February 7, 201214 yr Get a cache drive -- the new hot HD item this year OCZ Synapse And Corsair will be launching the accelerator this month -- 60 GB model goes on sale for $99 and will work with *any* size HD. Soarbywire - Avionics Engineering
February 7, 201214 yr Hey guys,I haven´t been arround the hardware forum for quite a time now (Cause everything worked quite well.) but since I do only fly the NGX I have sometimes a pretty big FPS problems (14 FPS and shuttering down at some addon airports). If you check my sig I normally shouldn´t have this problem, it´s normally pretty fast. But what I do know is that my HDD, which has two partititions (One smaller for the OS and the rest for FSX and everything else) is pretty crappy and this could lead to my bad results in some areas. So i thought to take a bit of strain off my HDD and get an small SSD for the OS and everything what is is that partitition (currently 55GB heavy) and let the rest on the main HDD to maybe boos the FPS a bit.I´m not a really wise guy in terms of HDD´s and SSD´s, so could you give me some idea how much this chnage would be worth the money?Stepffen,I know that there are many intelligent people who feel that SSDs are a waste of money. I'm NOT one of those intelligent people. I happen to think that an SSD for the OS and an SSD for FSX is the way to go. I'm grateful that I no longer have any performance issues or CTDs when using FSX. It's finally enjoyable. Loading times are fast, textures look sharper at faster speeds, and switching view occur silky smoothly.This is the opinion of someone who upgraded from 2 300gig Velociraptors. I've never looked back and do not regret my purchases.IMHO, FSX requires the fastest hardware you can buy; HDs, CPUs, RAM, and even GPUs. When you combine all these fast components, you get better overall performance. MSFS
February 7, 201214 yr I have a friend who has RAID0 with 2 1TB WD's.He was averaging 200MB read and 175MB write. It was $200 overall and the transfer speeds are almost as fast as the older SATAII SSDs.And remember, he has 2TB of storage space. :Big Grin:I think that HDD's in RAID0 are the most viable solution for the money at the moment.
February 7, 201214 yr I have a friend who has RAID0 with 2 1TB WD's.He was averaging 200MB read and 175MB write. It was $200 overall and the transfer speeds are almost as fast as the older SATAII SSDs.And remember, he has 2TB of storage space. :Big Grin:I think that HDD's in RAID0 are the most viable solution for the money at the moment.HDD raid0's only help with sequential accessseek time / random access is far more important with typical desktop workloads
February 7, 201214 yr HDD raid0's only help with sequential accessseek time / random access is far more important with typical desktop workloadsWell, my friend's bootup time is very fast and loading all of his startup programs are quite quick.The whole OS is jumpy and everything loads quickly inside programs etc.
February 7, 201214 yr Raid0 and FSX don't mesh well together. I would venture to say that even with an external card, you still could have more stuttering. MSFS
February 7, 201214 yr Well, my friend's bootup time is very fast and loading all of his startup programs are quite quick.The whole OS is jumpy and everything loads quickly inside programs etc.Monitor disk activity with HD Sentinel (not sure if it supports RAIDs) Process Explorer and Performance Monitor.You'll be hard pressed to catch a >1MB/s activity while using stuff in the desktop, task bars, etc... those things reside in memory 99% of the times in a properly setup systemOpening programs there may be some speedup, but SSD's are still much faster.You can't run a sequential benchmark and assume that the drive will perform like that with all loads. It depends on the number of accesses, the transfer size for each access, the location in the disk (sequential/random) and the queue depth/concurrency.It's the same with SSD's. People run a benchmark and see 500MB/s and think they will get that all the time, but that's just a peak value with certain workloadsRaid0 and FSX don't mesh well together. I would venture to say that even with an external card, you still could have more stuttering.I honestly don't think storage has much to do with stutters José. Not even texture loading, at least in my experience.I believe texture loading is limited by the amount of CPU time FFTF leaves to the fibers.I tested HDD vs SSD slewing miles away into blur land, and both took about the same time to load the high def textures. Possibly increasing FFTF would help with SSD's, but then you would be sacrificing FPS, stealing CPU time to the main engine. The SSD's counters didn't seem to show much of an increased activity after slewing Edited February 7, 201214 yr by dazz
February 7, 201214 yr Steffen,looking at your system specs I see have Win7 64bit, but only 4 Gigs of RAM.So my advice to you: Fortget that SSD and get another 4GB RAM. The disk cache in Windows does magic when it has enough RAM left. I have 8GB RAM myself and I can start FSX with the HDD led hardly ever lighting up. And if you send your Computer to standby instead of shutting it down at the end of the day, those chached files are still there when you use FSX on another day. Regards, Tom
February 7, 201214 yr Steffen,looking at your system specs I see have Win7 64bit, but only 4 Gigs of RAM.So my advice to you: Fortget that SSD and get another 4GB RAM. The disk cache in Windows does magic when it has enough RAM left. I have 8GB RAM myself and I can start FSX with the HDD led hardly ever lighting up. And if you send your Computer to standby instead of shutting it down at the end of the day, those chached files are still there when you use FSX on another day.+1000Superfetch FTW!
