PC Requirements

[NoOne]

if you have a 500-1tb drive now and it sits mostly empty, do yourself a favor and make sure you get a SSD (256gb+ or 512gb if you do something beyond ootp and normal pc use).


mechanical drives are dinosaurs. they are good for one thing nowadays - storage of things that make no use of increased drive speeds. e.g. movies, music, etc..

when your pc starts up in ~10s instead of ~20+s you appreciate them even more. games and programs will load into memory 3x as fast etc... your pagefile can be placed onthe SSD making that even faster, too (supplements RAM).

only get a 1tb+ hdd if you don't have any older drives and need the storage. a hdd is a bottelneck in modern pcs relative to almost all other components.

~$600 would get you a ssd and a good cpu/ram combo i bet.... i wouldn't spend much less than $500 on a new laptop (based on research from last year for a friend, so maybe ~$500-550 now can cut it?)

[The Wolf]

I went by Costco this afternoon and they had an entire row of i7 desktop computers available for less money than it would cost to build then.

Also 128GB USB 3.0 sticks for $23.

[NoOne]

update after patch:

small difference between ssd vs hdd 1-year sim duration. essentially, only the auto-save and loading of the game save time.

early years sim i 3mins on both drives... as time goes by they start taking longer - slight benefit from SSD begins to be noticeable. maybe 20-30 years in.

before the patch there was a 3x time difference... i had not used the ssd with '16, sorry for the misinformation.

still recommend the SSD strongly. i think this game is a bit heavy on host writes to use on a SSD though. this and a few other similar apps/bahaviour will kill it in 2-3 years.

you can set data path to a mechanical drive, but then you lose a bit of the utility. very limited host writes this way.

if they've gotten more robust in the last year or 2, then go for it.

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by NoOne

update after patch:

small difference between ssd vs hdd 1-year sim duration. essentially, only the auto-save and loading of the game save time.

early years sim i 3mins on both drives... as time goes by they start taking longer - slight benefit from SSD begins to be noticeable. maybe 20-30 years in.

before the patch there was a 3x time difference... i had not used the ssd with '16, sorry for the misinformation.

still recommend the SSD strongly. i think this game is a bit heavy on host writes to use on a SSD though. this and a few other similar apps/bahaviour will kill it in 2-3 years.

you can set data path to a mechanical drive, but then you lose a bit of the utility. very limited host writes this way.

if they've gotten more robust in the last year or 2, then go for it.

3 minutes?
That's insane I must be missing some option to sim more quickly.

[Coltrane]

Originally Posted by NoOne

still recommend the SSD strongly. i think this game is a bit heavy on host writes to use on a SSD though. this and a few other similar apps/bahaviour will kill it in 2-3 years.

Game will kill my drive in 2-3 years?

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by jmuelly

3 minutes?
That's insane I must be missing some option to sim more quickly.

well that was year 1... it does not last as i found out.

(this is also a sim-test league, no frills but all the functions i intend to use in a leauge... facegen off, bb cards off, no awards/ASG, no HOF, no stats/box/replays/splits etc kept. so, i figure i am saving 15-25% of sim-time if i recall from previous versions)


as the league aged, it kept increasing (upto 12 mins at one time, i think, maybe have been 10-11).....

IF i delete retired players and purge database etc... erase history and stats i think that speeds it back up.. i do 3 things, so not sure which is actually helping or if all three are helping (league history/stats history/purge db)... it still doesn't get back to ~3minutes once enough years have passed, but if i start a new league, it will be faster again.

right now, it's teetering between 6 and 7 mins on the csv directory time stamps (maybe 6:30 to 6:45 currently). i deleted retired players an purged db ~10 sim years ago, but league history is over 20 years old now and this league is 142 years old total.

i just went from 8 threads back to 4... no different in sim time. i've treid multi-threading/hyper-threading... 99% sure that makes no difference either.

if i restore this league from an earier date, i can get back near 3mins. at 1901 - 1966... in '66 restored the sims start at 4-5minutes (lower 4mins)... at 1931 restore they are closer to the 3-4mins (low to mid 3mins). what i don't get is that no retired players exist, history is deleted and the sim-times are still different... technically, each should be as if starting from year 1 (with a few extra FA), since i am removing all that extra bulk.

[NoOne]

Originally Posted by Coltrane

Game will kill my drive in 2-3 years?

look at the specs of your SSD...

my SSD says 72TB is its expected life. it is from 2014. they may be more robust now, but likely still have a shelf life much shorter than a HDD depending on use.

(host writes is given in S.M.A.R.T. info... get an app called Crystal Disk Info or any other that displays this info from the drive)

in 1.5 years of use, i had 1.5TB writes... 1 week of ootp17 and it jumped to 2.360TB. nearly 1 TB in 1 week. at the time it was 6-7gb per simulated season.. still at least 6gb per after last patch. 100weeks = 86tb and the drive is likely dead in 2 years if the specs are accurate. i said 2-3 years to err on the optimistic side of life expectancy, if there is one.

??i doubt they die, but more likely it's a half-life type rating, never looked up nuances of this spec??

if 'they' say you get double an ssd rated lifetime expectancy, then apply that knowledge.

i just moved it to the HDD, because i see virtually no difference in speed after the patch that noted improved simulation speeds.

when i had it on the SSD, i could avoid the massive host writes per year by moving system temp folders to HDD and using a custom data path (HDD) to keep league stored on the HDD stopped the massive hdd writes.

guessing: 1/2 to 2/3 of host writes during a simulation year (including 1 auto-save) is actually occuring in the system temp folders.

there seems to be no speed benefit by having temp folders on the SSD vs HDD... which doesn't make sense to me, but such is life.

[Coltrane]

Originally Posted by NoOne

i just moved it to the HDD, because i see virtually no difference in speed after the patch that noted improved simulation speeds.

I did the same. Pointless to use SSD

[jmuelly]

Originally Posted by Coltrane

I did the same. Pointless to use SSD

So if I am buying new is there any reason to get an SSD? It sounds like this game is wear and tear on the drive with little to no added benefit.

[actionjackson]

Originally Posted by jmuelly

So if I am buying new is there any reason to get an SSD? It sounds like this game is wear and tear on the drive with little to no added benefit.

Sounds like it. Thanks for the tip guys.