I spent good time reading all about SSD here and elsewhere. My FS PC runs XP Pro and it has a dedicated HDD for FS. The idea is to replace my FS HDD with SSD to get (much) better read performance. I plan to copy everything onto the SSD and pop it in. No hassle of reinstalling anything. Although so far I don't see how it will cause any problem, I'd like to hear from more experienced users here if you have any thought on the DOs & DON'Ts. Much appreciated.

JasonI use the copy method each time that I change my hard drives - no issues.One caveat you need to reallocate the old drive to another drive letter and reallocate the new drive to the original FSX drive's letter.That way all the registry entries are correct! RegardsPeterH

That's what I thought. Thank you for the confirmation. I actually plan to use my Win7 machine to handle the copying job, starting with initialing the SSD. I read that Win7 is capable of "aligning" SSDs correctly. I don't really know what that means but it's like hearing "vegetables are good for you". No need to understand all the biological theories just eat them. :Straight Face:

Make sure the SSD you get sports updateable firmware and implements the "trim" command.Cheers,- jahman.

Can't do TRIM since my FS PC's OS is XP. And speaking of which, I actually want to use the drive in IDE mode. From what I read about AHCI, it requires chipset driver update, and what's more AHCI will adversely affect normal HDD performance if not causing other issues. For this reason I selected a SSD with Indilinx Barefoot controller because according to this benchmark the indilinx suffers the least performance penalty from using IDE mode rather than AHCI.

I don't want to hijack this thread, but your question Windycloud begs the following from me: Can one install a new SSD drive with Windows 7 64 bits as the OS, and copy/transfer all FS9/X currently running with Windows XP 32 bits SP3 on my HDD without any re-install of FS on the SSD?Thank you for clarifying if this is doable or not.Best regards,

WindycloudI think that this is a partition alignment problem peculiar to Windows XP. With Vista/ Win7 and definitely the later SSDs this is now automatic so you don't have to bother about partition alignment any more - Hooray! :Applause: Read this: http://www.ocztechnologyforum.com/forum/showthread.php?48309-Partition-alignment-importance-under-Windows-XP-(32-bit-and-64-bit)..why-it-helps-with-stuttering-and-increases-drive-working-life.Jean-ClaudeI don't think that would work as all of your registry entries are in XP and not Win 7. Microsoft do have a migrating tool that does copy some settings from an old OS to Windows 7 it may copy the FSX registry entries, so I guess anything is possible. IMHO You would be better off with a clean install. However, there is a registry tool here on AVSIM and on Flight1 which corrects registry entries for FSX, but I'm not sure how effective it really is or if it works for FS9! RegardsPeterH

To report back, my Corsair Nova 64GB arrived today. A small and simple piece of hardware. I quick formatted it in Windows7 then popped it into my FS PC (running WinXP Pro) and copied all files from the FS2004 HDD to the new SSD. Power off - decommissioned the HDD - power on and changed drive letter - restart and all was ready to go.Texture loading is a lot faster. Now...what textures to load and when is still under FS9's control and that hasn't changed. So don't expect to see 100nm miles of ultra high res ground textures. But what FS does command to load comes up instantly. There are no "tardy textures" when panning and under aircraft selection window browse to any plane and the repaint is just there. I don't even see its loading process. My harddrive access light benefits the most. Before whenever FS loaded a batch of stuff the light worked long and hard. Now it merely blinks a little.A quick benchmark yields the same result as published benchmarks on the internet (208MB/s avg). Now I have a FS drive that's 4 times faster to read than my old SATA HDD.SSDs work well on eliminating disk speed from the bottleneck list of our forever quest of FS performance.

Let all you get the prices down on these ,R & D,then I shall consider this technology.2yrs they will be half the price and twice the capabilities.

Feeling very smart about yourself aren't you with that comment? You do understand that, after all, you are most likely talking about less than $100? Either you care little about FS (absolutely nothing wrong) or you value little of two years of time in your own life span, whatever that'll end up being. :Thinking:

To report back, my Corsair Nova 64GB arrived today. A small and simple piece of hardware. I quick formatted it in Windows7 then popped it into my FS PC (running WinXP Pro) and copied all files from the FS2004 HDD to the new SSD. Power off - decommissioned the HDD - power on and changed drive letter - restart and all was ready to go.

Same experience with FSX.Kingston 64 GB SSD ($99) arrived in the mail. Installed it in anempty hard-drive slot using a 3.5" bracket ($10) and hooked it upwith a SATA cable and Molex to SATA power adapter ($2.50).Initialized the drive in Win XP, copied the entire FSX directory over.Changed the drive letter, so it had the same drive letter as my previous(Raptor) FSX drive.Bingo! Works great - fast, quiet, and freed up the Raptor as a dedicated paging drive and FSX backup.