The games and their results
Hades 2 - Result: No data loss.
Still Wakes The Deep - Result: Absolutely fuckaw.
Dread Delusion - Result: Getting very bored of entering my Windows password.
Cyberpunk 2077 - Result: Regret starting this pointless experiment.
Alien: Isolation - Result: Just glad this is over, to be honest.
Depending on what kind of hard drive you’re saving to, and your write cache settings, your mileage may vary.
Yeah, solid state drives are going to be effectively immune to anything bad happening from powering off. But if you have a hard drive and just happen to get unlucky with the timing - it’s really, really hard to do - then your drive is gonna be in rough shape.
If you happen to turn off your computer at the exact moment a game is in the middle of writing a save file to disk, the write will be incomplete and having an SSD won’t make those unwritten bits appear on the disk.
Yes, but the writes are so much faster, and the window so much shorter, that for something as small as a save file (assuming you’re not playing a Bethesda game, anyway), it would be very unlikely to hit that critical window.
“Assuming your save file isn’t very large or that you don’t get unlucky, you’re immune to anything bad happening” doesn’t quite have the same ring to it as “you’re effectively immune to anything bad happening” does
I would imagine it also creates a temporary file to replace the file, so if the pc crashes it reverts to the temp file. Would be silly to not have a safety net.
If the computer is powered off when in the middle of writing a game’s current state to disk, that write is going to be incomplete and the state lost.
Sure, your save slot may not get corrupted and you’ll probably still be able to load whatever was in it before, but no amount of temporary files is going to help you recover data that was never written to disk in the first place
Which isn’t an issue in most games since they usually have an auto save that triggers every 3 seconds. It would only be a factor in games where you can only manually save. And people know to save those VERY frequently for various reasons already.
Ah well if we’re going to just make shit up to win an argument, I’ll have you know that my uncle works for Nintendo and he said that’s not true.
You’ll have some garbage data, sure, but it won’t fuck up your drive - that’s the difference. A hard disk can fail in so many different ways in comparison, and that’s what the warning is actually for - “unrecoverable” problems with the drive. With a SSD, the worst that happens is you lose your last write. It’s not going to have allocation issues, and isn’t at risk of any physical damage.
Oh yes absolutely, spinny disks can be more temperamental if they lose power, although it’s not super duper common especially nowadays; I’ve been lucky, I think I’ve never had any of mine get borked like that over the past >30y.
But yeah in comparison incomplete writes on SSD are pretty mild as far as potential problems go, at least on sane file systems
“effectively immune” … rofl! … no. Just … No.
Even if it were true about individual writes, many, many things take multiple IO operations to actually be complete.
I like what someone in the comments of the blog post said, and how it was more of a psychological safety net