SSD for ISOs and stuttery slowdowns...

cammelspit · 04-10-2015, 09:58 AM #1

Hello all! So, I been having a strange issue here that I had not noticed before. I have put most of my non compressed GC isos on an SSD, its a crappy one but an SSD nontheless. With some more recent optimications in the last month or two I decided to see how well some of the Wii games played. Mario Kart Wii, Skyward Sword and Okami Work perfectly with almost no, if any, slowdowns or stutters at all! I switched over to a couple gamecube games just for shits and they seemed to run with a massive amount of stuttering. In particular the games most stutter filled are Starfox Assault, Starfox Adventures and F-Zero GX. I noticed that all of my Wii games are on an old as the hills USB2.0 640GB HD with the entire partition NTFS compressed. Normally I would think this would be less than ideal but a good chunk of my roms and such are on it and MOST rams are tiny compared to Wii I don't see a problem normally. Out of sheer curiosity I moved those 3 GameCube games onto the same crappy old USB HD and low and behold, not an undue stutter in sight. I have 2 SSDs and one is for my OS and one was a spare I took from my wifes laptop that died only a week or so after I installed it and that is the one I am using for overflow stuff and quick load times on certain PC games. Both SSDs are identical and plugged into SATA ports handled by different chip sets, here is the model of the drives "PNY SSD2SC120G726A104". My thing is, shouldn't dolphin work better off the SSD? If so what the heck could I be doing wrong? My first instinct is that even though the drive sucks the USB drive uses its a different controller and maybe offloads my CPU? I asked my brother to test and he has the EXACT same issue from a Samsung pro SSD with the ddr3 cache unlike my PNYs. Is this maybe a queuing thing that dolphin perhaps doesn't play well with on SSDs? Confused

As always, thanks all for and advice or insight you may have.

P.S. My PC specs are Intel Core 2 Quad Q9400 OC to 3.51Ghz, Win7X64, 8GB RAM and the aforementioned SSDs.

**KHg8m3r** · 04-10-2015, 10:01 AM #2

What CPU does he have? That may be the issue.

Also, does the drive need to be aligned?

cammelspit · 04-10-2015, 10:20 AM #3

(04-10-2015, 10:01 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: What CPU does he have? That may be the issue.

Also, does the drive need to be aligned?

He has and AMD 8350 OC to some 5Ghz other than that im not too sure... Now, don't hate me for saying this but I don't actually know what you mean by aligned... Huh

I was under the impression that things like TRIM were all you needed as an SSD doesn't need to be defraged like a mechanical HD.

**KHg8m3r** · 04-10-2015, 10:40 AM #4

Aligning is how the partition is offset on the SSD. Google search for how to make sure it is or not

cammelspit

(04-10-2015, 10:40 AM)KHg8m3r Wrote: Aligning is how the partition is offset on the SSD. Google search for how to make sure it is or not

K ill give it a whirl and let you know...

[UPDATE] OK, it seems I am aligned and all is good.

**Fiora** · 04-10-2015, 04:07 PM #6

Dolphin heavily throttles the disk read rate in order to emulate the actual Wii/Gamecube disk speed, which is over 100 times slower than what an SSD can handle. The stutters are much more likely to be shader cache generation.

haddockd · 04-10-2015, 11:44 PM #7

He is using Win 7 and it automatically aligns upon install so he is good there.

**AnyOldName3** · 04-11-2015, 01:12 AM #8

But that doesn't guarantee that he installed it - if he'd cloned a hard drive using an older cloning tool, it might not have aligned it properly.

cammelspit · 04-11-2015, 02:36 AM #9

I did a little reading on the alignment issue and my install drive was installed and formatted with windows installer but the other SSD was not, either way I checked and they both seem to be properly aligned so its still no problem. Perhaps dolphin when it does this throttle perhaps my SSD or my system in general can't take it. The real question is if anyone else has and ISOs on an SSD and has had this problem before or at least can test it. BTW I also have my dolphin install on my C drive (One of the SSDs) and the isos on the spare (also SSD). It seems if I put both dolphin and an ISO on the same SSD it gets even worse, IF that helps any.

cammelspit · 07-21-2015, 06:19 AM **#10**

Hi, I am sorry for posting on such an old thread but I have found out what my own problem was and fixed it now after a couple months of frantically attempting to figure it out. I am posting here in case this helps anyone else out. POWER.... Thats it, I was using an older 500Watt PSU that was a salvage from an old P4 email server I used to run out of my living room years back. Turns out the actual sustained rating for the 12volt rail(s) was only 360 watts and with my machine being packed to the gills with hard drives and overclocked to kingdom come there simply was not enough amps to drive the system. I replaced the PSU with a more modern 800Watt and not only was dolphin smoothed out properly but also my strange once every two week BSOD was also fixed. No more video driver crashes... It all just works now. This is a trap for young players and even us old time PC builders if we just arent paying enough attention. So if ur having strange behavior on anything, especially when hitting the CPU/GPU hard as hell like dolphin does or transferring files, just do a quick calculation and add up the wattage requirements or your whole system and make SURE you have a power supply that can handle it. I figure it out when I upgraded my video card, was a gift from my brother in law, and it draws almost 80Watts more than my old card. The whole machine went on the fritz, started crashing a BSODing like crazy and I knew the card was confirmed working in another machine. So I took out my trusty calculator and BAM, not even close to enough to run the whole machine at peak draw. Either way, I thought this would be interesting and helpful to anyone experiencing similar strange behavior like I was.

Keep up the good work everybody!