PureBasic Forums - English

When I bought my HD7870 a month or two back, it came with a free "coupon" for D.I.R.T 3 (anyone remember when free games actually came with hardware on CD/DVD??)

So I finally relented and installed Steam for good. Ever since then, I have been buying shit up left and right Granted, I only purchase sale items, and try to buy Packs that are on sale only.. But it started with Ys Origin, and Felghana (I love the Ys series and hope XSeeD does Steam releases for all of the previous games and future ones too).

I just....can't....stop.. $5 here, $20 there, another $15 over here.. Just now I bought the X Superbox, which includes all the games from the X Series by EGOSOFT. And they are all patched and updated to work on Windows XP/Vista/7 32/64-bit. It was only $10 for 6 games..

I've got probably 100GB or more in games I now own, 66 individual titles (Sega Genesis Classics alone has 50 games in it though)..

It's horrible, I can't stop... and now I have to figure out how I'm going to maintain a parity based backup of all this, since I don't want to buy another Flex RAID license, and I am using my current license for my file server when I get it put together.... meh. I've even considered dropping 3 bills on a 1TB Velociraptor just to house all the installed games I will collect over time, since I want a gaming drive to be faster than current high capacity drives, and SSD's are too expensive for that much space.

Why do you need backups?
I would only care about backing up the savegames, the games can be redownloaded for free if anything were to happen.

But yeah, Steam is a nice way to waste money!

66 games? heh.. noob

c ya,
nco2k

I too use Steam now. Damn thing is great for budget gamers and people with some free time to burn.
The summer sale landed me the Dead Space series but I'm too much of a chicken shit to play it. I managed to get to the first save in Dead Space 1, though.. Woke my room mates up with a girly scream after having my face ripped off by one of the aliens. Haven't played it since.

We should get a PB Steam users name list going here sometime.

Currently playing Avernum: Escape from the Pit, was a fan after playing Avernum 3.

Defense Grid. Something like 60-70 hours so far and still going...

Has to be the best £3 spent ever...

Joakim Christiansen wrote:Why do you need backups?
I would only care about backing up the savegames, the games can be redownloaded for free if anything were to happen.

But yeah, Steam is a nice way to waste money!

I play a lot of big title games, that can be anywhere from 8 - 20GB in size (estimate for the high end). I already got us in trouble by exceeding out bandwidth limit 3 months in a row, last year.

My current backup folder of 34 games from Steam (what I can fit on my 100GB games partition) is 36.8GB. My 100GB games partition has 6GB free currently (not only Steam Games installed).

The Witcher 2, just by itself is almost 20GB in size. My currently installed Games on Steam make its appcache folder alone 50GB on the nose. And I still have another 30 or so games I could install.
I recently bought the Splinter Cell Conviction Pack (all games in the series) which will require 23GB just for those 4 games.
Dead Island will need another 10GB or so.

Bottom line is, I cannot afford to have to redownload games after a catastrophic failure. To do so at once would eat up over 100GB of bandwidth. Breaking it up over several months would force me to prioritize what games I want back first.

All the above aside? I am an avid "archivist". I have several Terrabytes of data already. I am in the process of putting my old PC parts I upgraded from recently, back together to create a second PC, which will act as a Redudant Storage File Server, and let me do some other stuff like play my vast collection of ROMS, or Video files on my TV.
I have plenty of room to store these backups, along with all the other CD/DVD images I have for my programs and game discs.

In fact UPS just now delivered my order from Newegg. So I have a 250GB Velociraptor that will now function as my dedicated gaming installs drive. It was a real kick in the nuts that Newegg dropped the price on the 256GB Vertex 4 SSD the day after I ordered this (yesterday), as it is now a price I would have considered paying. So I hope its not as noisy as some people claim it will be.. Some claim their VRaptors are whisper quiet, or that its only the heads that make noise when active, and that they do run pretty cool but not blistering hot.

I guess we'll see.. I've been itching to get my 10TB RAID server up and running for a while now. I just hope the raptor provides enough space for my current needs. If its quiet and cool running, I can get another later on and RAID-0 them for 500GB.

The best advantage of keeping a backup like this, aside from data security, is I don't have to wait for a huge game to download, so it saved both my bandwidth AND my time.

These things are not as loud as some people seem to think/claim they are.

When spinning idle (<1min on, >10min on / whatever the case) its whisper quiet.
All the noise comes from head activity and it is not THAT bad. It's no worse than some of the "quiet" drives from 5 or 6 years ago. I don't think its so horrible, and that's with the drive mounted in an open, external case.

It hasn't even gotten that hot yet. I don't suspect it will

I've been using Raptor's in Raid 0 for quite a while now. Before the old WD740, and they were LOUD. The newer Velociraptors I use now are more like regular drives.

I should move over to SSD, but the Intel I tried on my XPS710 a while ago caused strange hickups / pauses when running XP. I'll give it another try the day one of the Raptors, or the mainboard itself goes.

That was a frequent problem with the early generation SSD's

Those were choking on Random Read/Writes, but newer controllers (SandForce II, Indilix) have fixed them. Was this a newer SSD or something you tried that was older?

Even so, there are things you can/should do on an SSD to minimize these kinds of problems and also maximize performance / life expectancy.

Disable drive Indexing, move your Windows Swap file to a mechanical drive, etc. Some people still believe in disabling Prefetch/Superfetch too.