I am thinking of installing FS9 and FSX either onto one 80GB SSD drive, along with the OS - 80GBs would accommodate the OS and the two default installations with ease, I calculate c.40GBs in total, or (better?) having Win7 and FS9 on one 40GB SSD (total of under 25GBs) and putting FSX onto a second 40GB SSD. Might even stretch, financially, to 2 x 80GB SSDs - leave me a bit more room to manoeuvre.But my main question is this. I see from Process Monitor that during a flight FS9.exe is accessed hundreds of times a second - but obviously I would need to have all my FS data, like addon scenery, FS Genesis mesh, Ultimate Terrain etc. etc. on a conventional SATA drive - I could never run to the cost of putting my whole FS9 & FSX installations onto an SSD! In that event, is there really going to be much advantage of having SSDs at all - fsx.exe would be on an SSD, so would Win7, but much of the data (terrain etc.) it is accessing would not. Is that creating a bottleneck that invalidates the whole idea?Comments appreciated. Thank you.Martin

Hi Martin!I'm using an Raptor disk for my OS and a VelociRaptor for FSX. I've been following several threads on SSD for FSX. Search for posts by Bob Scott on SSDs and you'll get a lot of good advice!If I would go for a SSD solution for FSX at this moment it would be a 160GB Intel X25-M to make sure that all my FSX folders (80GB) will be contained on the SSD disk. Not much point in just keeping the FSX core an a small SSD disk and have the heavy duty scenery files on a slow SATA solution.For now I'm just saving up money for a new build late next year or early 2012 - based on the new Intel Sandy Bridge and the high end tech at that time.

Just get a 64 gig for now and install all your aircraft and AI to that and the scenery to another drive. That way you can move the additional scenery files around quicker when you get a new drive. Also scenery loading is bearable, it's nothing compared to what FSX does to read in the aircraft files. Every SimObject has to be referenced individually at startup. Now ideally Microsoft will optimize this anyway like they have for scenery directories, but for now SSD is 10x faster at the task.

Reckon I'll go for 2 x Corsair Force SSDs (60GB and 120GB) and 2 x Samsung Spinpoint F3s or F4s..

Don't worry too much about brands as price vs performance directly at the cash register. Chances are whatever you buy is going to be Samsung product anyway..

OK - it's ordered. Hard drive wise I have gone for:1 x Corsair Force 60GB F60 SSD for Windows 7 x641 x Corsair 120GB Force SSD for FlightSim2 x Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TBHope this will be OK!Thanks for the suggestions,Martin