Pilots,I'm getting back into the hobby after more than a year and I've decided I need a brand new computer to enjoy FSX. My budget will allow for one Solid State Drive (SSD) so I'd appreciate any hints on how to best utilize it. It's going to be a 120GB drive so I'm guessing there won't be enough space to fit in BOTH Windows and FSX plus all addons (scenery etc.). If so, would you recommend I place FSX (and addons) on the SSD while Windows resides on a normal HDD or should it be the other way around?The machine I'm building will have a boot manager so all simming will have a dedicated Windows running it while work and "non-fun" stuff is on another Windows instance.ThanksJonas

Windows and FSX will definitely fit in a 120 GBy SSD, as well as all the aircraft add-ons you are likely to have.Then decide on how much free space you want left on your SSD and continue filling up with add-on scenery. Whatever scenery doesn't fit, you can then load on the HDD.In deciding which scenery to place on the SSD vs. the HDD, I would look at the number of files in each secenery package. Some sceneries have losts of small files, whereas other sceneries have a few large files. Since for FSX an SDD gives you an advantge of a 10x speed-up in load tiems, I would suggest prioritizing sceneries with lots of small files for the SSD so they can benefit form the speed of SSD I/O.Cheers,- jahman.

If it were me, and this is (as always) IMHO, I'd place all operating system programs on the HDD. You'll want to end up with the OS itself in the © drive programs file and a lot of general programming in the © drive (X86) programs file. Place all flight sim programmning in the SSD and give it another letter designation.

Yep: the OS should go on a 200 - 500 gig hard drive, with FSX going on the SSD. HDD's are pretty cheap, and - if big enough - it can serve as storage for textures, such as REX, GEX, etc.. - those don't need to be with FSX.

Yep: the OS should go on a 200 - 500 gig hard drive, with FSX going on the SSD. HDD's are pretty cheap, and - if big enough - it can serve as storage for textures, such as REX, GEX, etc.. - those don't need to be with FSX.

I'm surprised to hear REX would be best placed on the HDD as I assumed REX was quite texture intense. Could you expand on that some?

I have a 120gb SSD with my OS, FSX, REX, about 20+ airports, payware airplanes, other FS programs like FSBuild and Active Sky, plus MS Office, Photoshop CS5 and I still have 30gb left.I do suggest you turn off the 'hibernation file'. That will save about 20gb.If I decide to upgrade to Active Sky 2012, I'll need to put it elsewhere or I can get picky by removing some scenery that I don't use very much.I recommend you put all of your FS stuff and your OS on the SSD.Get it, it's great!

I'm surprised to hear REX would be best placed on the HDD as I assumed REX was quite texture intense. Could you expand on that some?

Yes - REX consists of a 'large number' of texture files from which you create a 'theme'. You then install this theme into FSX, backing up the default files, then replacing them with the theme files. There is no interaction between FSX and with any other REX component. Should you choose to create a flight plan - there is still no interaction. Only by using the weather engine does it make a difference, and right now - most people use Active Sky Enhanced to manage weather. That may change, of course, as both vendors are currently attempting to out-do each other by offering almost identical products.However - this does not alter the base tenet, which is that the operating system is continuously working in the background, and there is always disk activity which would have to compete with FSX if the two are on the same drive. One should never setup a pc in this manner if there is the option of a second drive available.Dependent upon your settings, FSX can run very smoothly - it can hesitate - it can stutter - or it can bring the PC to it's knees, and the general case is - we have to work with many tweaks in order to get that best performance.There are other reasons to separate them too - such as the ease of simply imaging - or plain ol' backing up and restoring the "FlightSim" drive and the "OS" drives.... the restoration of a problematic flightsim should not involve rebuilding the operating system - and vice-versa.

I would suggest from a performance point of view of putting the o/s and fsx on the same ssd. If you must put the o/s on the hdd then migrate your pagefile to the ssd.

Yep: the OS should go on a 200 - 500 gig hard drive, with FSX going on the SSD. HDD's are pretty cheap, and - if big enough - it can serve as storage for textures, such as REX, GEX, etc.. - those don't need to be with FSX.

