Flight performance improvement

[jandjfrench 3]

Hi,

 

This may be more appropriate in the Hardware forum but it specifically regards Flight.

I'm using Win7 64 professional and in the performance appraisal thingee my readings are from 7.2 to 7.7 except for my hard drive transfer rate which is 5.9. I've noticed with all graphic settings at Max, if I'm flying fast and low the terrain is at low resolution at times. It seems that this may be an artifact of the transfer rate. If so, it seems as though an SSD drive might be in order.

I saw that today's "Giveaway of the Day" is Paragon Migrate which facilitates transfer of an OS on an old drive to an SSD.

If anyone has any recommendations, suggestions or comments I would very much like to hear (well, see) them.

 

Thanks, Jim F.

[Kerberos42 0]

Definitely go SSD. I bought a MacBook Air last year, and the SSD alone in it makes it faster and smoother than my new current model work MacBook Pro. I also put an Intel 320 SSD in my home windows PC and its like a different computer. Flight loads to the main menu in 14 second, and i'm flying 10 seconds after that. I'm not sure how much an improvement on the inflight performance an SSD would help with, as that would be more the graphics card & processor.

[Illegitimi non carborundum 4]

Jim

I used a dreadful program called Zinstall winwin (for me it was loselose) to do what you want to do but it failed abysmally and caused all sorts of issues on both my old HDD and the new HDD which was on a new PC and I could not get FSX to work properly and had to install both the OS and FSX from scratch. One solution I was given by the so called tech support was to uninstall the Windows firewall (not disable) but uninstall - I'm not sure how you could do that!! It was $110 down the drain as the Zinstall sellers would not give me a refund. So just be aware that these migrating programs may or may not work and you could end up with more problems than you solve. Backup everything before you start as you can lose quite a bit in the transfer.

With hindsight I would just go for a clean install of both on the SSD - my guess is that it will end up being less painful than a migration.

Good Luck.

PeterH

BTW a conventional HDD @7200 rpm in good condition less than 50% full and defragmented should easily exceed the data transfer from FSX into the VAS. That's not to say than a SSD will improve your loading times considerably.

[Gibbage 199]

Its not a good idea to try and transfer your OS from drive to drive. It does not always work. Also, most SSD's are much smaller then standard drives, so your just filling your fast SSD with useless stuff. Trust me when I say its in your best interest to install a fresh install of Windows on a new SSD! That way you can install your normal programs onto your hard drive, and stuff that needs the speed (games) on the SSD to keep from clogging things up. Also a new OS install always runs faster since its not bloated. If you MUST copy your old drive to the new SSD, try Arconis True Image ($60) or R-Drive ($45). Dont trust the free ones. I see them do more damage then good.

[Guest]

Its not a good idea to try and transfer your OS from drive to drive. It does not always work. Also, most SSD's are much smaller then standard drives, so your just filling your fast SSD with useless stuff. Trust me when I say its in your best interest to install a fresh install of Windows on a new SSD! That way you can install your normal programs onto your hard drive, and stuff that needs the speed (games) on the SSD to keep from clogging things up. Also a new OS install always runs faster since its not bloated. If you MUST copy your old drive to the new SSD, try Arconis True Image ($60) or R-Drive ($45). Dont trust the free ones. I see them do more damage then good.

 

+1 on everything!

[peterdrowan 1]

It was difficult but Its straightforward now with Paragon Migrate OS to SSD™. It will make a complete copy from a boot drive to an SSD and does it almost transparently for very little cost (about $20) though you have to move off enough from your boot drive so that everything fits. The increase in speed for windows is large. I have no connection or interest in paragon but am just a satisfied customer. I have one ssd as boot drive and one for FS and other games. Works very well. You don't even need to take out the old drive and if you use Easy BCD (free) you can add an entry so you can boot to the old or the new until your are sure it works. It took about 30 minutes to do.

 

Peter Rowan

[bpsanborn 0]

I don't agree with the advice to reinstall your OS and every one of your programs. It is not required at all for the functioning of your OS. If you buy a SSD that is as bigger than your boot drive, it is completely transparent. The problem is, that for now, the SSDs are very expensive.

 

It is really a factor of how you have installed your programs and where you store your personal data. I have always keep my OS and my programs/personal data on separate drives. I previously had a 256G hard-drive for boot/OS and a 256G hard-drive for Programs and Data and another 256G drive for local backup of critical files like My Documents and My Pictures.

 

About 14 months ago, I bought a 60G SSD... an OCZ Vertex 2... very expensive (~$180) and fast but small... and used the Acronis Drive Cloning tool to clone the C: drive. Before doing that, I made the C:drive as small a possible by moving the pagefile to the D: drive and turning off hibernation (Desktop PC) and deleting the big hibernation file. The SSD worked magic on my Win 7 64-bit system. Boot and return from sleep were super fast. But I found that the "User/AppData" folders were growing faster than I had estimated.

 

Just this month, there was a sale from SanDisk and Newegg.com on a very fast SanDisk Extreme 120G SSD for $139 (went to $119 after I bought). I recently cloned the old SSD to the new SSD. It took a half hour and was totally transparent.

 

The morale of the story is don't go too small on the SSD to save money. But the performance is fabulous. For Flight, all my Flight work files are on SSD. So my Flight start up time is quick. Both the programs below will clone your current boot drive without any problems. However, if you one those guys that has one 2T hard-drive with everything in one place... an SSD may be a problem. You may have to think about re-installing the OS on the new SSD and segregating your Programs and Data to the conventional hard-drive.

 

Brian

 

 

Acronis True Image Home 2011

EASEUS Partition Master 9.1.1 Home Edition (free)

[jandjfrench 3]

Hi,

 

Sorry for the delay in responding; for some reason I wasn't notified of the replies. I especially appreciate those that relate personal experience with SSDs.

The thought of a clean install of Win7 is not very appealing. The OS itself; no big deal - FSX at over 60GB with scenery and mods and running great; big deal.

As I have "Paragon Migrate OS to SSD" installed, I'm still considering a 60GB SSD. My thought is moving the OS and Flight to the SSD and leaving everything else on the existing drive. And if things did go astray the loss of FSX wouldn't be such a big deal.

 

Thanks for all the replies, Jim F.