SSD Drives - good idea?

[RonW]

Anyone had any experience or advice on using SSD drives to run FSX or FS9? I'm looking at speeding up my FS pc again and while a lot of $$ compared to regular HD's, they sure are faster,

[Kennair]

Hi Ron,

I've just reconfigured a PC using an SSD and a mechanical drive following Nick Needham's recommendations over at Flight1.  Although not the post I followed THIS one has some valuable advice on SSD's and configs.

I installed a 1T 7200RPM drive and a 120Gb OCZ SSD into an i7 980X partitioning the 1T drive into 200Gb & 800Gb.  The OS was installed onto the 200Gb (1st partition) and the 800 is used for storage.  The SSD is dedicated to FSX and any addons that need to be installed into FS itself.  Testing revealed the SSD's read and write speed is twice that of the mechanical so maximum performance for FS considering its running 3 undocked views with high scenery levels.  This system originally had just the SSD with everything loaded onto it in the default "Program Files" folder and was performing poorly as a result.  Performance has now increased by a factor of 5.

Don't rely on the extra speed of the SSD's if the rest of your system isn't up to par however.  Everything has to work in unison in order the get the most out of this program (FSX).   Given the lowering cost of SSD's they are becoming a good option for flightsimmers though.

Good luck and have fun,

Ken.

[RonW]

Ken - thanks for the info.
I'm going with an i7 980, ASUS Rampage III, 6 GB OCZ 1600/2000, GeForce 480 and a single OCZ 180 SSD on which I will install Win7 and FSX. O/C'd to 4.6 approx I expect some decent results. I too have always split the OS and FSX on 2 different drives or at least partitions. With none of the usual limitations and issues of Hard Drives, I expect the single SSD to work pretty good.

If not, then I guess I might put FSX on an additional 300GB Velocity Raptor as the SSD is really only to run the OS at the best speed possible, Not much advantage re FSX.

I've learned a lot from following Nick's info and he's probably right - I've likley already gone overboard in terms of FSX frame rates vs spending $$.

[Maurice]

If not, then I guess I might put FSX on an additional 300GB Velocity Raptor as the SSD is really only to run the OS at the best speed possible, Not much advantage re FSX.

I would think that the exact opposite would be true. FSX needs to access large scenery files constantly and the fastest hard  drive or rather SSD would be a distinct advantage. Personally, I think I may get two SSD drives, one for FSX and one for Windows. Since hopefully this will be be my last PC upgrade for FSX  ,  I want to minimize any chance to slow down any processes, whether Windows or FSX.

Overkill? probably but at this stage it's only a drop in a bucket compared to the total sim expense. When you are buried under several tons of concrete, adding another bucket of concrete on top really makes no difference to your health, financial or otherwise 

Maurice

[RonW]

If I keep this up my wife will be supplying the concrete - and not for my sim.

I'll try the OS and FSX on the same SSD and see how it goes. What the heck - I must be up to 4 times relaoding FSX and all the addons - what's one more time. I've done FS9 so many times I can't rmember but I did finally get smart and made an Acronis copy - makes life much simpler - simply patch the whole thing over.

It's hard to get objective data this early in the SSD game about whether FSX improves. I'm expecting the fast CPU and the decent GPU to do most of the work. If I only minimize the scenery stutters using an SSD it will be worth doing.

[Kennair]

Yes SSD's are still in development really with no longevity to them as yet, however I can certainly vouch for the improvement in my sim over the previous install which did have FSX and the OS on the one SSD drive.  Unfortunately I made many changes in total so can't really pin down one particular thing that made the difference.  I will say that I feel the GTX480 card was a significant factor though.  It replaced an ATI 5870 and was probably the best move of all.  Big advantage with the SSD's of course is there's no need for defragmenting, in fact its a big No-No!

As for the OC of the 980X I could only achieve stable speeds of 4.1Ghz.  Anything over wouldn't pass all tests and considering its in a commercial environment its got to be stable as much as fast.  Thankfully I achieved that at this speed.  Can't stress the importance of installing and configuring Win7 and FSX to Nick's instructions however in order to make the most of all that grunt.

Ken.

[RonW]

You should be able to get better speed out of that 980.  I'm using a Cool Master 932 Full case with fans all around, Zalman CNPS10X Extreme fan cooler, and can get a very stable 4.5 at 60C temp max. Usually the temp is mid 50's. I had it at 4.8 but the temp is too risky. So far it's all very stable. Be sure to use CoreTemp as your temp/speed program monitor.