An SSD greatly speeds up launching of KSP!!!!! :)

[rexscates]

I bought a small SSD with the sole purpose of speeding up KSP booting times.

and yep it sure does!

-rex

hash tag I don't do hash tags

editted well it only seems to change things for me?

hrmm i guess I am special along with my KSP memory leak in all my installs even plain vanilla.

Edited June 1, 2014 by rexscates
based upon results below

[Kasuha]

There's little doubt it will be faster but I don't think the difference will be significant on well maintained (i.e. at least defragmented, in better case sorted) disk.

Care to share any numbers, such as how long did it take before and how long does it take now? How many mods you use, eventually how much memory does KSP take right after load?

For example on my standard HDD, stock KSP (no mods) takes 36 seconds from launch to menu and KSP takes up 1460 kB memory.

Edited June 1, 2014 by Kasuha

[Duke23]

I'm curious about this as well, thinking of picking up a SSD but I can't convince myself it will be worth it. Load times don't bother me as much as framerates...

[rexscates]

probably half to 1/3rd the time.

After load memory is 2.6 gigs or so. I also have a weird memory leak (increases memory allocation over time) in basically all versions and even clean installs on a win 7 64 bit machine.

I do use the memory reduction mod to decrease the memory usage down to the 2.6 gig amount.

I hope that 64 bit version occurs soon so frame rates improve and I can install more mods

[Red Iron Crown]

I found an SSD made little to no difference in KSP loading times. In my experience, a faster CPU makes for faster loading. For a while I had two PCs on which I played KSP, one with a slow processor and SSD, the other with a faster CPU and a mechanical disk; the fast CPU/mechanical disk machine consistently loaded KSP faster.

That's not to say SSDs aren't a good thing, the difference for most day to day tasks is significant.

[rexscates]

well my computer is also fast

[nli2work]

i7 3.5ghz not overclocked

KSP w/ mods; 2.93 gb loaded at start menu (When the music starts)

Corsair Performance3 SSD [17% fragmentation]

2:00 min

WDC WD1002FAEX SATA 7200RPM [0% fragmentation]

2:16 min

Seagate ST235062 IDE 7200RPM [50% fragmentation]

2:51 min

Edited June 1, 2014 by nli2work

[_Aramchek_]

well my computer is also fast

As is mine, 3570k@ 4.7ghz, and I found adding an ssd, in my case a ocz vector 150, made almost no difference in the initial game loading speed, or when launching.

That was going from a WD Black 1tb high speed spinny drive.

Don't get an ssd just FOR ksp, if you're getting one anyway, cool, but it won't help you much in ksp.

[rexscates]

i wonder if my install was severely fragmented since it was a download at various times and now it is linear. either way much better for me.

As is mine, 3570k@ 4.7ghz, and I found adding an ssd, in my case a ocz vector 150, made almost no difference in the initial game loading speed, or when launching.

That was going from a WD Black 1tb high speed spinny drive.

Don't get an ssd just FOR ksp, if you're getting one anyway, cool, but it won't help you much in ksp.

[Wallace]

I found KSP loads way faster when I got an SSD (at a guess twice as fast), tho I got new ram at the same time (more and faster) and switched to 64 bit windows 7 from 32 bit vista, so tricky to know how much improvement is down to the SSD.

Different computers have different bottlenecks so hard to say what effect anything is going to have. I was upgrading from a 5400rpm SATA laptop harddrive, that has been slightly defective for years and was riddled with bad sectors, so I got a huuge improvement all round from the SSD upgrade. If you're running a fancy new high speed disc then it's probably not worth upgrading unless you need a new hard drive anyway.

Oh, and btw fragmentation on an SSD is pretty much irrelevant, as it doesn't actually have sectors but pretends that it does to the OS cos that's what the OS deals in, the OS really has no idea what's going on on the drive so the fragmentation reported by the OS is like telling you if you have the right arrangement of the horse harnesses in your 100 horsepower engine.

[FenrirWolf]

I'm curious about this as well, thinking of picking up a SSD but I can't convince myself it will be worth it. Load times don't bother me as much as framerates...

An SSD is worth it just for having everything about navigating your OS being faster.

[katateochi]

I got an SSD a couple months back and I found that for basically everything except KSP it makes a huge difference; hibernating, searching for files, installing things, everything except loading KSP!!

