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This is my second laptop with an SSD and a HDD, and I feel like I've done the space allocation wrong because I'm getting long loading time for video games. Here's what each drive currently holds:

  • SSD (128Go):
    • #Windows OS
    • Program Files (mostly utilities)
    • System "My Documents" folder
    • Hibernation file


  • HDD (1To):
    • Video Game libraries
    • My actual documents folders
    • Swap (pagefile.sys)



Is there something glaringly wrong I'm doing that I should change to squeeze the most performance out of this setup?
#windows

Lofenyy (moved) reshared this.

Jonathan Beverley
Jonathan Beverley  
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No, but your games are loading off the spinning disk, so they're going to do it at spinning disk speed. There might be something happening where windows is spinning down the HDD to save power, which you might be able to fix in the power management settings.
Isaac Kuo
Isaac Kuo  
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Do NOT put swap on a spinning hard drive. Put it on the SSD. Don't be worried about frequent rewrites. I don't think that's really been an issue for SSDs for years, and in any case it was never worth the performance hit to worry about it.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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@Isaac Kuo Thanks Isaac, this was the thing that jumped at me when I looked at the situation. However the SSD is starving for space, so I haven’t always had the physical space to have the swap on it.
@Isaac Kuo
Isaac Kuo
Isaac Kuo  
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I don't use Windows for gaming so I can't advise about gaming performance specifically, but I do have one coworker whose Windows 7 workstation is just bizarrely sluggish and we never have figured out why. Stuff loads slowly ... sometimes very slowly ... a lot of performance is slow ...

It really makes no sense. It's got plenty of RAM and a much faster CPU than my workstation. Neither looks heavily loaded during times the computer is sluggish. It's got an SSD ...

I just bring this up because it demonstrates that sometimes a Windows computer is just slow and sluggish without obvious reasons. (We have enterprise level security, virus scanning, etc ... it's not anything like that.)
Life Sim Engine
Life Sim Engine  
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pick some specific game, move it to the ssd, see if it's faster
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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That’s a good suggestion, but my SSD is always almost full as it is, so I have to pick my battles very carefully.
Life Sim Engine
Life Sim Engine  
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Have you tried running with no swap file? RAM is big these days
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I haven’t, but I’m not even sure Windows will allows me to disable the swap.
Lofenyy (moved)
Lofenyy (moved)  
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I second this as well. You will have to pick your battles carefully, as you've already noted.

However, why is your SSD so full? My system + all my files fit in about 50GiB. Granted, it's Linux, but still.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Breakdown of my SSD (118 GB):
  • System Users folder: 48 GB including:
    • Spotify Data: 6 GB
    • Backblaze Backup: 6 GB
    • Signal Attachments: 5 GB
    • NVIDIA Driver Cache: 2 GB


  • Windows: 22 GB
  • Program Files: 19 GB
  • Hibernation memory: 7 GB
  • Swap (after I moved it): 5 GB although it can climb to 11 GB apparently
  • ASUS eSupport folder: 2.5 GB
  • Free space: 25 GB


But this is after I deleted 6 GB of logs Intel Extreme Tuning Utility collected over 4 years.
Ji Fu
Ji Fu  
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@Hypolite Petovan isn't really a lot for swap?
@Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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These are the system-recommended settings. I can set my own minimum/maximum but I have no idea what I'm doing.
This entry was edited (2 years ago)
Lofenyy (moved)
Lofenyy (moved)  
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*thinks to myself* "25GB should be enough for most if not all of his games, right??"
Lofenyy (moved)
Lofenyy (moved)  
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You could move things that load fast enough from your User folder to the HDD to make room on the SSD for games.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I actually already did this when I moved the user-controlled "My Documents" folder to the HDD, but Windows uses the User folder automatically for storage for apps like cache, logs, saves, etc...

So I would have to move all or nothing, and I'm not sure it would like me to move a system folder.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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I have 30 installed games currently:
  • Steam Games: 184 GB (including 40 GB for Dota 2)
  • UPlay Games: 49.4 GB
  • Battle.net games: 5.6 GB
  • Origin Games: 7.8 GB
  • Epic Games: 2.5 GB
  • GOG Games: 1.7 GB
  • Itch.io Games: 1.5 GB
  • Rockstar Games: 0.3 GB


Total: 252 GB 😅
Lofenyy (moved)
Lofenyy (moved)  
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Listen, I knew I was living under a rock but... wow. Dota 2 wouldn't be able to fit on a standard Blu-ray disc, it'd have to be double-layered, which is very uncommon and probably expensive to burn and mass manufacture.

I'm gunna guess that Dota 2 doesn't have a console release because of this. I'm also gunna guess that if it does have a release, it's likely only on Playstation 3+, or it's download only.
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Dota 2 is aggressively PC-only as it is a competitive RTS using more hotkeys than you can map on a regular controller. However, its installed size wouldn't be an obstacle to play it on console as you would simply download it from the online store like I did on my computer.
Lofenyy (moved)
Lofenyy (moved)  
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Do I look like I know what a Doe-Ta is??

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QwucZK1BCj4

Do I look Like I know What a JPEG is

its something with hotdogs right?
YouTube
Ji Fu
Ji Fu  
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@Lofenyy LOL. BTW, is there a particular reason you are linking directly to YouTube rather than to a Freedom Respecting front-end like Invidious? https://invidious.rhyshl.live/watch?v=QwucZK1BCj4&t=2
@Lofenyy (moved)
Hypolite Petovan
Hypolite Petovan  
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Select the target drive "Dota 2" (40.35 GB) should be moved to:

  • OS (C😀: 24.5 GB available
I guess I'll contend with long initial loading times.
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