Not sure if the title of this thread accurately describes my question. Im thinking of picking up an SSD drive to use for FSX. Ive got FSX running great, but the one area that can use some help is in load times and an occasional pause while loading scenery. Id love to be able to cut that down. The problem is, I have so many addons (planes and scenery) that my FSX directory is up to 250GB and growing all the time. I checked the prices of SSD drives and the size I need to contain FSX and all the addons i have would be way beyond what Im willing to spend. I know they will come down in price at some point, so I guess Ill just wait till then. However, an 80 or 100 GB SSD drive is not too bad in price. If I pick one of them up and install just FSX and a few scenery areas, then install the rest on a regular drive, would this help or hinder load times and scenery load pauses? has any one divided up FSX addons between different drives?Rob

A Velociraptor is also in your price range. If you are running off a standard 7.2k rpm drive, you'll notice a good boost in texture load times.

If I pick one of them up and install just FSX and a few scenery areas, then install the rest on a regular drive, would this help or hinder load times and scenery load pauses? has any one divided up FSX addons between different drives?Rob

Multi-drive install? Yes.Well, it's a fact that scenery is 'located' with the scenery.cfg, and while I've never moved any of the base stuff, I have photo scenery scattered across several drives.Most of my add-on aircraft are separate from the default... and are/can be on a different drive also - just reference them in the FSX.cfg entries.After reading about the benefits of defragging with placement of the sim on the outer edge of a drive for faster access, I concluded that I would put it on a drive other than the system drive and got a couple of smaller (80G) drives to do the same with my most frequently used photo scenery. So, system is at the front of C:, FSX is at the front of G:, Scenery is at the front of drives 3 and 4. I hope it helps but I sure don't know how to test it now....For sure, only one thing can be at the front of a drive and it will take multiple drives to have everything in the most accessible location.Loyd

I have the OS on one drive, FSX on another, addon scenery on another and addon aircraft on the fourth. All are on the outer tracks.

Alternative: Get a nice new 1.5 or 2.0 TB "traditional" 7200 RPM drive, and dedicate it entirely to FSX. If you keep the drive orderly and defragged, you'll achieve near-velociraptor speeds at far less cost than a VRap (*and a FRACTION of the cost of an SSD). You'd also have the fringe benefit of lots of extra space should you ever need it. SSD's for FSX, in my experience and opinion, are wasteful. Sure, loading times and such are much faster, but my observations of using my SSD with FSX is that overall game performance is not impacted outside of the initial loading process. Nothing in-game, such as texture loading or anything else, was really affected. Although I initially purchased my SSD for exclusive FSX use, I slid it over for use as my primary system drive (Win7 and my applications), and it makes a HUGE difference there. As a system drive, SSD's are unmatched... but dedicating such an investment to FSX for this former FSX+SSD user, is strictly for those with checkbooks too big to care. The differences just aren't big enough.Multiple stories have been done on the newer crop of 1.5+ TB drives - because their areal density (the density in which data is packed on the drive) is so high, if you are able to keep your data on the outside edge of the drive you can achieve unexpectedly fast read rates, which is ideal for FSX. By "short-stroking" a large drive, partitioning a huge drive down to something like 250-300GB, or just by using defragmenting tools which will stack data to the outside, you can limit your drive usage to the fastest portions of the hard drive and get VRap speeds without the VRap pricetag. So long as the "inner" portion of the big drive isn't being used when you load FSX, large drives make excellent bedfellows with FSX. Again, SSD's have their advantages... and they can be seen on nearly all computers when you use an SSD as your boot and daily application drive... but I think most users will end up with a feeling of "is that all I'm going to get with my money" when they choose to use SSD's with FSX. Good luck with your decisions!-Greg