I'm only into UK routes, not really into kettles, love me some AP and JT stuff and a fair few community made freeware routes and repaints. I did have TS on it's own 240gb SATA SSD which my current TS ownership nigh on two thirds filled, so what I'm looking at now is a 500gb M.2. My question to you more seasoned digital hoarders bearing in mind what I said above... Is that a reasonable and futureproof enough size? I'm not asking you to look at crystal (or any other) balls and predict my final content ownership, I'm just after a rough guide of where you're at for my own deductificationing. I'm also getting a 1Tb SATA SSD just for Steam/Origin/Uplay/(sure there was another one) and all the games that I actually play which is nearly less than the amount of blinkin' launchers I need.. Also hopefully in the not too distant future a (lesson learnt) 10Tb external HDD to keep my backups fully out of the clutches of my new PSU and any possible future god complex power surges striking my poor innocent hard working components down in their prime, One good thing (silver lining) about this forced upgrade to a new MB, PSU and 9th gen CPU is I can now chuck a RTX 3080 in whereas my old board and more to the point the 6th gen CPU that the board supported wouldn't have, all I got to do is save up.... Oh and wait for Nvidia to build some more and get one before the scumbag scalpers do! Having just re-read this before submitting, I can definitely tell I need to go get some sleep, can you? Not gonna edit it though... deal..
If you're running TSx of an SSD and you have another disk / drive for file storage then 500Gb should be fine for most installations, so long as you keep the downloads etc on another disk. I have three, one for windows / general program installations (500Gb), one for TSx / TSW (1Tb) and one for "dumping downloads, profiles and pictures on" (2Tb)
I have a lot of add-ons plus Freeware routes and scenarios My G:\Steam\steamapps\common\railworks folder is currently 554Gb Peter
There's no such thing as future proof. I remember building my first PC in 1993 and thinking my 256 MEGAbyte hard drive was surely massive enough for anything... yes.. megabytes. That's barely enough space to rip an entire CD into MPs if I use a high, variable bitrate, and certainly not enough to rip it as a FLAC file. LOL I'd get a 1TB SSD. I'd NOT use a M.2 slot either, as there's precious little advantage to game loading times by using M.2.. even with a NVME M.2 drive. Watch this.... It's just not worth the extra cost to gain a second or two, and wasting an M.2 slot for what is essentially storage. A SATAIII SSD is more than enough, and they're cheaper. Get a 1TB SATA SSD. Avoid cheap LOVE without a DRAM cache, and avoind WD models, especially WD Green... they have longevity issues. A 1TB Samsung 870QVO is around £90. A 860 EVO is only £105. A Crucial BX500 1TB is less than £90.
Bit hard to not by a WD when they now own Sandisk too, and yes I've bought a WD and a Sandisk Future proof is/was a relative term, if it see's me a couple o' three years it's futurified enough in my books. As for not getting the M.2 if I'd have made the move of moving TS over to an M.2 like I'd long since planned too then I'd still be playing TS right now, my M.2 was the only thing that survived the purge. Might just be dumb luck but I'll take that over an intelligent failure any day with a Y in it.
That helps because I know you have a LOT of TS stuff, If I removed all the European stuff from that (well, most, because I did get a few in bundles) then I'd be well and truly below my 500Gb max target.
Yep that's exactly how I intend to do it and how I did it prior to the failure too. (sorry I answered out of sequence I read and replied from bottom to top for some odd reason).
There's something to be said for speed in that it reduces tile stutter- that moment when you're driving and the frame rate tanks because the next stretch of scenery is being loaded in.
SSD performance starts to wane once you fill them beyond approximately 70% of their capacity. As they fill past that their speeds reduce dramatically the closer to full you get. I would suggest, if you can, you go for at least a 1TB NVMe 2 drive. I use this one which gives a very acceptable bang for buck. It’s not the very fastest, but it’s still very good. https://www.tomshardware.com/uk/reviews/intel-ssd-660p-qlc-nvme,5719.html The 1TB version is a steal at around £90.
