Are frequent patches overwriting 120+ GB SSD a concern?

[ony]

Hi,

Just yesterday updated to patch 1.0.1 and got to re-download almost whole game and same rushed into my SSD.

But today we got 1.0.2 which in download was ~8 GB but it still indicates writing to disk as ~120 GB.

I'm a bit conservative user of SSD and I assume that such kind of overwrites are wearing out my SSD faster than it should. E.g. with 600TBW this wear it out in 14 years just because of single game.

When I run monitoring how much data written to my SSD I can see that it was definitely 100+ GB written. I.e. it doesn't seem that Steam intelligently updates files in-place or maybe it uses atomic files updates.

Is my concern valid or I'm being too conservative?
Should I trade up-to-date game experience by going offline mode to play without patch?
Is there some option in steam I can toggle to perform patching in-place?
Or maybe patching is done through some vendor code that modifies files?

P.S. Normally I use F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System) for SSD with overlay filesystem on HDD and push down some files to SSD whenever there are updates. But I think compiling shaders takes hours if everything is on HDD (tried during first install).

[p00se2]

you absolutely sure it downloaded the entire game 154gig and not just the 11 patch ?

[space]

it doesn't redownload the game, it downloads the update only, and patches 130gb~ of data

patching =/= download

[alka]

I wouldn't think re-writing the data for the game a few times is going to wear out SSDs though I'm not an expert.

SSDs have issues I think when data is re-written much more frequently than a handful of patches for a game.

Top result on google leads me to this[www.enterprisestorageforum.com]:

The DWPD measures the number of times you can rewrite the entire SSD every day over its lifespan. For example, you can consider a 200 GB SSD drive with DWPD 1 and a warranty period of five years. It means that you can rewrite 200 GB daily for five years without chances of failure.

[Molesworth.Houghton]

Reagarding these compiling process of graphic shader i can tell you that Nexus Mods offer a modification called "No Shader Warmup" which skips the procedure at the beginning. By the way, you will still use the same ssd in 14 years ?

[Mac]

Publicado originalmente por space:

it doesn't redownload the game, it downloads the update only, and patches 130gb~ of data

patching =/= download

False, it downloads all the associated files that get changed, for instance, lets say it changes 1 line of text inside a file thats 12gb in size, the patch is 1kb, but the download is actually 12gb because its not updating the 12gb file, its replacing it.

the 1kb download is the difference in file size between the old 12gb file and the new 12gb file.

This is why the last patch, 11gb, was actually 139gb in size - they changed small things across multiple files, all of which needed to be replaced.

[space]

Publicado originalmente por Mac:

False, it downloads all the associated files that get changed, for instance, lets say it changes 1 line of text inside a file thats 12gb in size, the patch is 1kb, but the download is actually 12gb because its not updating the 12gb file, its replacing it.

that's so wrong i can't even

it doesn't download the entire 12gb file, it unpacks it, applies the 1kb change, and then repacks it

Publicado originalmente por Mac:

This is why the last patch, 11gb, was actually 139gb in size - they changed small things across multiple files, all of which needed to be replaced.

wrong again, it patched 130gb of data, it didn't download it, you would know this if you knew how to read the steam download window and monitored bandwidth and disk usage

[p00se2]

Publicado originalmente por space:

Publicado originalmente por Mac:

False, it downloads all the associated files that get changed, for instance, lets say it changes 1 line of text inside a file thats 12gb in size, the patch is 1kb, but the download is actually 12gb because its not updating the 12gb file, its replacing it.

that's so wrong i can't even

it doesn't download the entire 12gb file, it unpacks it, applies the 1kb change, and then repacks it

how much "read" and "write" is required to apply 12 gig patch into a 140 gig game ?

[ony]

For 1.0.1 I was downloading 120+ GB . For 1.0.2 only ~8 GB was downloaded.

