Solid State HD - Hog3 ?

SSDs are great for some things, but they're not the cure-all many people expect them to be. We've heard of several people installing SSDs in their consoles with mixed results.

Personally, I've tested SSD's in both the HogIII and the RHFB. They worked, but didn't give a significant performance increase, and in a few cases there was a slight performance decrease.

Why wasn't there a big performance increase? The Hog stores it's shows as thousands of little tiny files, and dealing with small files is where SSDs do the worst. If you're curious, look at what Intel has written on "Write Amplification".

The other factor is that OS's have gotten really good at dealing with rotating media. When you're loading a show, VFS read-ahead masks most of the rotational latency you'd expect to get from reading lots of small files.

I suspect that SLC based flash drives would do better (everything I tested was MLC), but SLC is *far* more expensive.

Thats very nice to know.

Tell something about the upcoming features in the next release :-)

:hogsign:

Johnny,

We have many things we are working on for upcoming releases... I am sure that you will be quite pleased with our plans for the near future... I will post further details as we get a bit closer to the beta testing phase...

Thank you for the explanation Eric. I have also suggested sometime ago SSD, but like you said, after studying a bit more Hogs way to handle things, I realized it's not a good option. Especially, if you think the price. I guess, SSD would only help in starting and loading OS, but with showfiles it would make things slower or there would not be any performance gain.

Brad, how soon is the new release?

:-)
:hogsign:

We have another patch release coming very soon.. the next major release will be sometime after the first of the year...

Eric,

I would like to have an extra HDD for replacement in case of breakdown on my desk.

Is there anything special I should be aware of.
Types of HDDs the console will not run with? Will it run both the 5400-7200rpm versions?

And finally... How do I make the easiest copy of the system. Can I dump my console HDD over to another spare HDD?

thanks
J:hogsign:

The Hog III uses a 3.5" hard drives with a Parallel ATA interface. The drive must be 20 gig or larger.

Officially, we'll only support hard drives purchased from HES. But, it's your console, so if you want to try another drive it's up to you.

If you want to pre-load the software, your best bet is to install it in the console and load the OS by booting from a CD-ROM. Someone who's proficient with linux might be able to transfer the OS another way, but you won't know for sure if it worked until you install it in the console. As long as you have to install it to test it, you may as well load the OS while it's in there too.

Got me Roadhog in from the car and switched it on. It took a good 5 minutes to boot. On the screen where it says loading fixtures the numbers crawled up. Would bringing it in from the cold cause the slow load or is hard drive failure coming my way??

If it's the cold causing it i'm thinking Solid State could be the way to go.

Any thoughts greatly appreciated!

S

not very relevant to the subject but I have a question ;Do you think an external sound card to produce?(RHFB)...(hog3 cd timecod option to RHFB)

CD Timecode is only available on the HogIII console.

full traking for backup and please....usb save option un hog 3 full!!!
for the next release

Let's keep this thread on topic and just discuss solid state drives.

If you'd like to discuss feature requests, the "Requests and Enhancements" section is a better place to do that.