Heavy disk usage (could lower my SSD life?)

[WalkerDown 1]

So i've figured that A3 heavily uses my SSD's for no apparent reason, i could understand the loading of this or that textures or model or whatever time to time, but not a 100% usage the whole time i play, this doesn't make much sense. We don't have much data on how the SSD life could be affected by this kind of "access", but it's surely not good.

Does anyone have figured about this issue as well?

[tonygrunt 10]

SSD life is affected by writes and not reads which is what most of the time ArmA does.

I have 2 Vertex SSD's from 2009(not sure) which hold my ArmA series games and they still have health around 90%, cause the only writes are game updates and new addons.

I wouldn't be worried, daily windows and steam usage will affect more your SSD life than ArmA will ever do.

[nuxil 2]

ssd has improved alot the last years. i bet you will get a new pc before the ssd disk will fail on you.

[WalkerDown 1]

The question remains: why the game is using my SSD so much? Apart affecting (potentially) my SSD's life, it looks highly unefficient to me. Is there any technical explanation? Do they recognize the issue? I didn't found any detail about it (yet).

[EDcase 87]

You think that the game loads the full map with all textures and objects into RAM...?

The Alpha installation is 7Gb and most of that is the terrain, objects and texures COMPRESSED.

Altis is going to be MUCH bigger so u think it can load all that into your RAM...?

NO

ARMA uses streaming to load the terrain/objects on the fly.

Reading data does NOT shorten the SSD life.

[Iroquois Pliskin 0]

Do you have file indexing disabled on all drives?

I've done that, plus set the Paging file to Auto-determined by OS - mine barely blinks, but then again it's a Samsung 840. :cc:

[big_t 1]

ssd has improved alot the last years. i bet you will get a new pc before the ssd disk will fail on you.

As long as you buy any brand other than OCZ....... zing!!

Joking aside this should be true, although we are still in the infancy of large scale ssd usage. I believe we need a few more years to determine if they are in fact reliable. Most brands offer a 3 year warranty.

Edited April 1, 2013 by Big_T

[WalkerDown 1]

You think that the game loads the full map with all textures and objects into RAM...?

It should loads textures and stuff into the ram, if you have plenty of ram available.

The Alpha installation is 7Gb and most of that is the terrain, objects and texures COMPRESSED.

Altis is going to be MUCH bigger so u think it can load all that into your RAM...?

See above.

ARMA uses streaming to load the terrain/objects on the fly.

Reading data does NOT shorten the SSD life.

It's not efficient, hard drives (what if you don't have an SSD?) are much slow than ram.. for obvious reason. So SSD life apart, this is another area (after the CPU usage) where Arma is not efficient at all: the game is accessing the HDD continuosly (the HDD is accessed 100% of the time) when i still have like 18GB of RAM free? It doesn't make sense.

---------- Post added at 19:52 ---------- Previous post was at 19:46 ----------

Do you have file indexing disabled on all drives?

I've done that, plus set the Paging file to Auto-determined by OS - mine barely blinks,

Indexing and swap-file is disabled, plus another couple of optimization to make sure that my SSD's aren't unnecessarily used, this is why i'm complaining that a game is using it 100% of the time for no obvious reasons.

but then again it's a Samsung 840. :cc:

I'm using two OCZ Vertex4 512GB (nor that it would makes any difference btw...)

[iOGC_Aenigma 1]

Edcase is right in how arma utilises hdds and ram. If you are that worried about your ssd I suggest loading arma 3 from a ram disk. The fact is that arma works this way and that's it. It streams from hdd to ram. If it's the most efficient way to do things or not it's how it is. If you have 18 gig of free ram I can only suggest using a ram disk.

Sent from my HTC One X using Tapatalk 2

[froggyluv 2136]

RamDisk's great but it's a pain in the a$$ to keep changing files, backing up files, deleting files for every Dev update. If using, recommend you stay out of the auto-update builds.

[Ezcoo 47]

-- Nvm

Edited April 1, 2013 by Ezcoo
ninja'd

[nuxil 2]

It should loads textures and stuff into the ram, if you have plenty of ram available.

...

