I've ordered a 256Gb SSD for Christmas and before I start making too many plans for its use I've got a question or several...
1. Do SSDs benefit P3D/FSX; if yes how?
2. Given the amount of "stuff" available for P3D/FSX these days is there a compromise which provides benefits without filling the entire SSD with P3D/FSX and all the attendant stuff?
3. What are the top 5 recommendations for getting the best from an SSD?
I suspect the answers to some or all of these might be found on the interweb thingy somewhere but to be honest I CAB to trawl through millions of articles, which may or may not be of real use so I thought I'd ask the flightsim biased experts in here. Mind you feel free to go tell me to get trawling if the answers to the above require a page or 6 of text!
1. Do SSDs benefit P3D/FSX; if yes how? Yes, they improve program and flights loading speed. SSDs do not improve frame rate, maybe some improvement in smoothness when complex scenery needs to get loaded from the SSD during the flight.
2. Given the amount of "stuff" available for P3D/FSX these days is there a compromise which provides benefits without filling the entire SSD with P3D/FSX and all the attendant stuff? Ideally you would put FSX/P3D and all addons on the SSD to get the full benefit of the fast SSD loading speed. If you really feel you must offload some files to a mechanical hard disk I would move addon aircraft and addon scenery you rarely use.
3. What are the top 5 recommendations for getting the best from an SSD? I can only think of 2... :
1 - NEVER defragment an SSD, it makes no sense and will shorten the lifetime.
2 - SSD lifetime will increase if you do not entirely fill all the available space. Modern SSD's come with utility programs (e.g. Samsung Magician) which help you to ensure at least 10% of the SSD will be reserved for this so called "Over Provisioning".
Chaps, something to note. On windows 8 and 8.1, SSD's DO run a defrag, but its not a defrag in the sense of a physical disc, it simply runs TRIM. The OS is intelligent enough to distinguish between SSD and spinning disk and will run the correct defrag process for each.
