<p>Hi,</p><p>I've been toying with the idea of running EQ2 from a 32 GB USB stick. </p><p>Now I did some reasearch, and it seems that a fast magnetic HDD reads and writes at about 90 MB/sec.  The USB sticks top out at about 33 MB/sec for reading and 18 MB/sec for writing.  Being that EQ2 does small file loads (certainly well under 33 MB), i'm wondering if the nearly instantaneous read access of the USB stick would make them a better choice. </p><p>My system runs fine and i've fairly fast zone times, but my goal is to reduce these load times as much possible AND have maximum FPS with maximum settings at all times.  I raid and many times need to see as much detail as possible.  Also, i two box on the same machine, so any benefit here is a bonus. </p><p>Any thoughts on the matter? I'm particularily interested to hear feedback if anyone is doing this now. </p>

<p><cite>Bournev wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Hi,</p><p>I've been toying with the idea of running EQ2 from a 32 GB USB stick. </p><p>Now I did some reasearch, and it seems that a fast magnetic HDD reads and writes at about 90 MB/sec.  The USB sticks top out at about 33 MB/sec for reading and 18 MB/sec for writing.  Being that EQ2 does small file loads (certainly well under 33 MB), i'm wondering if the nearly instantaneous read access of the USB stick would make them a better choice. </p><p>My system runs fine and i've fairly fast zone times, but my goal is to reduce these load times as much possible AND have maximum FPS with maximum settings at all times.  I raid and many times need to see as much detail as possible.  Also, i two box on the same machine, so any benefit here is a bonus. </p><p>Any thoughts on the matter? I'm particularily interested to hear feedback if anyone is doing this now. </p></blockquote><p>I do not think a USB drive will help you much in this case.  The USB drive might load zones slightly faster depending on your current hard drive, but it shouldn't have an effect anywhere else.  I wouldn't even feel comfortable declaring that the zone times would be shorter.  Also, keep in mind that the USB flash drives have a limited number of read/writes.  Those probably wont run out quickly, but they will run our with constant play.</p><p>The only benefit I can see for having EQ2 on a USB drive would the portibility it provides.</p>

<p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bournev wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Hi,</p><p>I've been toying with the idea of running EQ2 from a 32 GB USB stick. </p><p>Now I did some reasearch, and it seems that a fast magnetic HDD reads and writes at about 90 MB/sec.  The USB sticks top out at about 33 MB/sec for reading and 18 MB/sec for writing.  Being that EQ2 does small file loads (certainly well under 33 MB), i'm wondering if the nearly instantaneous read access of the USB stick would make them a better choice. </p><p>My system runs fine and i've fairly fast zone times, but my goal is to reduce these load times as much possible AND have maximum FPS with maximum settings at all times.  I raid and many times need to see as much detail as possible.  Also, i two box on the same machine, so any benefit here is a bonus. </p><p>Any thoughts on the matter? I'm particularily interested to hear feedback if anyone is doing this now. </p></blockquote><p>I do not think a USB drive will help you much in this case.  The USB drive might load zones slightly faster depending on your current hard drive, but it shouldn't have an effect anywhere else.  I wouldn't even feel comfortable declaring that the zone times would be shorter.  Also, keep in mind that the USB flash drives have a limited number of read/writes.  Those probably wont run out quickly, but they will run our with constant play.</p><p>The only benefit I can see for having EQ2 on a USB drive would the portibility it provides.</p></blockquote><p>suspect there will be a drop in zoning, USB 2.0 transfer rate is only 480Mbps, Sata rev 2 is 3.0 Gbs, Sata rev 3 will hit around 6 Gbps</p>

<p>Now if you were serious about it,  then you could try say a 32gb CF card with a sata connector.</p><p><a href="http://cgi.ebay.com/CF-Compact-Flash-Type-I-II-to-Serial-SATA-Adapter-9693_W0QQitemZ180331954197QQcmdZViewItemQQptZPCA_C ables_Adapters?hash=item29fc9f4015&_trksid=p3286.c 0.m14">http://cgi.ebay.com/CF-Compact-Flas...id=p3286.c0.m14</a></p><p>Depending on the CF card could be quite fast,  I wouldn't recommend logging enabled in eq2 as it would do a lot of extra writes to the drive. </p><p>The whole deal would be sub $100 in cost.  I'm sure you can google CF performance using it as a SSD drive,  and remember not every CF is created equal.</p>