It's not efficient, hard drives (what if you don't have an SSD?) are much slow than ram.. for obvious reason. So SSD life apart, this is another area (after the CPU usage) where Arma is not efficient at all: the game is accessing the HDD continuosly (the HDD is accessed 100% of the time) when i still have like 18GB of RAM free? It doesn't make sense.

sure i agree. more mem you got. take advantage of it.

sadly this is not the case of arma. arma is limited down to 2048 MB if i remember correct.

getting the texture data from ram would speed up the transfere between cpu and graphic card. this is why installing arma on a ramdisk gives performance improvment.

if you have over 18 gb of ram. i would suggest you do this squeez every fps out of arma. :o

you basicly want to store the entire model with tetxure into ram to get best result. imo arma3 should have been fullbloded X64 and only that. who sits on a i686+ arc nowadays..

but thats another story.

Indexing and swap-file is disabled, plus another couple of optimization to make sure that my SSD's aren't unnecessarily used, this is why i'm complaining that a game is using it 100% of the time for no obvious reasons.

you might find this intresting : ArmA 2 I/O analysis results

I'm using two OCZ Vertex4 512GB (nor that it would makes any difference btw...)

It might. depends on your setup. if you setup the two disc's in raid0 you will increase the read/write speed by 2 times. "in theory"

[RuecanOnRails 10]

Arma 3 STREAMS the game from your hdd or ssd.

If you use a process monitor and watch disk activity for each file, you will see files the same file getting read hundreds of times with no file caching. It's the way Arma games run, it's why using ramdisk or ssd will give you less stutter and a smother overall experience.

For that reason you are much better off to play Arma games from your ssd.

Don't worry about your SSD, not only are all the file accesses reads but SSD's outlast HDD's when it comes to longevity and lifespan. The only difference are ssd's tell you at what point they can start to degrade, and HDD's don't.

For the post where someone "jokes" about not buying OCZ... The failure and issue rate on OCZ's is NOT higher than any other ssd brand in fact when compared to others their stability can be higher in some cases. The reason OCZ has a bad rap is purely because of the volume of drives they sell. They sell more SSD's than any other company. People are always more inclined to post issues than they are to post praise for a piece of hardware. If you try to compare the amount of bad ratings on an ocz drive compared to a samsung ssd you will see there might be 100 bad reviews for ocz, but only 10 for samsung... Chances are very high that OCZ sold ten times more drives than samsung did and their failure/issue rate is just as good as the other brands.

The did have some issues with firmware a few years back, but that was promptly fixed.

[WalkerDown 1]

sure i agree. more mem you got. take advantage of it.

sadly this is not the case of arma. arma is limited down to 2048 MB if i remember correct.

Every week we discover that an issue of 4 years ago, is again here today.. so the question is: what they did in this years? It's the 2013.. the game is not taking advantage of multiple cores (neither it can use fully two of them), it doesn't take advantage of having 24GB or 32GB or RAM aboard (it's pretty standard nowaday, considering the RAM cost) ... it's not that you must be that skilled to deploy a basic file caching: why the hell my HD is reading the same file zillions of time when it can sits in the memory after the first reading? File caching is something that any average coder knows of... wth.

[max power 21]

Perhaps we can stick to the topic. If the topic has run its course, we can probably let it die or a moderator can close it.

I might remind you that this topic is on SSD life vs. Arma's aggressive streaming technology. If this topic continues to devolve into yet another optimization complaint thread, people may find that they are no longer able to post in this topic or may get warnings or infractions for thread derailing.

[Gorbachev 1]

RamDisks are indeed great for nearly every game that doesn't utilize a 64 bit architecture. 32GB systems can finally utilize their ram.

[RuecanOnRails 10]

RamDisks are indeed great for nearly every game that doesn't utilize a 64 bit architecture. 32GB systems can finally utilize their ram.

Even games using a full 64 bit architecture will still benefit from ramdisk. Going from 32bit to 64bit doesn't magically cache all game data to ram at game launch. It also doesn't store game data in the ram when it's not directly needed.

[big_t 1]

Arma 3 STREAMS the game from your hdd or ssd.

