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Skyrim Save files on SSD; yes or no?


marat569

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Should I store my save files that skyrim generates on a SSD or my regular storage HDD?

I'm a save junky and after about an hour of paying have 2gb worth of save files to delete ( I keep the last 3 )

My saves are about 11mb each at the moment; skyrim itself and MO with mods lives inside the SSD -- but do save files being there make a HUGE difference?

 

A bit about my saving habbits: Save after walking a bit, save before I see enemies, save after I kill one enemy, save after combat -- save during combat if I ran away and got my healing spells out; save after I open a door, save after I save.

 

No I don't trust quicksaves!

 

So what do you guys think? I personally feel writing the amount of information (the saves) and "deleting" them so frequently on an SSD is not worth wasting it's "write limit" and 11mb [ A lot of junk scripts, but I'm scared to touch my save file, rather the junk scrips be there than screw something up] is not that much to read/write on my HDD compared to the actual game and mods.

 

Also what are your save habits? Do you guys go a whole dungeon relying on autosaves? Discuss my friends!

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I'd turn off autosave completely. It can cause all sorts of mischief.

Unsubstantiated rumour and hearsay. Anecdotal evidence is all well and good, but I have 3300+ hours of time logged in Skyrim in the last ~three years now, the entire time with auto-save enabled, that say Skyrim's auto-save feature is perfectly safe, stable, and reliable. Or at least, no less so than the standard save feature.

 

I've tested running the game on both my SSD and my HDD, and in my experience there's been no significant difference in load time or performance. I recently moved the game back to my SSD and have found things a lot more stable than before, though I can't be sure if that's because of the drive, my new load order, my custom .ini files, or even my choice to not use ENBoost anymore (what with the ENB binaries refusing to cooperate with AMD cards, apparently).

 

11MB for a save file isn't anything to worry about, really. My current character is level 26 and my save is 11.9MB, and that's with about 190 active mods. I ran the save cleaner on it once about ten levels ago, though I forget offhand what it was that led me to do so -- I was having problems with a mod I uninstalled, though I don't for the life of me remember which one. You don't have to worry about save size until you're pushing 20MB, and even then so long as your game is stable it's not worth fussing over. 25-30MB is where I would start looking to clean it up, stable or otherwise.

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I'd turn off autosave completely. It can cause all sorts of mischief.

Not sure about how much Skyrim profits from the save files being on an SSD - I'd think the heavy hitters in terms of loading time are texture mods.

 

 

Is there a technical reason why we shouldn't use auto save?

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Is there a technical reason why we shouldn't use auto save?

Bad experience with prior games and paranoia are the only things that come to mind for me. Although automatic saves at cell transitions do happen at a time of high game load which can sometimes (but very rarely) combine to make you hit the magic memory limit causing a game crash. But running your game so close to the memory limit will result in lots of other crashes too, so auto saves are the least of your problems in that case.

 

Skyrim's autosaves are perfectly safe and use exactly the same code as any other save (according to folks from the SKSE team who looked into it).

 

People have traditionally blamed the autosave feature for corrupted saved games. But corruption of games is very, very rarely (if ever) the result of the saving process. It's loading a saved game after you've already been playing that can leave the game memory in a corrupted state, and then the next save after that (whether automatic or manual) will then store that corruption for later. Reloading that corrupted data later is usually when people notice the problems so they blame the saves instead of what happened before the saves.

 

Autosave all you want, just avoid loading a save file after you've already been playing for a while. Instead quit and restart the game whenever you want to load a saved game file.

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I save a lot because well it's progress. I still have autosave active, I just don't rely on it aka When I enter a dungeon and it autosaves, and say I die, I'm back in the beginning of the dungeon because that was the last save.

 

I'm fighting two strong mobs, I die, I'm back at the face of the mobs and figure out 100 different tactics and combos until they die, kill one small mob with 5% HP; save and figure out a way to get my HP back, save, and then fight the mob until it dies.

 

Basically I save because I don't like having to go through the dungeon all over again on death. I'm not playing hardcore diablo.

 

 

The point of this topic mainly is to keep the saves on a SSD or HDD, performance wise.

Edited by marat569
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I never measured the cell transit time with and without autosave enabled, but the difference was *very* noticeable. While I have never had problems with corrupted save games from autosaves, it's still a lot easier to used quicksave whenever appropriate.

Well Esc -> new save takes under two seconds.

 

When I say autosave I mean on dungeon entrance, on room entrance, you'll do so much things before your progress will be saved.

 

I know when you want to do a clean mod removal or upgrade you always do a normal save (Remove mod, save, load game, save, install mod, save, load game and you're set!)

 

Authors asking to do something along the lines of that means save > autosave for some reason. Thing is I don't want to kill my drive by writing saves and deleting them constantly. While writing this post I deleted 2gb in save files, 200 saves (Divided by 2 because of the .skse file) and that's from one game session of about a few hours. 12mb per save -- samsung 840 evo sata 3 line; don't wanna kill it.

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I never measured the cell transit time with and without autosave enabled, but the difference was *very* noticeable. While I have never had problems with corrupted save games from autosaves, it's still a lot easier to used quicksave whenever appropriate.

Well Esc -> new save takes under two seconds.

 

When I say autosave I mean on dungeon entrance, on room entrance, you'll do so much things before your progress will be saved.

 

I know when you want to do a clean mod removal or upgrade you always do a normal save (Remove mod, save, load game, save, install mod, save, load game and you're set!)

 

Authors asking to do something along the lines of that means save > autosave for some reason. Thing is I don't want to kill my drive by writing saves and deleting them constantly. While writing this post I deleted 2gb in save files, 200 saves (Divided by 2 because of the .skse file) and that's from one game session of about a few hours. 12mb per save -- samsung 840 evo sata 3 line; don't wanna kill it.

 

 

 

 

You need to understand that an SSD has a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) that is in the decades... the reliability factor is so superior to HDD

Drives fail for two reasons shorting out... or other component failure.

They continue to read after failure.

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I never measured the cell transit time with and without autosave enabled, but the difference was *very* noticeable. While I have never had problems with corrupted save games from autosaves, it's still a lot easier to used quicksave whenever appropriate.

Well Esc -> new save takes under two seconds.

 

When I say autosave I mean on dungeon entrance, on room entrance, you'll do so much things before your progress will be saved.

 

I know when you want to do a clean mod removal or upgrade you always do a normal save (Remove mod, save, load game, save, install mod, save, load game and you're set!)

 

Authors asking to do something along the lines of that means save > autosave for some reason. Thing is I don't want to kill my drive by writing saves and deleting them constantly. While writing this post I deleted 2gb in save files, 200 saves (Divided by 2 because of the .skse file) and that's from one game session of about a few hours. 12mb per save -- samsung 840 evo sata 3 line; don't wanna kill it.

 

 

 

You need to understand that an SSD has a MTBF (Mean Time Before Failure) that is in the decades... the reliability factor is so superior to HDD

Drives fail for two reasons shorting out... or other component failure.

They continue to read after failure.

 

SSD it is ^_^

 

On a different note, is it worth touching my save file with a script "cleaner", it's fine that it's 12MB. Unless nothing goes wrong with the same and everything is fine, just "junk" removed that's fine (and automatically not manually) -- but if it is 1) manual 2) "screws things up" the filesize is not a big deal.

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