In game, you'll not notice any difference between M.2 and a good SATAIII SSD. Other brands are available I recommend Samsung. It almost certainly was dumb luck, yes. Explain "intelligent failure"? I'd rather take a working back up solution. Seriously... if you all want to spend more than you need just for the e-peen bragging rights of saying you have TS on a PCIe 4.0 NVME M.2 drive, knock yourselves out, nothing wrong with that I suppose, but you'll get little to no noticeable speed advantage in games as countless videos demonstrate ...or how about this blind test then.... I'm trying to help you here. What you will save you could put towards starting a savings fund for a back up solution that actually works If you had one of those, you'd not be in this situation now. If you're rolling cash though... go for it.
BTW... if it gives you any indication of required size, my Railworks folder is almost 275GB, and I only have British routes and trains (apart from those that were bundled with the various versions of TS I've bought) and I have no interest in steam either. So that's just British diesel and electric content, apart from stuff that was bundled with TS itself. If you play European or US routes too, and add steam to the mix also, then as Peter has demonstrated, a 500GB drive is not enough.. not even close if you are serious about a comprehensive collection. Add to that the fact that it's never a good idea to "fill" a SSD, and that advertised sizes will be less if you over-provision (which you should), then even a 1TB SSD is not even slightly outrageous as a drive solely for Train Simulator.
Hmm.... My boot drive is a very old Samsung 830 SSD. Here's a benchmark I ran on it when new, and empty apart from a fresh install of Windows. Here's one I just ran now... with the drive at 77% full.... Not all tests are the same in the newer version of the benchmark, so some tests net a different result, but overall... It's pretty much the same after 6 years and being nearly 80% full. I think the "it slows down when full" thing is an urban myth, or just because people don't over-provision their drives to mitigate against NAND cell failure over time. This is why some drives are 512GB... whereas some are 500, or even 480GB. Some reserve space for over-provisioning in firmware, and some don't, assuming you will do so yourself. How many people do though? How many people know what that is? The slow down some people report is probably more to do with NAND cell failure on old drives than available capacity being the reason.
I bought a 1TB SSD for a gaming PC about three years ago, thought that would be plenty: now there’s maybe 50GB left thanks to my son’s 600GB of games and my 100GB of TS (on top of other things). See now a 2TB SSD can be had for what I paid for the 1TB. Think an upgrade will have to be made in the coming months.
I remember getting an Amiga with (IIRC) a 170MB HD and thinking, "now we're motoring!" Yes that's not a typo'- megabytes.
I was excited about my first computer as it had (gasp!), an internal hard drive of 80MB. Before then, the Apples we had at uni had your OS, word processor and files all on a 1.44MB floppy! Thank heavens technology improves:
> Thank heavens technology improves: When I think back I seem to remember that my first "computer" game (played on a TV) named Pong was more fun than Train Simulator. . . .
I'm sitting at 220 GB for about 380 DLC. Newer routes tend to be 1-3 GB, but there are older things, trains and scenario packs. I have a 1TB and it's at 50%. I have some large games installed, but I either play them or I don't need them. I have an older, smaller and slower one and use that for some other games instead of letting it idle, 60 of 232 GB. My old SSD did slow down when full, triggering the purchase of the new one. Moving the files was funny, it was doing 10MB/s.
Any hard drive, SSD or mechanical will slow down.. a LOT if actually full... meaning 99% or more full.
Possibly the reason the old SSD was losing performance is that many old SSD's did not have a good Garbage Collection system (nowadays known as TRIM) and so many blocks were "locked" and performance suffered. All drives HDD/SSD need at least 5-10% free space so that Windows can access files and do its thing on the drive. Usually, a HDD's performance deteriorates when it gets much above 60% full, SSD's with a TRIM function should perform at any capacity except at that last 5-10%.
After dabbling with Microsoft Flight Simulator, I was amazed at how many GB TS consumes, but then again, it’s not just generic scenery the world over with a few airports/cities/landmarks detailed, so I shouldn’t be!
1st computer Sinclair spectrum ZX81 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZX81 2nd computer commodore 64 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_64 3rd (and first component PC) 386 That was closely followed by a 486, P1, P2 then I went laptops for a few years and then onto my first gaming PC which had a GeForce 6800GT and a P4, as for storage sizes I can't really recall now.
This isn't really true at all. HDD performance when only 60% will depend on the type of technology used (HDDs have come a LONG way in the past 10 years) and obviously how fragmented its contents are.