For the post where someone "jokes" about not buying OCZ... The failure and issue rate on OCZ's is NOT higher than any other ssd brand in fact when compared to others their stability can be higher in some cases. The reason OCZ has a bad rap is purely because of the volume of drives they sell. They sell more SSD's than any other company. People are always more inclined to post issues than they are to post praise for a piece of hardware.

Well here is a link to a fail rate list from 2012. 7.03 percent,,,, that sir is abysmal. Take from it what you like. Either way OCZ has a track record of a terrible fail rate. They may very well be better now.

http://www.behardware.com/articles/862-7/components-returns-rates-6.html

[Gorbachev 1]

Even games using a full 64 bit architecture will still benefit from ramdisk. Going from 32bit to 64bit doesn't magically cache all game data to ram at game launch. It also doesn't store game data in the ram when it's not directly needed.

I thought just moving all my games and applications out of Program Files x86 would cause them to automagically utilize the full capabilities of my i7. :j:

[Leon86 13]

If people are worried about their ssd they should only monitor write actions, there will not be many, if any.

[WalkerDown 1]

If people are worried about their ssd they should only monitor write actions, there will not be many, if any.

You can be worried about your mechanical disk as well (in this case you wouldn't worry just about the write cycles...), so the problem remains: ArmA3 "streams" the files, even when it's not (technically) necessary. It is a waste of resources and it affects the game performances. It would be nice to have (even a basic) file caching, since it doesn't look to be that hard to implement (for a game developer). I'm honestly surprised that it doesn't have a such primitive technology already, that's why i tought it was a "bug" rather than a missing feature.

[fabio_chavez 103]

Every week we discover that an issue of 4 years ago, is again here today.. so the question is: what they did in this years? It's the 2013.. the game is not taking advantage of multiple cores (neither it can use fully two of them), it doesn't take advantage of having 24GB or 32GB or RAM aboard (it's pretty standard nowaday, considering the RAM cost) ... it's not that you must be that skilled to deploy a basic file caching: why the hell my HD is reading the same file zillions of time when it can sits in the memory after the first reading? File caching is something that any average coder knows of... wth.

but these informations are not correct, betapatches and startup parameters made multicores and +4gb ram available in arma 2 allready.

[Ezcoo 47]

but these informations are not correct, betapatches and startup parameters made multicores and +4gb ram available in arma 2 allready.

Arma 2, just like Arma 3, is 32-bit application. They can't use more than 4 GB RAM in any situation. It doesn't matter if you add -maxmem=8192 in the startup parameters – it is there but doesn't change anything in reality. Only thing it could cause is game crash.

[RuecanOnRails 10]

Complete file caching in Arma 3 isn't really feasible.

Arma is unlike many other games. No matter what mission you are playing, the entire map, structures and object data can and is loaded. Statis alone can require 6gb of data that can be loaded and unloaded based simply upon the direction you are facing. In order to cache all that data you would require a minimum of 8gb of ram (you need extra for the OS, background programs, and the game to actually run)

Stratis is the smaller island with Altis coming in at a much larger size. If we double the size of Statis, and say Altis and data may require 12gb bumping the minimum up to 14-16gb of ram minimum as a requirement.

File caching in other games is easily done as their maps in general are much smaller in size and complexity. Comparing arma to other games doesn't work.

Still the only difference you will see going from hdd, to ssd, to ram(disk) is slightly less stutter as data is loaded quicker. It does not add FPS.

Edited April 2, 2013 by RuecanOnRails

[Ezcoo 47]

Still the only difference you will see going from hdd, to ssd, to ram(disk) is slightly less stutter as data is loaded quicker. It does not add FPS.

Agreed, I tested it actually some hours ago... I copied my whole A3 folder from SSD to RAMdisk that had from 500 to about 4500 MB/s read speed, skipped the Steam launch to make sure that the game is run from RAMdisk and benchmarked the game (PC specs: i5-3570k@4,5 GHz, GTX 670 OC edition, 16GB 1600 MHz 9-9-9-24 DDR3 RAM, Win7 64-bit, Samsung 830 SSD). The result was surprisingly a little bit worse (-0,7%) with RAMdisk than with SSD. The change in stuttering wasn't very noticeable either. The loading times, however, were ridiculously short – e.g. Stratis was loaded in few seconds.