I finally pinched enough pennies together to get a SSD. I bought a Samsung 840 series that is 120 gigabytes in size. Relatively easy installation and only a bit of frustration getting it going, but moving my Vanguard folder on to it is like NIGHT and DAY. Honestly, if you want to get some performance into the game, get an SSD. Mine cost a bit over $100 and has changed the very concept of how I see the game now. Make sure you buy a kit though, as I had to steal my SATA3 cable from my DVD player to get it going. Cheap buggers should include one.
I just thought of an idea this morning. Sony really missed out with an opportunity! They could have marketed Vanguard with a inexpensive SSD, and made a killing! Buy the game and get a $25 dollar off coupon, let's say on Samsung drives.
Troy, thanks for the suggestion man. I'll be happy to escalate your feedback to the appropriate team to have it reviewed
Thanks for posting this. I too recently bought a Samsung 840 but decided to install the client on my spinner HD instead. With all the chunk-clunk as it loads, I was toying with reinstalling the client on the SSD instead. Do you get much noticeable stutter just after crossing a chunk on your SSD?
Yes when I first got it, it was incredible. Recently I came back and it seems a bit more choppy but perhaps I didn't play long enough for it to build up the caches. But yes, it was incredible change when adding Vanguard to the SSD drive.
Both my hubby and I bought SSD drives back in the day when they were $400 specifically for Vanguard. I can confirm that they make a world of difference in ANY game. We have since upgraded to bigger capacity SSDs, but IMHO it's the only way to go for any type of online gaming.
What you are seeing is the downside of the SSD. SSDs are fast, so fast it is hard to beleive the difference, but like all good things they come with some inherent downsides, and "dirty" drives is a big one for SSDs, and I don't mean it watches ****. SSDs have one serious failing amongst all drives, and that is clearing or wiping blocks takes an immense amount of time, slower than a traditional HD even. So as a drive is used, the blocks get "dirty" as the firmware always writes to a clean block first, so over time the SSD will "dirty" up with written or used blocks (I use "blocks" vs cells due to its more understood nature from traditional HD). Garbage collection and TRIM are things you will hear about to deal with this, but reality is, over time all SSDs suffer from performance degradation due to use. TRIM is the easiest way to solve this, and MS did us all a favour by adding TRIM as part of drive optimization instead of just old defrag (NEVER defrag an SSD). If you run XP, you need to get an external TRIM program like "wiper.exe". If you run Windows 7 it should initiate TRIM when system is idle (leave it over night once a week), and with windows 8 you can initiate TRIM anytime. Now for the downside again, not every desktop SATA controller permits the passing of the TRIM command. Intel x87 and x77 series do, I know the newer AMD APU controllers on the FM and FM+ socket do, but it seemed to be under testing the 8xx and 9xx chipsets did not (Phenon/FX CPUs). Almost no addon it SATA controller (say the Marvel on your top end board on any platform) permits TRIM pass through, never use them for SSDs. Also only the latest x87 chipset with the latest Intel driver permits TRIM pass through in a raid array. For those of us with PCIE Revo drives, we get no TRIM and trust me, OCZ can state what ever drivel they want, GC (garbage Collection) is no replacement for TRIM, a secure erase and reload every 2 years is almost a must. SSDs are great, but require little more care and attention than good ole traditional magnetic media. However the pay off is well worth it. One last hint, never fill an SSD to beyond 80%, this will in almost every case have a devastating effect on your performance.
It would be nice if someone wrote a guide suggesting 2-3 ssd drives as well instructions of how to install them and vanguard on them;p
