Dragon Age III: Inquisition Message Board  

This has been proven to be bull... I even spoke to a friend of mine who worked on the game and got his take on it..

While it's not an SSD killer, it does seem to introduce some performace issues, and more than the 5% claimed by the developers

Yup, I'm sorry I wasn't clear enough in my post - I certainly do not believe that this (or most other) DRM(s) pose any threat to any PC hardware, per se.

I was merely comparing it to the "classic" StarForce, that had strong success in preventing pirate releases of products that used various iterations of it. But there was controversy surrounding it, how it affected hardware, and even stories about ruined PCs (true or not, there was a lot of negativity surrounding it - for what reason, truly... well that, can be debated), and the commercial breakthrough simply wasn't there. (For the negative publicity, or other reasons? It's not as black and white as some make it out to be, there are other factors important in a corporate, competitive, environment.)

DRMs will continue to evolve, as will methods of bypassing them (and not just for pirating reasons, even if that is the main reason), which means I doubt this DRM system is the be-all, end-all that some make it out to be.

Phew... I read the entire thread so far because I just built a new machine and I have two 1TB SSD Samsung drives, one an 850 Pro and the other an 840 EVO. I bought these (at considerable expense mind you...) so I could load everything onto them just like a TB mechanical drive and use them in the same manner I was used to with spinner drives. I was certainly alarmed when I read the first post, but now it seems to be some less than credible information, though I'm glad it was mentioned so it could be put to rest. I'm an old guy and this new machine was sort of my retirement present to myself so I wouldn't want the money I spent on it going to waste because there would be little in the way of funds to replace it. It is running an i7 5930 with 16GB of DDR4 2666 ram, a pair of r9 290x XFX Double Dissipation vid cards in crossfire, a 1200wt power supply and anything else I could think of to make it "as good as it gets" in a consumer machine for gaming. Benchmarks say it is faster than 98% of the machines extant, and I want to keep it that way! So worries about my SSD drives were very concerning as they are the most expensive parts of this build. I was trying to be as "future proof" as possible with the whole project.

So thank you all for your informed responses. I feel a bit better now. I had no concerns before the original post, went through a bit of a letdown when I read it, and came out the other side more informed and confident, so it wasn't just an exercise in futility. I'm glad I joined here years back and have always relied on the owners and members for good advice.

Thanks again!

[Edited by JustSomeGuy, 12/13/2014 4:38:18 AM]

If it makes you feel better about your build, Samsung's SSDs are starting to get a reputation for longevity surviving petabytes of data being written to it.

Samsung has made gigantic strides in the last 18 months with the 830-850 lines. Excellent longevity, great read/write speeds (after a firmware fix), and awesome power efficiency.

If they offered the same amount of hardware failsafes against data loss that Crucial's non-enterprise lines do I'd jump to an 850 Pro in a heartbeat.

Well, its come to the point where this thread should simply be renamed: SSD vs HDD vs HHD drive comparison.

To throw my two bits into the pot, I would like to point out that an SSD could theoretically be fully worn through in about a month, however regular use does not allow for this kind of wear. You would have to write to the whole drive approximately 10 thousand times in order to wear out most MTBF estimates for a single block. Otherwise, the lifespan of the disk is often in the range of 4+ years with adequate wear leveling.

Simply put, I don't think that an SSD is any less reliable than a conventional hard disk for gaming. But for long term storage, such as videos, music, pictures, and documents should be kept on a HDD. SSD can lose block integrity from long term storage without continued refresh.

It's still a tad premature but in another 5-10 years we'll have better track records and more accurate history of how well these drives have performed under strain.