1. assuming 150MB/s HDD read speed (fairly fast for a hdd) it would take 11 minutes to move a single 100GB file. This speed would be vastly lowered if copying many small files
[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

SSDs have limited write endurance, so moving a lot of large files on and off of them will wear the nand flash out shortening its lifetime and potentially killing it

This is the conventional wisdom, but honestly I've not seen any detectable wear on any of my several year old SSDs even with daily use. I've seen more SSDs fail just due to age/power on hours professionally and never wear-related

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

That's probably because you are not moving 100s gigabites of daya on a regular basis (i assume)

[–] [email protected] 1 points 4 months ago

But for gamers moving game installs that they don't feel like rebuilding the mod load out for between an HDD and an SSD that might be moving an extra 100GB month or so, probably less frequently depending on how much they're moving games around, plus it's no more wear than if they simply uninstalled and reinstalled the game as needed. Ultimately I don't think that'll make much difference.

I'll look at the wear stats on my main desktop with its 8 year old SSD when I get a chance and share

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Skyrim is not going to take a few minutes. A few hours, at best.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Not even remotely true on modern hardware. It's pretty quick.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

It has nothing to do with modern hardware since you're still limited by the read speed of your disks. Given we're talking about spinning rust, that will take tens of minutes to complete a couple hundred gig, and even more so if you're transferring tons of small files.

I could easily see it taking over an hour for a 200+gb install. Even going at the theoretical max, you're looking at 20min just in data. Tacking on added latency from opening and closing many small files and any kind of fragmentation/disk location, that's going to add significant time to the transfer.