SSD Experiences

[JohnWillimas]

I've just fitted an SSD to hold my FS-X installation (OS is still on hard disk) and while it has improved load times I don't think its as dramatic as I had hoped. Anyway here the data is for anyone thinking about using an SSD. I'm using 126G of the 223G available on a 240G drive.

Has anyone had different experiences?

Here's my old and new load times:

Starting the program to appearance of the free flight menu: was 45 secs, now 22 secs.

Loading the aircraft choice screen from the free flight menu: was 25 secs, now 13 secs

Loading a flight from the free flight menu to sitting in the cockpit: was 4 minutes 30 secs, now 3 minutes.

The first two seem pretty good, the last one less so. These are done with the same scenery, aircraft etc.

Frame rates seem unaffected (as expected) but things like panning and switching views seem smoother although its difficult to be sure.

[TSR2]

Hi John, you'll see a much more noticeable experience with the SSD as the c drive. If you've got one ssd to play with, make it the os and a spinning disk on FSX.

[Jetstreamsky]

I agree making the C drive the SSD makes a lot of difference. I changed my C drive to SSD for non FSX reasons, not expecting any impact to FSX which is on a standard hard drive, but I guess all the number crunching goes on in the OS rather than where FSX resides.

[Vancouver]

Is your SSD plugged into a SATA3 socket?

[JohnWillimas]

Thanks for the thought, Vancouver. Yes I'm using an SATA 3G socket. I'm thinking of getting a second SSD for the OS now... at £120 for 240G it seems likely to be worth it.

[JohnWillimas]

Here's an update.I put a second SSD in to take the OS and programs etc. Here's the new figures in bold.

Starting the program to appearance of the free flight menu: was 45 secs, now 22 secs, with 2xSSD : 26 secs

Loading the aircraft choice screen from the free flight menu: was 25 secs, now 13 secs, with 2xSSD : 11 secs

Loading a flight from the free flight menu to sitting in the cockpit: was 4 minutes 30 secs, now 3 minutes, with 2xSSD : 1minute 24 secs

Certainly a big improvement in load to cockpit. Also I've noticed that the time to switch views seems to have dramatically improved and is now virtually instantaneous. The horrid pauses I use to get while textures for aircraft loaded when I switched views seem to have gone too

I wasn't expecting a frame-rate improvement so I didn't note what I had before - maybe 30fps peak, unlimited - but I do seem to have got a jump to around 50fps (if I leave it unlimited). Throttle back to 26fps and its beautifully smooth.

The other heads-up on this was that cloning the C drive was really easy with the Kingston kit and the Acronis software.

[DaveB]

Thanks for that John

ATB
DaveB

[Dev One]

My SSD experience not so good, my son installed one as a memory buffer(? I think thats what he said, box label say its a solid state cache of 50GB) last May & it failed in December last, so have had to disconnect it!
Keith

[JohnWillimas]

Well, I'm hoping these last longer than that! I'm guessing the memory buffer idea is to let you move the swap file from hard disk to solid state. If this was going to be a benefit, I'd guess that adding more real memory to the system might be an alternative but I'm no expert. My two SSD's just look to the system like any other disk drives. I guess I can fall back to the hard disk if these go boobies upwards but so far I'm happy.

[DaveB]

Yup.. I think this is what Alex (Vancouver) did with his system. He runs 16gig of system ram and has effectively removed the need for a swap file.

I'm running a small secondhand SSD as the system drive on my Win7 rig and my only worry with it is it's size so I'm looking to get a larger one to replace it at some point. With the near demise of WinXP, the Win7 rig will be taking more of the work and 120-odd gig is scarily small I have to say that when I do anything which involves the SSD, it's blindingly fast when compared to the sataII and III drives I also have installed. It's good to know the drive copy software you get with new SSD's seems to work faultlessly making migration to a larger drive painless Pity I can't afford one big enough to put FSX on

ATB
DaveB