So I bribed my neighbour yesterday with an invitation to him and all his family to cook for them my worldwide (well, almost) famous super-spicy Majorcan style snails this next weekend (escargots in french sounds a lot more enticing) and he agreed to lend me his SSD again.Just for kicks, I cloned my OS + FSX partition to both the SSD and my poor WD Caviar Green, normally used as mass storage drive. I'm running the same test I used for the RAM speed comparison here and will be posting the outcome shortlyIs this meaningfull at all? No clue, but hey, let the geeks have fun!

...and the geeks will have fun! This has been needing to happen. I'll be excited to play with the data again, but I'll be away until the middle of next week trout fishing! The last discussion involving memory got all sorts of ideas flowing in my mind and now I'm looking to expand the current FSXMark11 results spreadsheet to include some sort of advanced stutter report. I'll make it simple by including a method of automatically import FRAPS csv files. This way you don't actually have to know anything about excel to generate some spiffy reports. Basically - all you have to do is run the benchmark, the excel spreadsheet will do all the work for you. This will be a week or two from now, however.I think I would need a generous blessing of spices to stomach escargot...

How about some yummy mountain oysters then? that's quite common in Texas isn't it?

Congrats for the benchmark.Waiting for the escargot recipe!:--))

Haha, my grandfather raises cattle and I still didn't know what mountain oysters were. Thank you Wikipedia. Barbacoa and menudo on the other hand - great stuff! I'm pretty sure you have to be in south Texas to get menudo. Even Austin is a little too far north.

Haha, my grandfather raises cattle and I still didn't know what mountain oysters were. Thank you Wikipedia. Barbacoa and menudo on the other hand - great stuff! I'm pretty sure you have to be in south Texas to get menudo. Even Austin is a little too far north.

YUCK!

You can get Rocky Mountain Oysters and menudo here in Colorado!!

Love the sign in the3rd pic... "The town of Severance" "and the Bulls Cry" :LMAO:

Results of the benchmark I run 3 tests on the SSD and 3 on the Caviar Green, rebooting in between tests in case anything was cached.Downloads:The benchmark filesTests results of the Caviar Green Test results of the OCZ Vertex II SSDThe spreadsheetsAnd this is the sumary:Dips below X FPS: CAVIAR GREEN vs SSDbelow 30: 1113.00 - 1078.00 below 25: 185.67 - 180.67below 20: 27.67 - 25.33below 15: 16.67 - 15.67below 10: 1.33 - 1.67d<Xthis "delta" stat compares a frame with the next to calculate the difference. So if for example we have 50FPS at a certain point, and the next is 30FPS, the delta is -20.The 1st column is the delta for each range, so for example, in the 1st SSD test there're 1488 drops between 5 and 10 FPS, and 1892 drops of 5 or more FPS (includes all the ranges below) And again, the pattern of the tests are identical, like in the memory speed benchmarks:Caviar GreenSSDThere is a difference though. In all of the caviar green runs, there was a prominent stutter at the beginning of the test that doesn't happen with the SSD. It's when the PMDG744 initilized the displays and systems. Nothing relevant IMO:Caviar green above, SSD below:Screenshots of the AS SSD & ATTO tools so you can see the SSD is alligned, in AHCI mode and in good shape with the expected data transfer rates:So my conclusion based on this would be: an SSD does NOT reduce stutters or do anything to make the sim smoother.As I said in the memory benchmark, I don't claim this is conclusive, but I'm pretty sure any smoother perception is just placebo effect. I mean, this is a 280MB/s SSD vs a Caviar Green:I won't comment on texture/scenery loading speeds as that's not something I can bench

As I said in the memory benchmark, I don't claim this is conclusive, but I'm pretty sure any smoother perception is just placebo effect. I mean, this is a 280MB/s SSD vs a Caviar Green:

Thank you for the excellent analysis and presentation Dario.Your tests support everything I have read on hard drive operation and effect on system performance.I feel comfortable in stating:1) Access time has little effect on FSX performance given the relatively large file reads (Approx.400MB Avg. typical).2) Increased transfer rates above those exhibited by the Caviar Green, have no effect on FSX performance.So from 1 and 2 above:a) SSD has no significant effect on FSX performance however I would expect other programs that require much smaller file reads would benefit from the SSD low access time.bee) I would expect no performance increase from Raid0, (see my specs, albeit I do realize CPU offloading due to controller card). c) As expected HDD access time has little effect on large file reads.Your test is very useful information for people trying to decide factually what hard drive purchase to make, be it Vraps or SSD’s or other.

Exactly Gary. I have to say that getting this VRap was probably a mistake. I paid 200€ for it when Caviar Blacks are quite close in performance and more capacity. An SSD or a Caviar Black, even a Caviar Blue would have been better options probablyWell, I did another test. Instead of 3 flights of 5 minutes circling around Heathrow, I tried one from London City (EGLC) to Heathrow and then to Standsted (EDSS) for a 30min total flight.I wanted to make sure the scenery and terrain were not previously loaded in memory when the flight is loaded and also increased the speed from 140 to 170 knots at 1000ft altitude.I had to cut the last 200 seconds because the xls wouldn't take so many rows hehe.The files can be downloaded hereSame thing again, nothing showing that the SSD helps with stutters

Exactly Gary. I have to say that getting this VRap was probably a mistake. I paid 200€ for it when Caviar Blacks are quite close in performance and more capacity. An SSD or a Caviar Black, even a Caviar Blue would have been better options probably

Dario, not sure if you are up to it or not...but it may be interesting to look at performance on a different controller. For example if this test was on the Marvell ports try it on the JMicron? Your comparison above is vallid and sound I am just curious.If you do go through the bother it would be interesting to see CPU utilization for each, SSD vs. Caviar, even on the same controller as tested above.

I'm sorry Gary. I don't have the ssd anymore

I'm sorry Gary. I don't have the ssd anymore

Thank you Dario.By the way based on your tests I think my next install I will drop my Raid set and go for the faster access time over the increased transfer rate.Great work once again the best SSD to mechanical comparison I have ever read.

Thanks for the kind words Gary.I've been playing with the settings and thought I'd post the graph of this same test with no traffic. See how apart from that stutter some 210 secs into the test, the run was silk smooth