Copied the same install to both disks and tested (the other disk is a WD raptor), over three tests the raptor actually had a slightly faster average loading time than the SSD:

WD Raptor - 2.03

Samsug SSD - 2.10

(this is a very modded install)

So my machines bottle neck is not the harddrives!

If your thinking of getting an SSD then I'd say do it, just don't do it simply cos you want better KSP performance. If you want your OS to load super fast or to go into hibernate in record times then SSDs rule.

[Vaporized Steel]

Practically any file loads faster when accesed from a SSD. Although with small files that's hardly noticeable. For example, I play Flight simulator X and I installed about 80gb of mods to this game. Without a SSD with a fully defragmented 7200rpm harddrive it could take litteraly 15-20+ minutes for the simulator to read all the plugins from the harddrive prior to booting. After gotting a SSD that was shortened to 3 minutes with the same amount of mods.

KSP doesn't actually load as much.

Prior to as it is now I reinstalled my computer 1 month ago and in the process of installing, updating, backing up a whole lot (like FSX and ksp lol) I didn't yet defragment any of the disks yet and had put ksp on a 7200rpm seagate drive pretty much stuffed with 3/4 of data.

Now I play KSP on a fully defragmented HDD which I did with O&O defrag (A defragger App)

Although I didn't write down the exact difference I estimate it took perhaps half the time compared to loading the game + mods on the non defragmentated disk.

I'm just saying before everyone runs to the computer stores buying one when things can be satisfactory just by defragmentation.

[Kasuha]

Edit: nevermind.

[Rarity]

I got an SSD a couple months back and I found that for basically everything except KSP it makes a huge difference; hibernating, searching for files, installing things, everything except loading KSP!!

You should disable hibernation if you have an SSD. If your OS is on the SSD, then boot time should not be an issue and disabling hibernation will free up 8 gigs of precious SSD space.

[katateochi]

You should disable hibernation if you have an SSD. If your OS is on the SSD, then boot time should not be an issue and disabling hibernation will free up 8 gigs of precious SSD space.

I switch between a Linux OS (for work) and windows (for games). I don't often hibernate windows, but to save having to set up 9 virtual desktops of work files and programs I nearly always hibernate my Linux install. It's not about saving boot time for me, its about saving time opening everything I need for work, so those few GB are worth it.

[Nuke]

ssds make everything faster. i dont expect to see mechanical hard drives on the market for much longer. especially with moore's law making ssds halve in price every 2 years.

[MarvinKitFox]

ssds make everything faster. i dont expect to see mechanical hard drives on the market for much longer. especially with moore's law making ssds halve in price every 2 years.

Mechanicals are still 1/10 the cost, for 10 times the storage.

And doubling that capacity every 18 months.

Storage on physical disk is getting cheaper, at a greater rate than for SSD.

I can get two 4Tb hard drives, for the same cost as a cheapo 0.4 SSD.

[Kasuha]

Mechanicals are still 1/10 the cost, for 10 times the storage.

I have taken a look and a 250 GB SSD is about three times the price of a 250 GB mechanical drive at my local reseller.

And doubling that capacity every 18 months.

Storage on physical disk is getting cheaper, at a greater rate than for SSD.

Mechanical drives were 2 TB when SSDs started being available at 30 GB capacities. Now, mechanical drives are at 6 TB and SSDs are at 2 TB. That's change from 66:1 to 3:1.

CRTs were also always cheaper than LCD monitors. All the time till they stopped selling at all. I think here we're watching history repeating itself, maybe just a bit slower.

[Aghanim]

I found an SSD made little to no difference in KSP loading times. In my experience, a faster CPU makes for faster loading. For a while I had two PCs on which I played KSP, one with a slow processor and SSD, the other with a faster CPU and a mechanical disk; the fast CPU/mechanical disk machine consistently loaded KSP faster.

That's not to say SSDs aren't a good thing, the difference for most day to day tasks is significant.

I think the bottleneck isn't in the storage, because I have tried putting KSP inside a ramdisk and it doesn't load much faster

[xcorps]

I migrated ksp to my SSD (plextor) and saved a whopping 5-7 seconds.

I boot win7 x64 faster than ksp loads.