Who uses an SSD for FFXI?Follow

Who here uses an SSD for FFXI and can comment on the differences between this and a standard SATA III HDD, in terms of how FFXI runs. I imagine loading the game will be faster, but the entire login process takes several clicks as it is. Is there much wait time loading between POL and clicking through to terms and then finally character selection screen, or is the load time about the same time given the networking also being done at same time? Are zone loads noticeably faster or is it again limited to data coming from the network?


Edit: is there a pol registry settings for the location of log files, so that if FFXI is installed to an SSD, can I change the location of the log files so to limit writes to the SSD disk, and have the log files stored to a normal HDD.

Edited, May 3rd 2012 6:41pm by shibaaa

I do, but I don't believe it's installed on my SSD.

It should help with uhhh zone loading a bit. Not much though, as Docent said.

I was the weirdo that had XI installed on a Flash drive so I could run it on a netbook with an 8 gig hard drive.

It ran decently enough considering the low res graphics (by necessity) but I did notice that cutscenes especially loaded a bit faster.

I've been planning on purchasing an SSD as part of my next round of upgrades, but that's more for XIV at this point.

Like Docent said, no real difference. I have FFXI on an Intel X25-M, it loads about as fast as it always has.

Are those SSD's worth the cost then? I heard a lot of hype over how they're faster, but when you compare prices you're only getting around a tenth of the storage of a regular HDD for much greater cost. For that sort of storage reduction, it would have to be blisteringly fast for me to consider them an viable alternative just yet.

I think my 1.5TB HDD cost around £120, whereas the nearest equivalent in SSD is only 480Gb and costs nearly £450. Is the speed on them just that much better?

Edited, May 6th 2012 3:18am by Glitterhands

What you need to do is have 2 hard drives, a smaller SSD for your apps and your OS, and a larger standard disk HDD for your media.

If all you're running is Windows, Photoshop, and a few video games, an 80-120 GB solid state drive is enough room to easily hold everything.

Set your iTunes folder to the 1TB "media" drive and keep the 500 GB of music and videos safely tucked away from your OS.

I second everything Docent said. I will never build another PC without an SSD in it.

I've actually convinced my office to buy SSDs for all our developers' machines instead of upgrading to complete new machines this last year, and sticking SSDs in our 3-year-old machines gave us a better performance boost than entirely new machines would've.

It does require fairly specific storage habits, but you get used to that. Most of it comes in setup, and after that it becomes second nature. First thing I do after installing Windows 7 is re-point all the standard media folders (Downloads, Music, Videos, etc.) to my secondary HDD so that they don't clutter my SSD. Once you get your media to live comfortably on your HDD, and nothing but pure application data on the SSD, it's a glorious thing. I can't even remember what it's like to click on an application and have to sit there waiting for it to finish loading.

There IS a down-side to SSDs though!!! Be warned!! Some games these days are designed with loading screens that have useful tips and hints on them. For example, Skyrim. As you're loading a game or changing zones on Skyrim, the game displays useful helps/hints about gameplay. You will never see those with an SSD. It loads too fast. :\

Edited, May 7th 2012 8:26am by Pergatory

Same experience as everyone else, I see no perceptible difference between XI running off a hard disk than on an SSD.

I bought my first SSD due to LOTRO's totally dire design which caused zone loading times of 30 secs, which dropped to 5 or so when installed on an SSD, and I've noticed a small decrease in stuttering in Rift, but XI graphically is a lot simpler archirecture-wise and the game was designed to work sensibly on slow networks .. which is one reason it's so hackable, the client does so much more without server consent than many games now .. so hard-disk delays really don't affect it.

Recently bought a 2TB HD for storage purposes, only to see people start talking about SSDs lately. While I'm curious to see the difference, still not sure the prices are in a comfortable range for me. Managed to get the 2TB drive for about $50 on sale since my primary one was quite easily filling up with game data alone. Nowadays I just swap what I'm most frequently playing back and forth to keep the primary drive cleaner with the occasional defrag. Not a big MP3 whore, but I am starting to keep animes and such I download instead of just ferrying them off to the recycle bin after watching.

I wouldn't really look at SSDs as a storage upgrade, more of a performance upgrade like buying a newer CPU or video card. So your 2TB HDD was likely still a good investment, even if you turn around a month later and buy an SSD. Which you should do!!

Next time you feel the pain of performance and are craving an upgrade, get yourself an SSD. Trust me. You don't need a huge one, so don't cringe at the $500+ price tags on some of them. A 90GB drive would do just fine, and those have been quickly approaching the $100 mark. Remember, you only need application data on the SSD. Windows, Applications, Games, etc. All your MP3s, anime, pictures, and everything else should live on the HDD, since you don't need screaming fast random access to those files. You probably don't mind waiting a tenth of a second for your 2-hour video to start playing after you double-click it, but you do mind a tenth of a second to load each new texture you encounter in a game.

Having just installed the May update, I'll tell you something SSD's are quicker at. 1 second to install the entire 1001 files of the update.
Once it had downloaded them of course. To be fair it only took 5 seconds om my other dual box comp so it's not earth shatterring.

I've been on this current comp with a primary SSD for my OS and a few other bits for near on a couple of years now.
FFXI being the only 'real' game on the SSD due to how often I play it. And the obvious restriction on space not allowing me much to play with for all my other stuff.

Never had the slightest problem with it.
And as said somewhere above, if you get random crashes at least you know the machine is going to reboot in 10 seconds.

So if I wanted to add a SSD to the computer I built, how would I go about switching windows over to that drive?

My SSD came with some cloning software, and it copied over the windows installation to the SSD.

It's probably easier to clone it from a non-techy person perspective, but if you reinstall the OS from scratch you can tweak everything to run the way you want from the get go.

Good ol' Windows XP ran best when you reinstalled it fresh every six months. Win7 can go a few years before it goes all slow and old, but even it will probably run better with a fresh OS install on the SSD.

It's probably best to install Win 7 directly onto the SSD rather than try to copy an existing build over. Win 7 will detect that you have an SSD and it will actually use different default settings based on that. For example, it won't bother you about defragging your hard drive, it'll turn on trim support, etc.

Keiichim, I suggest making sure you have trim support enabled. That's the big one.