Stephen,Thank you. Your enthusiasm helped me buy the right SSDs.Jose

My FS PC runs WinXP so no TRIM for me. And it has both HDD and SSD so I chose not to use AHCI mode. Even so for me the improvement of a SSD as the FS drive is still noticeable.

Jason,Even though you're content with a slight increase in performance, it's not really the best approach. Now I understand why some people say that SSDs did not really improve their system. That's becuase they bought the wrong SSD or did not use the right set-up.Since I've had the chance to try IDE, AHCI, and Raid0, I have a good understanding of how the SSD read speed affect my sim experience.I, like most simmers, want smooth flight with sharp textures. SSD has achieve this goal for me and it can for most with fast systems.In the near future I will opt for a Raid0 set-up with my two current SSD drives for OS and a separate RevoDrive for FSX.RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD will allow the extremely fast reads I want without having to replace my motherboard.

DJJose: Or that you could accomplish the same improvement by loading the software 2 minutes earlier....

DJJose: Or that you could accomplish the same improvement by loading the software 2 minutes earlier....

Thanks. I'll give that a shot. :Bring It On:

DJJoseHave you really thought RAID 0 through. What benefit will it give you in terms of FSX which is mainly very small files. RAID was developed for servers that handle huge amounts of large chunks of data and these are quite different to home PCs. There is a great article here: http://www.bestpricecomputers.co.uk/reviews/home-pc-raid/"These SOHO RAID solutions were limited to striping and mirroring and the general consensus among erudite consumers was that striping two hard disks into a larger volume meant more speed while using one disk as a mirror provided a protection against data loss. These generalisations are largely myths. From our experience - and the stats we’ve collected from our customers - those with RAID 1 are marginally more likely to lose data than those without any RAID at all. The even more startling fact to emerge from our stats was that those with RAID 0 are six times more likely to suffer data loss than customers with no RAID array in their PCs. andwrt to increased speedBut very little of that is true. RAID 0 does not always make for more speed. In fact striping may not make the blindest bit of difference to the speed of the average home PC!If the claim that RAID 0 is not all it's cracked up to be sounds illogical then it's worth taking the time to read the reviews. A search in Google should lead you to them. Except for a few limited high I/O activities like video editing - and the typical application benchmark - the speed gains are almost non-existent. For the average PC user RAID 0 is as useful as a rear spoiler on an 800cc car. It looks good, it sounds impressive but it don't do nuffin'IMHO RAID adds nothing to FSX but a fast SSD on its own does. On board RAID actually uses some cpu cycles so it could slow FSX down? There will be lots of other opinions claiming that RAID is faster but the logics of the situation dictate that this just cannot be true. To me a SSD on a PCIE card is a much more elegant solution.RegardsPeterH

It might alleviate stutters, however that can have a lot to do with your RAM, CPU and other stuff. An SSD is an improvement on platter drives in just about every way other than price per GB. In regards to what you are looking for, an SSD will alleviate the classic tile fill in you get in FS9 as you quickly pan around the aircraft in spot. Regardless of whether you use FSX or FS9, an SSD will certainly help thing along, and make the Hard Drive much less of a bottleneck on the CPU, Motherboard, and RAM. Honestly, I would wait until prices get closer to 1GB per dollar. Right now its about 600mb per $1. If you have the extra money lying around, I would go for it. Its very cool, SSDs are indeed the future.

A colleague of mine has been talking lately about getting a 64GB SSD drive for his system. Now I'm thinking.... since stuttering has always been an issue (loading textures, other crap) It would seem logical that an SSD drive might be the holy grail to solving the stuttering/performance problems typically seen in FS since disk reads are the culprit to the stuttering issues... and if SSDs perform magnitudes faster.... :Thinking: Is anyone using an SSD device for simming yet?

Just replaced a dedicated FSX Raptor drive by a $99 Kingston 64GB SSD.Works like a charm. Fast, quiet and smooth scenery loading in FSX.

I am considering SSD.I keep my machine fairly lean, I don't need massive amount of storage hence SSDs appeal to me.If I wanted to go solely SSD, would a single larger drive be OK, or is it still advantageous to have two separate SSD drives for Win7 and FSX?

I am considering SSD.I keep my machine fairly lean, I don't need massive amount of storage hence SSDs appeal to me.If I wanted to go solely SSD, would a single larger drive be OK, or is it still advantageous to have two separate SSD drives for Win7 and FSX?

According to opinions in this thread: http://forum.avsim.net/topic/321622-christmas-time-ssd-time/two SSD drives would be optimal.

I am considering SSD.I keep my machine fairly lean, I don't need massive amount of storage hence SSDs appeal to me.If I wanted to go solely SSD, would a single larger drive be OK, or is it still advantageous to have two separate SSD drives for Win7 and FSX?

I've been one of those who have praised Raid0 for as long as I can remember. I've witnessed what a single Vrap could do. Then Vraps in Raid0. The performance was excellent. However, without a dedicated Sata Raid0 card, you will run into issues like stutters. A properly configured Raid0 should yield excellent results.In comes solid state drives. I bought 2 120 G Skill and I will never look back. This was suggested by an excellent contributor, Stephen, whom I admire. I bought two and tried an IDE set-up, Raid0 set-up, and AHCI set up. I settled with an AHCI set-up - one SSD for OS and one SSD for FSX.If you have the extra funds and the motherboard supports it, buy 2 Sata III drives or one 100 G Skilll SSD drive for OS and one RevoDrive for FSX. Don't worry too much about trim or garbage collection for RevoDrive. It will be a long time before you see the drive degrade.If in doubt, check out some benchmarks. The numbers don't lie.