Hi all,I would go for a 10 000rpm drive if I could, over a SSD to save my $'s for something else. I don't believe 10 000rpm drives will add too much more noise (yes a little), and if they do bother you then sure, go for a SSD if you can afford it.Everything I've read tells me that higher disk R/W & overall access timings are considerably faster and beneficial to accessing scenery and weather features in a flight. What I would be really interested in is if anyone has done an overall comparison between the speed of access of a 10 000rpm drive and a SSD - while I'm sure a SSD would be a lot faster, but how much exactly?I plan on getting a 10 000rpm drive in my new system build later this yr. Cheers,David

Hi all,I would go for a 10 000rpm drive if I could, over a SSD to save my s for something else. I don't believe 10 000rpm drives will add too much more noise (yes a little), and if they do bother you then sure, go for a SSD if you can afford it.Everything I've read tells me that higher disk R/W & overall access timings are considerably faster and beneficial to accessing scenery and weather features in a flight. What I would be really interested in is if anyone has done an overall comparison between the speed of access of a 10 000rpm drive and a SSD - while I'm sure a SSD would be a lot faster, but how much exactly?I plan on getting a 10 000rpm drive in my new system build later this yr. Cheers,David

If we're talking in-flight performance, just go with a 7200 rpm drive. Neither a 10,000 rpm drive or an SSD will provide any benefit. Sure, load times will be greatly improved with an SSD, but I have a hard time justifying the $290 spent on a 600GB VelociRaptor. So I tend to split this decision into two camps: an SSD if you're really concerned with noise and better load times, or a regular 7200 rpm drive if you can't afford an SSD. It's all or nothing! Anything in between is pointless. A 10,000 rpm drive provides no benefit to in-flight performance, it's noisier, it's not going to improve load times that much, and it's going to cost significantly more than a 7200 rpm drive. Realize that a couple of us have done a comparison between a 7200 rpm drive and an SSD over in the hardware forums. There was literally no benefit, so there's no reason to think a 10,000 rpm drive is going to behave any differently.

This topic appears to be pretty hot, so I suppose I will chime in. For those of you who missed the FSX stutter benchmark, storage edition thread a couple weeks ago, you should go check it out. I personally put an SSD to the test on a brand new FSX install and compared it to a 7200 rpm Samsung spinpoint F3 1TB. I saw no difference in min, max, or avg FPS. Digging deeper and plotting FPS for the FSXMark11 benchmark only gives one conclusion: there is absolutely no difference. See for yourself:Ignore the plot of CPU usage as it doesn't seem to have any sort of consistency or relevance as far as I know. Don't get me wrong - I love my SSD, boot times and program load times are awesome... but it was given to me as a gift, so I didn't have to fork out the $250 from my own pocket. Honestly, I would probably be wishing I had put the money towards a cooling loop, case, or video card if I had payed for it myself. SSDs are nice, but I would focus on making sure you have everything else EXACTLY as you want it before buying one.

Of course you won't improve your FPS by changing a hard-drive!!It is amazing how strong the placebo effect can be.Your choice of drive type / configuration will depend on your needs.If you have a large number of complex add-ons / detailed photoscenery and the like, you will notice significant increase in loading flight times.With hi-res photoscenery in fast planes (eg fast jets) you will get delayed terrain LOD loading, and these things also take up large amounts of space.Many people who have purchased 100Gb SSD drives for dedicated FSX use are struggling as they purchase more add-ons, and having to replace the drive before the end of its life.If money is no object then a 480Gb SSD will be great, or a PCIE based drive (IBIS / Revodrive). For most of us however, these are far too expensive per gigabyte.I run 2 x 300Gb Velociraptors in RAID0. These are not tangibly more noisy than a standard spinpoint drive (which I also run for scenery development/storage)IMO: Simplest bang for buck would be a 600Gb velociraptor (non-RAID). They are not noisy (where did that come from?!) ... or if you can afford an SSD of reasonable size then go with that. What does a faster drive do for you?1. Faster Load times2. Less texture lag (blurries) in a properly tuned/performing system. It will not improve FPS / stutters or general graphics quality (except texture loading)

Simplest bang for buck would be a 600Gb velociraptor (non-RAID). They are not noisy (where did that come from?!)

