Does anyone know what the current size of swtor download is? Was looking at getting a ssd, and since swtor is the only thing I use my laptop for was wondering what size would suffice 60bg?

About 25 GB. It is added to every update. For example, the 2.9 PTS download is over 0.6 GB additional on top of the current version.

Great, thanks for information

Advice: do not put SWTOR on an SSD. there are a LOT of reads/writes that SWTOR does and it will shorten the life on your SSD. I made that mistake...never again. Edited July 24, 2014 by psandak

Hmmm never heard that before. What kind off ssd did you have? What else did you have on it and use it for? I ask this cause I literally use my laptop for nothing besides swtor, not even Web browsing or anything even than its only couple hours a week 4-10 depending on work. Edited July 24, 2014 by Gnimish

I cannot say for certain that having SWTOR on my SSD was the proximate cause of its failure, but EVERYTHING else on the drive was "normal/typical user": OS, MS Office, Web Browser. For all I know the drive may have simply been defective. But all my techie friends and co-workers agree that having SWTOR on the SSD was not a good idea.

 

My SSD was a Corsair Force GS 240GB I bought from Newegg and lasted about 18 months. The good news is that the unit is still under the Corsair (3yr) warranty. Whether they replace it or not, I won't know for a while. In the meantime, I have gone back to a 500GB HDD as my OS and apps drive with my 2TB stripe as my data. IF I get a replacement SSD I will most likely not put SWTOR back on it

Okay, thanks for the tip.

But SSD are solid states ... the whole point of them is the fact they are solid states and don't have moving parts thus the amount of read/writers shouldn't affect them at all?

 

It's the main reason I WANT an SSD heh and also why they recommend to use them as the most intensive activity drives, if you are using a SSD as bulk storage that isn't often access you've spent extra per GB that you don't need.

 

I would assume there to be another reason for them to fault. I've often had flash memory etc. stop working for no reason ( without researching I'm not sure how susceptible they are to things like electromagnetism etc.? )

When I built the computer I have now back in July of last year, I built it with this game in mind. I have a 128GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD drive for my OS with a 1TB WD data drive.

 

When I originally built it, I put SWTOR on the SSD, and it killed about 30 GB of space, maybe a little less. There was really only room for this game and one other before I started getting space warning issues of less than 10%. That being said, the insane speed I had on it didn't seem worth it since you do a lot of group FPs and WZs and OPS groups where the loading time of the level or zone didn't matter as much due to the fact that you always had to wait on the person with the slowest machine anyways.

 

So, when I had to reimage for personal reasons, I reinstalled the game on the mechanical drive and have been playing that way ever since. I save the space on the SSD for the 1 player games I play that I can take advantage of the faster load times. Plus in the grand scheme of things, SWTOR isn't too PC intensive.

There is an extremely long and detailed article on SSDs concerning failure rates and reliability here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/ssd-reliability-failure-rate,2923.html It takes the opposite tack than we are doing here by asking whether SSDs are MORE reliable than HDDs. The study included thousands of drives used industry-wide including hundreds of thousands of hours of operation.

 

The bottom line is that SSDs are NOT "more reliable" than HDDs, but conversely, they are not less reliable either. This means that there is NO JUSTIFICATION for refusing to use an SSD because they are "more prone to failure." That simply isn't true and the study above proves it. But that begs the biggest question. Are they really significantly faster. Once again, here's a study: http://www.pcworld.com/article/2048120/benchmarks-dont-lie-ssd-upgrades-deliver-huge-performance-gains.html and it suggests they are.

 

But "speed" can be subjective. The real issue is whether a faster drive of any sort makes a MEANINGFUL DIFFERENCE in game play. Is using an SSD ENOUGH FASTER to justify doing it, or in an all-things-being-equal world, does it really matter that much? After all, you have Internet speed as a factor here as well as server reaction speed. These lags we often see are likely not because of your local machine performance.

 

I run SWTOR on an SSD myself. I have to tell you I do not see a significant difference in game play. Of course I don't have an objective speedometer running that can report the difference and 'prove" my opinion, but I really don't think it matters that much. If someone can come uop with an OBJECTIVE measurement that makes sense, I would be interested.

An SSD ( from my own knowledge ) will not speed up the game in terms of actual gameplay like lag spikes or poor FPS. All it will really do is improve loading times between zones etc. as this is where the disk is heavily accessed to the point that the disk is the bottle neck. Better game performance is more often than not the GPU bottleneck and sometimes the CPU thought I don't think I've even seen this game push my CPU to full load so probably not CPU.

 

Faster RAM can of course also help improve performance but again that will go back to what is actually your bottleneck in the first place.

 

One thing I did note is people stating they run their OS and games on the same drive? If avoidable I would think you are better off not doing that personally so you don't have the same physical disk being accessed by 2+ ideally intesive "applications" ( obviously more so in terms of o/s since tons of things are going on at once ). I noted this worst when installing games etc. on a disk that is shared by my o/s and the o/s pretty much grinds to a halt whilst the installs are going on.

Yea, I don't think it helps the gameplay, but I do know the load times when clicking on an elevator or loading up an OPS or FP was super fast. But, you can't start until you have a full group (usually), so being the fastest just means you are sitting there longer waiting for others. Since I'm impatient by default, this wasn't good for me. It was only helpful when doing the missions myself.

 

As for the OS and games on the same drive, other than installing the game, did you notice any lag? The last game I played solo was Dishonored and having that big world load up on the SSD was pretty ****** as I never had any downtime. Granted, I have a pretty stout PC, with the video card being my bottleneck.

 

ASUS HERO Maximus VI

Intel i5-4670k 3.4 Ghz

16 GB of 1866 DDR3 Mem

128 GB Samsung 840 Pro SSD

1 GB WD Black

1 GB 7750 AMD GPU

 

http://i27.photobucket.com/albums/c177/cmonstergt/New%20Computer%202013/2013-07-17190318_zps265632ad.jpg

No other than installing you shouldn't notice any lag game wise, unless of course you're silly enough to try copy files off the physical drive or do something else hard drive intensive. Ideally now even downloading can have an effect beyond network issues if your speed is high enough to increase disk activity to a point it interferes with the games ability to read the drive also - of course only if your install drive is on the same drive as any download folder you use ( which it shouldn't be ). I guess in a perfect situation 3 physical drives would work nicely - 1 for o/s, 1 for installs etc. and 1 for downloads etc. I've read a few topics recently on people noting that copying between physical drives faster than copy between partitions on the same physical drive which is interesting though one would assume the speed difference to be fairly nominal.

So I used a hard disk transfer cable to take swtor from old laptop to new laptop (my Internet is extremely slow atm too me 12 hours to download last patch.) And said file was 35 gb. If anyone else was wondering.