February 7, 201214 yr +1000Superfetch FTW!Superfetch is a complete mystery to me. Every time I think about using it, I lose interest and stop researching it. You guys are implying 8GB is enough to use Superfetch. Am I correct? I do realize W7 does a fine job, apparently, of controlling memory.... Still, it seems like I'd be asking a lot with only 8GB. ___________________________________________________________________________________ Zachary Waddell -- Caravan Driver -- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/zwaddell Avsim ToS Avsim Screenshot Rules
February 7, 201214 yr Author Steffen,looking at your system specs I see have Win7 64bit, but only 4 Gigs of RAM.So my advice to you: Fortget that SSD and get another 4GB RAM. The disk cache in Windows does magic when it has enough RAM left. I have 8GB RAM myself and I can start FSX with the HDD led hardly ever lighting up. And if you send your Computer to standby instead of shutting it down at the end of the day, those chached files are still there when you use FSX on another day. I also thought about that. I had 8 GB RAM with my old system. Swapping the page file to the RAM gave me perfectly smooth and way better frames than without. As the prices have decreased since I got my 4 GB, I think I'll get another 4 GB. Or should I use two 4 GB dimms instead of 4 x 2 GB?! Best regards, Steffen Fight time: NGX 737-700: 37,0h; -800: 47,2h
February 7, 201214 yr I love my SSD's! Fast, quiet and trouble free (after an RMA) in every way.Kind regards,
February 7, 201214 yr Nevermind. Apparently I lack common knowledge. :Doh: ___________________________________________________________________________________ Zachary Waddell -- Caravan Driver -- Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/zwaddell Avsim ToS Avsim Screenshot Rules
February 7, 201214 yr I also thought about that. I had 8 GB RAM with my old system. Swapping the page file to the RAM gave me perfectly smooth and way better frames than without. As the prices have decreased since I got my 4 GB, I think I'll get another 4 GB. Or should I use two 4 GB dimms instead of 4 x 2 GB?!4x2 or 2x4, I don't think it matters. Just try not to mix different types of RAM.BTW: Win7n seems to be really good about managing memory. I've never noticed Windows even trying to use the page file... Regards, Tom
February 7, 201214 yr Superfetch is a complete mystery to me. Every time I think about using it, I lose interest and stop researching it. You guys are implying 8GB is enough to use Superfetch. Am I correct? I do realize W7 does a fine job, apparently, of controlling memory.... Still, it seems like I'd be asking a lot with only 8GB.8GB leaves quite a lot of spare RAM for Superfetch, but the more the merrier.Unless you use some very intensive RAM app that depletes Superfetch's cache, it'll all be there. Even then, Superfetch runs in the background & caches everything back in memory once RAM is available again.I also thought about that. I had 8 GB RAM with my old system. Swapping the page file to the RAM gave me perfectly smooth and way better frames than without. As the prices have decreased since I got my 4 GB, I think I'll get another 4 GB. Or should I use two 4 GB dimms instead of 4 x 2 GB?!At current prices you could get 8GB, but are you saying that you have the page file in a RAM disk with 4GB of RAM installed?
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