Perhaps I owned one . As far as bang for buck, what is this "bang" you speak of??? I never could tell a difference in texture loading between my 7200 rpm drive and my 10,000 (ground textures or VC textures). A 600GB VelociRaptor is $290. For just a little more, OP can pick up a 180-240GB SSD. That way when he realizes it doesn't really have any impact on FSX he can use it as his OS drive instead and see a lot more bang than a VelociRaptor could ever provide.

Moreover, My OS is OEM, so changing drives means I'm gonna have to buy a new windows 7 (I stand to be corrected if I'm wrong).Thanks again.

If you have a retail dvd of the OEM W7 you should be ok. Especially if you are only changing HD. The problem is with manufacturer installed operating systems such as Dell etc. I changed my entire motherboard, proc. and graphics card last year and did a clean install with no problems registering with Microsoft. As long as you haven't done this within 6 months from your last install, you should be ok.Regards,

This has nothing to do with PMDG. Sigh.

hi i have one ssd drive and one tb hard drivecan i install the os and fsx on the ssd,will this help or have the os on ssd and leave fsx on the regular hard drivevivek

hi i have one ssd drive and one tb hard drivecan i install the os and fsx on the ssd,will this help or have the os on ssd and leave fsx on the regular hard drivevivek

If you have enough space, you can run both FSX and Windows from the SSD. It's not like you can't in a magnetic drive, but there're some drawbacks that are not present in flash drives with no moving parts and don't need defragging.If you install the OS in the SSD, you may want to save all the space you can there by disabling hibernation, search indexing, moving the page file out of the SSD... here's a useful guide for SSD optimization:http://thessdreview....zation-guide-2/it recommends disabling the page file, but unless you have lots of RAM (and even if you do) I would just move it to a secondary drive

This has nothing to do with PMDG. Sigh.

Cameron, PMDG have stated many times that they don't mind hardware threads here

I suppose, except it's like, everywhere in these forums.

You can absolutely mix and match RAID and non-RAID drives. RAID is an abstraction layer done in the controller chip on the motherboard, as far as the OS knows, it's just a single HD.There's honestly no specific reason that I can see to have FSX on a separate harddrive just for the sake of itself. Yeah it makes defragging easier and whatever, but as long as there's sufficient space on your main drive you're fine with on the same drive as the OS. (make sure to put FSX in it's own folder though, not in the Program Files/Program Files (x86) folders.

Perhaps I owned one . As far as bang for buck, what is this "bang" you speak of??? I never could tell a difference in texture loading between my 7200 rpm drive and my 10,000 (ground textures or VC textures). A 600GB VelociRaptor is $290. For just a little more, OP can pick up a 180-240GB SSD. That way when he realizes it doesn't really have any impact on FSX he can use it as his OS drive instead and see a lot more bang than a VelociRaptor could ever provide.

An excellent idea returning that noisy, slow velociraptor. It must have been faulty!SSD for a system drive is the only way to go, if you're about to do an OS install. (Lots of random read/write operations -- no drive will perform better)My comments were based on experience directly swapping 2x7200RPM drives (which could sustain 140Mb/sec). With two velociraptors as drop in replacements, same Adaptec controller, same system. Admittedly these are in RAID0 on a standalone controller. The result is sustained 200mb/sec and no blur, even when slewing rapidly whilst developing scenery. Something that 7200 RPM drives could never do.Developers restart their computers and spend more time looking at texture loading than they do flying. So my impression is admittedly from that perspectiveBang for buck? perhaps this is the inverse of Buck/Gb.SSDat 240Gb SSD = $1.70/Gbat 500Gb SSD = $2.79/Gbat 600Gb Velociraptor = 0.48c/GbSo at the stated capacity, an SSD is approximately 5.8x the cost.If you want a really fast drive and don't use addons, or mind it always being full then a 120Gb SSD is great.My 128Gb SSD system volume drives me nuts. 3 years on, waiting for the OS to stall, so I can justify the cost of a larger SSD.There are a couple of advantages of FSX on a separate drive:The drive / array can be increased in size / upgraded or generally replaced easily without a reinstall of FSX or Windows (assuming you don't somehow corrupt your install!)As suggested above you don't run into permissions issuesNo consumption of system drive bandwidth.Each to their own, but you need to assess how each person uses their computer and their sim. The (only?) problem with SSDs is that they are still relatively small per $ spent.(All grit for the mill.)