<p><cite>Wingrider01 wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>TSR-DanielH wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p><cite>Bournev wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>Hi,</p><p>I've been toying with the idea of running EQ2 from a 32 GB USB stick. </p><p>Now I did some reasearch, and it seems that a fast magnetic HDD reads and writes at about 90 MB/sec.  The USB sticks top out at about 33 MB/sec for reading and 18 MB/sec for writing.  Being that EQ2 does small file loads (certainly well under 33 MB), i'm wondering if the nearly instantaneous read access of the USB stick would make them a better choice. </p><p>My system runs fine and i've fairly fast zone times, but my goal is to reduce these load times as much possible AND have maximum FPS with maximum settings at all times.  I raid and many times need to see as much detail as possible.  Also, i two box on the same machine, so any benefit here is a bonus. </p><p>Any thoughts on the matter? I'm particularily interested to hear feedback if anyone is doing this now. </p></blockquote><p>I do not think a USB drive will help you much in this case.  The USB drive might load zones slightly faster depending on your current hard drive, but it shouldn't have an effect anywhere else.  I wouldn't even feel comfortable declaring that the zone times would be shorter.  Also, keep in mind that the USB flash drives have a limited number of read/writes.  Those probably wont run out quickly, but they will run our with constant play.</p><p>The only benefit I can see for having EQ2 on a USB drive would the portibility it provides.</p></blockquote><p>suspect there will be a drop in zoning, USB 2.0 transfer rate is only 480Mbps, Sata rev 2 is 3.0 Gbs, Sata rev 3 will hit around 6 Gbps</p></blockquote><p>Aye, but actual read / write speed is nowhere near 'theoretical maximum' speed - no hard drive touches SATA speed.  I have thought about the limited number of writes, but i suspect that the drive would still be usable for years, which would make it perfectly usable. </p><p>Vodroc, thanks for the CF link - I had considered this also. </p><p>Would still love to hear from anyone doing this (or even a SSD drive) to tell us about their load times and whether they feel the flash memory (USB, CF or SSD) affected their overall FPS in taxing situations.   Thanks in advance.</p>

<p>I have a G.Skill 64gb MLC flash drive in my laptop that replaced a 120gb 5400rpm drive. It was a vast improvement in speed but I have compaired the loading time with a friends pc that has a 500gb sata 7200rpm drive and its about the same. Sometimes the SDD beats the mechanical drive. I also have two 320gb 7200rpm in raid 0 and its a little faster then the SSD. I have tested the read/write speed of the raid 0 and the ssd. The raid 0 gets about 200/150 and the SSD about 110/80, but because of having practicly no access time and the mechanical drive having about 14ms or worse they come out to be very close. If you do get a SSD just make sure you don't get one with a jmicron controler. All of the G.Skill drives use samsung crontrolers. The drive I have IS a samsung drive with a G.Skill sticker on it. <img src="/smilies/69934afc394145350659cd7add244ca9.gif" border="0" alt="SMILEY" /> tomshardware.com has a good benchmark on flash and ssd storage; plus google is a very good thing if you know how to use it.</p><p>Anyway, back to the original posted question, running on a usb anything is a bad idea. Not only will you get a max read/write of about 35MB/s, USB2.0 is half-duplex. That means it can either read or write but not at the same time so you get even less throughput because of it. I have tested running programs from usb flash vs. ide/sata mounted drives and the ide/sata mounted drives win everytime except when writing lots of very small files and thats only because when a file is writen/changed the filesystem has to be updated on that chage as it happens. With flash having very, very fast access time it can write these small files faster because it doesn't have to move a mechanical arm and wait for a spinning platter to write the information. That being said, a westerndigital velociraptor drive at 15k rpm will give you about the same speed as a 'good' MLC flash drive, will cost about the same and have more storage space.</p>

<p>TemberWolf, thanks for the great reply.  So USB drive is out for sure.  Any thoughts on the CF -> SATA option that Vodroc linked?  I've read up on SSD's and the only one i could see myself buying today is the 2nd generation Intel, which is a tad pricey yet.</p>

<p><cite>Bournev wrote:</cite></p><blockquote><p>TemberWolf, thanks for the great reply.  So USB drive is out for sure.  Any thoughts on the CF -> SATA option that Vodroc linked?  I've read up on SSD's and the only one i could see myself buying today is the 2nd generation Intel, which is a tad pricey yet.</p></blockquote><p>Use the Intel as the boot/OS and a raid 0+1 for data, happy with that configuration</p>

<p>I also looked into a CF for my media center PC a while back. best i could fine was a 300x .....think that was around 80mb read? I may be mistaken as it's been a while. It cost in the long run of getting the converter for CF to ide and if you can find one, and the do exist, a converter to sata, the price is very close to a regular ssd. I have even seen CF converters that had a raid controler of some sort where you can put two cf on one adapter and it would look like one drive and also a few very expensive laptop hard drive sized caddies so use CF in laptops. I bought my G.Skill ssd from newegg.com for about $140usd but its gone up in price a bit. heres the link:</p><p><a href="http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231220" target="_blank">http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...N82E16820231220</a> $179.99usd at time of post.</p><p>  I am VERY happy with this product. In benchmarks it was about equall to a western digital black 320gb 7200rpm dirve. In some tests the ssd won, obviously the access time and small file read/write but for some things like very large files the WD Black hdd won. I'm talking about 500mb+ files and there are not any files that large that are accessed that offten by anything othere then videos and pictures of very high quallity. I run EQ2 with all the same options on my laptop as i do on my desktop like chat logging. Also the flash memory chips in all flash storage runs alot cooler so you can put this in a hotter enviroment than a mechanical hard drive.</p><p>Like i said in the previous post, and i can't stress this enough, check what crontroller the SSD drive uses as there are some crap ones out there. Jmicron is awfull. Most of the OCZ flash drives use Jmicron controllers but oddly enough use samsung flash memory chips? strange..... Tomshardware.com pulled apart the exact drive I have and found that on the underside of the pannel the G.Skill sticker is on there was the samsung full retail with specs and everything on it. so basiclly g.skill is buying the drive from samsung, flipping the name plate over and putting their sticker on it. XD</p><p>Also as a side note/off topic. Windows 7 is optimized for SSD windows xp and vista are not. you will see an incress in performance from xp to vista and a vast improvment from vista/xp to windows 7. lookup "windows 7 ssd" on google and you will see what i mean. XD</p>