Building new system trying to decide on hard drive setup.Figure I'll do one SSD for the OS and games and a separate drive for FSX.For FSX is an SSD going to be better than a WD Velociraptor? Space isn't a big deal, my current install is 32 gigs for FSX, so I figure 128GB will be plenty for the drive.How do you tell what a good SSD is, what specs do I look for on it etc.? Any particular standout brands / drives?

See my specs. That's what I recommend. Look at corsair and mushkin drive., they're probably the best. Look at the speeds of the drive. A fast read is 200MB/s + and the same with write. You want to get one where the write is fairly similar to the read.

For FSX is an SSD going to be better than a WD Velociraptor? Space isn't a big deal, my current install is 32 gigs for FSX, so I figure 128GB will be plenty for the drive.

The ONLY difference you will see is in initial load times for FSX. That being said an SSD is not going to have much of an impact on overall FSX performance when compared to the Velociraptor. Taking into account the cost per GB ratio and only a difference in intial load times, the Velociraptor wins hands down.

Hi,I agree with Sargeski... SSD is useless on FSX if you look the cost/performance ratio vs a Velociraptor or a Caviar Black HDD... I'm using my SSD only for the OS to speed things up and two Velociraptors in Raid 0 for all the games in my PC...Maybe when MS release Flight you'll see an increase in performance... in the meantime with FSX you won't...Dexter...

The ONLY difference you will see is in initial load times for FSX. That being said an SSD is not going to have much of an impact on overall FSX performance when compared to the Velociraptor. Taking into account the cost per GB ratio and only a difference in intial load times, the Velociraptor wins hands down.

You should also see an improvement in the speed of texture loading, and keeping them loaded while flying at fast speed.

And you never have to defrag.

If you have lots of spare cash and aren't really looking for a significant performance increase, the SSD would be the way to go.It's not coast effective, provides no significant increase in fps but will provide faster initial load times.Best bang for the buck is the Vrap. Also, you could easily run that 128G to near full with add-ons. Best bet is a 300 or 600g Vrap.

Building new system trying to decide on hard drive setup.Figure I'll do one SSD for the OS and games and a separate drive for FSX.For FSX is an SSD going to be better than a WD Velociraptor? Space isn't a big deal, my current install is 32 gigs for FSX, so I figure 128GB will be plenty for the drive.How do you tell what a good SSD is, what specs do I look for on it etc.? Any particular standout brands / drives?

SSD disks have a limited lifetime on read and write - the disk will fail eventually. This is why you cannot defrag a SSD as it creates too many read-write events. TheSSD has internal software to spread the data across the disk so that the whole diskgets used to reduce the R/W on one byte. That said, I use SSD in a commercial setupwith large scale oracle databases - and we have not had data errors over 4 years.SSD will not give you better fps - it will improve load times, and if you don'thave much memory it can reduce texture load problems (fuzzy textures) during fastflight.As to quality of SSD - look at the sustained read rates,write is less important for FSX. Also the MTBF (mean timebefore failure for memory) as this will give an indicationof quality of the chip - this is significant for SSD

Thanks for the replies everyone.Decided to go with twin SSD's (one OS / programs - one pure FSX). Read some articles on them and seems they are worth it - and in heavy use most still have over a decade of life in them so not too worried about that considering i upgrade every 2 years on average anyways.