I see that solid state drives are getting cheaper, with a 240GB Internal Solid State Drive - 2.5" Form Factor, SATA III, 6Gbps around $150. The 120GB ones with slightly slower speeds are much cheaper. Has anyone installed EQ2 on one of these new solid state hard drives, or runs their whole pc on one? I was wondering if it gives any significant game boost? I have a new high end graphics card and I know that didn't make a hill of beans worth of difference to EQ2. I read somewhere about a person claiming that their PC's boot up time went from 13 seconds to 3 seconds. That's amazing if it's true. I was wondering how much of an effect it would have on EQ2 gaming performance? Instant zoning?
If you have the game running on the drive it helps with zoning, and loading assets a great deal, you'll see a significant performance gain from it with the game.
It'll help quite a bit with zoning times, and anything that needs to load textures, assets etc. from disk. One caveat, though: the cost for that performance is that the memory in the SSD has a limited number of write cycles before it fails. They use load-levelling internally to spread the hit out, but EQ2 has a nasty thing in it: the log files are written under the game's installation folder. Since they're constantly being written to, and each write causes a write cycle to a block on the SSD, just playing the game constantly burns up your SSD's lifespan. Not an issue if you replace drives or computers every couple of years, but I'm used to thinking in 5-10 year lifespans for hardware and in those timeframes I'm looking at a likely 2-3 drive failures just from wear. My solution was to use the Link Shell Extension add-on for Win7 to turn "EverQuest II\logs" into a junction pointing to an EQ2Logs folder on a regular hard drive. That gives me the best of both worlds: the game files live on a fast SSD, the constantly-written-to logs directory lives on a regular hard drive where it doesn't wear out the SSD, and the game and ACT and the like are none the wiser. http://schinagl.priv.at/nt/hardlink...nkshellext.html
Jrral@Unrest wrote: I use something similiar. I use the built-in Mklink ability. http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/wind...-windows-vista/
Jrral@Unrest wrote: As someone who just started using a solid state drive, I'm really interested in setting this up myself. I wasn't aware of the stress that EQ2 caused a SSD (I guess playing any game on them frequently in general would wear them down?) just through regular use. That said, I have the program downloaded, but I was little hesitant to use it as I've never done anything like this before. I hate to ask this, but do you think you could state specifically how you went about setting up the junction, and which folders particularly (if any) need to be copied to the regular hard drive to make this work properly? I just want to make sure I don't miss a step or something. In any case, thanks a ton for the link. I honestly had no idea how easy it was to wear these SSDs down just through regular gaming, so I'm glad to learn about it, sooner rather than later . Edit: Just wanted to add that I'm using Windows 7 64-bit.
deadcrickets2 wrote: Wow, not sure how I missed this. So this process can be done using a built-in program? I'm assuming Windows 7 has this feature too?
Senvilan wrote: What I did: Assuming C:\ is an SSD and D:\ is a regular hard drive and you're using LSE Create D:\Everquest2 Go to where you have the game installed on C: and move the logs folder over to D:\Everquest2\logs Right-click on D:\Everquest2\logs and select Pick Link Source Go to your games folder and right-click on a blank area. Select Drop As... and then Junction Done. The logs folder in your game directory should now have a small grey chain-link symbol on the lower-left corner indicating it's a junction, and double-clicking on it should open it showing the contents of D:\Everquest2\logs