But my bigger concern is writing to disk. Those patches seems to update existing files rather than append another packs/db as in previous version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.
And I suspect that updating those packs cannot be done in place like just overwriting some blocks and/or appending content to the end. I.e. patching probably shifts old blocks too.
And if there is no way Steam/game-patcher communicate with system how to re-shuffle blocks of data, then it is impossible to avoid re-writing big portion of those files (there are 14 files ranging in size from 1+ GiB to 33.8 GiB).

[CadaveR]

I mean, it's the SSD work, they've been probably stressed a lot already before during production as every other hardware component. Every hardware will eventually die but they're made to be used.

[space]

Publicado originalmente por p00se2:

how much "read" and "write" is required to apply 12 gig patch into a 140 gig game ?

depends on which pak files it patches, if it patched all pak files, then all 154gb, but both updates patched about 130gb~

though honestly if you're that worried about wear and tear, then just uninstall the game until it received all (or at least most) patches

[alka]

Publicado originalmente por ony:

But my bigger concern is writing to disk. Those patches seems to update existing files rather than append another packs/db as in previous version of S.T.A.L.K.E.R.

Yes, the game files are re-written. But like my post above implies, SSDs can handle regular rewrites. They run into problems when you are re-writing them 1000s of times, not the handful of re-writes we get with game patches.

[DarK]

Publicado originalmente por ony:

Hi,

Just yesterday updated to patch 1.0.1 and got to re-download almost whole game and same rushed into my SSD.

But today we got 1.0.2 which in download was ~8 GB but it still indicates writing to disk as ~120 GB.

I'm a bit conservative user of SSD and I assume that such kind of overwrites are wearing out my SSD faster than it should. E.g. with 600TBW this wear it out in 14 years just because of single game.

When I run monitoring how much data written to my SSD I can see that it was definitely 100+ GB written. I.e. it doesn't seem that Steam intelligently updates files in-place or maybe it uses atomic files updates.

Is my concern valid or I'm being too conservative?
Should I trade up-to-date game experience by going offline mode to play without patch?
Is there some option in steam I can toggle to perform patching in-place?
Or maybe patching is done through some vendor code that modifies files?

P.S. Normally I use F2FS (Flash-Friendly File System) for SSD with overlay filesystem on HDD and push down some files to SSD whenever there are updates. But I think compiling shaders takes hours if everything is on HDD (tried during first install).

Don't worry, you'll upgrade your PC(including storage) several times before you will wear out that SSD.

[ony]

Decided to upgrade to 1.0.3 19GB and it failed on out of disk space. Apparently you need 3x times of game size to guarantee updates are working. One copy for steam/steamapps/downloading, another for steam/steamapps/temp (probably where it patches files), and last one for steam/steamapps/common where playable version is. With 155 GB it is 465 GB 😢

[alka]

Publicado originalmente por ony:

Decided to upgrade to 1.0.3 19GB and it failed on out of disk space. Apparently you need 3x times of game size to guarantee updates are working. One copy for steam/steamapps/downloading, another for steam/steamapps/temp (probably where it patches files), and last one for steam/steamapps/common where playable version is. With 155 GB it is 465 GB 😢

None of the 3 big patches was a 155 GB download though. 3x capacity seems excessive, x2 is probably adequate, as long as all of the hard disks used have sufficient capacity for whatever stage of the update process they are needed for.

If it were otherwise, they'd just make us download the whole game again from fresh.

[SilverX95]

Publicado originalmente por alka:

Publicado originalmente por ony:

Decided to upgrade to 1.0.3 19GB and it failed on out of disk space. Apparently you need 3x times of game size to guarantee updates are working. One copy for steam/steamapps/downloading, another for steam/steamapps/temp (probably where it patches files), and last one for steam/steamapps/common where playable version is. With 155 GB it is 465 GB 😢

None of the 3 big patches was a 155 GB download though. 3x capacity seems excessive, x2 is probably adequate, as long as all of the hard disks used have sufficient capacity for whatever stage of the update process they are needed for.

If it were otherwise, they'd just make us download the whole game again from fresh.

if it helps you need at lest 250GB to 300GB free
i should know cause at one point i had 250GB free on my game drive atm is 361GB as i uninstalled borderland 1 and borderlands 2
ya don't need 465 GB free