SSD array turning random reads into sequential?

[ckryan]

So I bought another X25-V a few days ago for ~$60, so that I could RAID 0 two of them for my Steam folder. Then, I pre-order Deus Ex, download it, and once it unlocked, installed it.

The first thing I noticed was the terrible loading times -- 30 seconds with V Sync, 22 with out. Then, 36 hours ago I noticed that loading times were getting lower and lower, down to about 3 sec without V Sync and 7 with.

So I couldn't explain this - there was a patch released Tuesday afternoon, but it was only for compatability. The only explaination I could come up with was that somehow the random writes turned into sequential writes after twenty or so hours of playing the game. Does this actually happen in practice? Is there some other explaination of why loading times so radically decreased?

I know this is just one example, of one game -- but this is a pretty unusual behavior. My hypothesis is that during loading sequences, the array makes quite a few random writes -- I used TaskMgr to monitor I/O Write(in Bytes) of the game during a session and found that after a few hours the game had written ~650MBs.

 

[gjs278]

actually, it's been documented by other people that the patch for deus ex dramtically lowered load times for everyone

 

[ckryan]

but it didn't happen for several days after the patch. That's why I thought it was strange. The patch did help initially, but only helped by about 8 seconds. It also didn't happen all at once.