These days magazines are full of magic bullet reports when it comes to SSDs being able to speed up PCs. While my iMac has done a fairly good job of running FSX and the new 737NGX, when it comes to more complex scenery, the hard disk shows its lack of high performance.A while back I bought myself an OCZ Technology 240 GB Vertex 3 SSD and put together a new system with an ASUS P8P67 motherboard, a i7-2600K CPU and an ASUS GTX 580 graphics card. I was most impressed by the overall system speed, particularly anything that involved data being read or written to the SSD. I have always enjoyed tinkering with PC technology, and yes, it tends to be a rather expensive hobby if you want to keep up with the latest and greatest.To cut a long story short, I recently read about new PCIe-based SSDs and the fact that they were even faster than the current top of the line SATA III based SSDs. Well, the 240 GB on my Vertex 3 had reached the recommended 80% capacity limit, great excuse :-) I know, so tada, here is the latest technology addition to my simulation PC, a 480 GB RevoDrive 3 X2:And yes, it is every bit as fast as advertised! I ran a disk benchmark with the Vertex 3 installed and then the same benchmark with the new RevoDrive 3 X2, the result speaks for itself:FSX and the 737NGX load sooooooo much faster now, even faster than with the Vertex 3, not to mention the fact that anything involving disk access, be it in read or write form, is really instant.So if you're looking for the ultimate Xmas upgrade for your gaming or simulation PC's aging hard disk.....this is it ;-)Jerome

700 dollars its not that fast but wish I had one, great post thanks

OMG.... Can I have a picking from your money tree?

For $700 it better be doing more than making load times shorter. Just saying.

It better fly aorund the room and serve drinks lol

Can I have it?What case do you use?

700 dollars

You forgot to put a 1 in front of the 700

its not that fast

True...fast would be an understatement Jerome

I saw the 1,700 didn't believe it lol

What case do you use?

It currently lives inside a Cooler Master Stacker that has been modified and is equipped with liquid cooling paraphernalia.Jerome

Congratulations, your hard drive is officially more expensive than my entire computer! Very jealous!

I looked at the PCIE revo drives when building this current rig, but I read a lot of horror stories. Most of them relate to getting the OS to play nice with this new technology. I think the drives themselves are sound and good (I own 4 OCZ drives, three in my current setup), but I think they are a couple years ahead of their time right now. I'm sure that not too long from now they will become the new standard and as a result we will see new motherboard layouts.What has your experience been like with regards to stability?

Just a question, but whats the chance you might be able to give us a comparison between a normal HDD and the solid state you put in (the 480GB) in FSX? I am not suprised it loading so quickly, but is it more then loading times that are improving?

Hi Tom,There is no way to actually show numbers relating to the hard disk performance inside FSX (at least none that I know of)....buuuuut....by the above benchmark chart, you can see the read and write times for the various file sizes - and I'll add a third one showing my regular, normal HDD. If you look at the 737NGX model file and various DDS texture files with a file size anywhere from 8 KB upwards, coupled with any 8 KB upward scenery BGL file for instance, then it's pretty easy to deduce that reading such files in particular is up to 30 times faster than a normal HDD file being read at a rate of 50 MB/sec. The incredible performance benefit is particularly noticeable when you fly a complex aircraft, such as the 737 NGX, over very dense, complex scenery.Jerome

I looked at the PCIE revo drives when building this current rig, but I read a lot of horror stories. Most of them relate to getting the OS to play nice with this new technology. I think the drives themselves are sound and good (I own 4 OCZ drives, three in my current setup), but I think they are a couple years ahead of their time right now. I'm sure that not too long from now they will become the new standard and as a result we will see new motherboard layouts.What has your experience been like with regards to stability?

Hi Mariano,I guess the horror stories would be relevant if you happen to have a motherboard that's not compatible. In fact from my experience, most hardware incompatibility is a horror story, but thanks to the Internet, most hardware manufacturers now offer compatibility guides through their websites.What's really interesting with the PCIe-based SSD drives in particular, is that they make full use of the bandwidth and deliver higher than SATA III performance on a SATA II equipped motherboard.As far as stability is concerned, I haven't had any problems. The installation was straight forward, the drive was instantly recognized during bootup using a USB Win 7x64 Installer, all I needed to do is supply the specific driver on a separate USB stick.PCI Express has been around for quite some time, in my opinion these drives are absolutely ideal. I think as pricing drops, as was the case after the CD-ROM first hit the market back in the 90s, this technology will be adopted more and more, especially by niche consumer groups such as gamers and simulation enthusiasts.Jerome

Congratulations, your hard drive is officially more expensive than my entire computer! Very jealous!

You forgot to put a 1 in front of the 700 True...fast would be an understatement Jerome

Recession? Some people are obviously not feeling the pain! :(

700$ for a SSD!! i would never