Cheap?Have a look:http://www.newegg.co...N82E16822136533I bought this HDD last year - before the flooding in Thailand, $88! (Western Digital have several plants there, and they where flooded)I prefer to use SSD´s like this: Two cheap OCZ Vertex 2´s - one as a cache on the WD Black with FSX, the other for the OS, works perfect.

Edited February 17, 201214 yr by Tor

IMHO putting the OS and FSX on the same SSD is not the best long term idea. I have one SSD for the OS, and I currently have my FSX stuff loaded on a SATAIII mechanical. I have used about 90 GIGs on my SSD and my 120 gig FSX partition has about 20 gigs free now. If you don't have a ton of addon scenery, REX, AS2012 and payware planes, you will probably be fine on one drive for a while. I personally would rather have the OS on its own SATA channel with its own drive.

I would suggest from a performance point of view of putting the o/s and fsx on the same ssd. If you must put the o/s on the hdd then migrate your pagefile to the ssd.

I'm planning on having 16GB of RAM so the pagefile shouldn't be much of an issue, I hope. From what I've learned here I believe separating Windows and FSX on two different drives is the way to go (it's also what I've done in the past and it has always worked fine). Perhaps I should look into getting a second SSD after all? Have to find something else I don't need then...

I use my 60gb SSD as a boot drive. Just Windows and a couple of smaller programs I use a lot go on it. My FSX installation is pushing 80gb and there's not that much to it. I personally don't find the loading time decrease in FSX worth the cost of a 120-256gb SSD.But if you have the storage space or you know you won't have a large FSX install, an SSD is the way to go.

Based on the above, you can do it every which way..For what it is worth, I have my OS on a HDD and FSX on an SSD, and like it that way.

I've done exactly this. I have Windows and FSX on a 120GB SSD, and have a 1TB HDD (formatted into two roughly 500GB partitions) for other data, software and selected scenery add ons. On reflection, I feel I should really have just put FSX on the HDD and left the SSD solely for the OS and smaller, commonly used applications like browsers and office. A typical FSX installation gets more and more bloated as time goes on. My SSD is already completely full. I've moved every scenery add on I can onto the HDD to free space on the SSD for others, but the issue I have is some add ons, like Orbx scenery, have to be installed in FSX's directory. If I want to buy more Orbx stuff, I need to uninstall something else. This has become a real pain, which I could have avoided if I'd just installed FSX on the HDD in the first place. Every time I want to install something new I have to go through the drive with a fine tooth comb looking for things that don't need to be there, and moving them if I can. I personally have seen little, if any, performance gain in FSX running off an SSD. Loading time is maybe a little faster, but that's where it stops. REX I've installed on the HDD, because it takes up a huge amount of space, and you won't see any performance gain by having it on the SSD - it may install the textures into the FSX directory quicker, but apart from the weather engine there are no REX processes going on whilst you're flying.The OS on the other hand thrives running off an SSD. It boots and shuts down quicker than my Mac, and is usable the instant the desktop appears (whereas before I used to have to wait an age for various processes to start before I could even do anything). Apps I use all the time like the web browser, email client, Word etc, come up and are usable instantly. The user experience in the OS is snappy and quick and an absolute joy.So my advice, contrary to what others are saying, is put your OS on the SSD, and put FSX on a large, fast, HDD. In my experience with an FSX installation, space is more important than speed.

I started off with one SSD and had both FSX and the OS on it. I also had my swap file on the same SSD. Later I acquired another SSD and transferred FSX to the new SSD for storage rationalisation reasons.I can state categorically that I have experienced no discernable difference in FSX performance between the two configurations. We are dealing with memory technology when using SSDs not rotating disks. If anyone is going to advocate a "Doom and Gloom" theory about having FSX and the OS on the same SSD then you had better advocate not having FSX and the OS in memory at the same time (not really easy) because it is, basically, the same technology.However, I will champion having FSX and the OS on different spindles if using the traditional style of spindled disks.