Okay, I am looking after about 3 years to build a new rig for FSX. I run FSX in Direct X 10 preview, and have a huge amount of photoscenery, which I do almost all my flying in around the western U.S. The problem right now is, due to the huge amount of photoscenery and a large amount of AI, FSX takes 10-15 minutes to boot up before I can fly, and that gets real old.

 

I am looking at getting a SB 2700K which I will OC to close to 5 GHZ, some 2133 MHZ ram, Corsair H100 cooling, and an Asus gtx 670 or 680 direct cut II Top (if I can find one).

 

My question is, since I dont have any experience with SSD drives, and due to the current price of 1 TB ssd drives, is it possible to have three 512 GB SSD drives in one computer so I would have 1.5 TB of ssd space? I realize most people have the SSD for the OS and maybe for FSX, but if I have too much photoscenery to load just onto the primary SSD, I think that would defeat the purpose of wanting FSX to load quickly if mosts of my photo scenery was on a secondary regular 7200 rpm HD.

 

Thanks

Brian S.

Okay, I am looking after about 3 years to build a new rig for FSX. I run FSX in Direct X 10 preview, and have a huge amount of photoscenery, which I do almost all my flying in around the western U.S. The problem right now is, due to the huge amount of photoscenery and a large amount of AI, FSX takes 10-15 minutes to boot up before I can fly, and that gets real old.

 

I am looking at getting a SB 2700K which I will OC to close to 5 GHZ, some 2133 MHZ ram, Corsair H100 cooling, and an Asus gtx 670 or 680 direct cut II Top (if I can find one).

 

My question is, since I dont have any experience with SSD drives, and due to the current price of 1 TB ssd drives, is it possible to have three 512 GB SSD drives in one computer so I would have 1.5 TB of ssd space? I realize most people have the SSD for the OS and maybe for FSX, but if I have too much photoscenery to load just onto the primary SSD, I think that would defeat the purpose of wanting FSX to load quickly if mosts of my photo scenery was on a secondary regular 7200 rpm HD.

 

Thanks

Brian S.

 

Hi Brian,

 

I use an SSD in my MacBook Pro and it's wonderful for high speed boots etc. Even though I don't have experience w/ FSX and SSDs per se, I know for me I plan to purchase just one medium capacity SSD for my Win7 install AND FSX install on the same drive--under assumption that there is not much performance penalty in NOT having OS & FSX on separate physical drives w/ SSDs vs HDDs. I have no need for terabyte sized storage for OS+FSX, so it will probably be a 400-500Gb SSD which is overkill but gives headroom for Prepare3D etc if we go that route.

 

If I need a second one it will be an HDD for data only, completely unused for any aspect of FSX other than storing addon installation files and other pure data. It is arguably easier/cleaner to maintain to have OS & FSX on the same drive as far as imaging/cloning goes.

 

Noel

Hi Brian,

Where SSDs help the most are with load time (loading a flight) and launch time (starting up the FSX application after having booted up your computer). You can always Raid0 3 SSDs to get to 1.5TB. As you are using mostly photo scenery, I have to ask, what storage do you use at the moment? It's mainly access times that make the difference. Slow regular HDDs can actually slow down your texture loading. Most notable when flying fast. You can also speed up your texture loading with the help of HyperThreading and the correct Affinity mask. Especially notable if you have fast enough storage. Never the loss, when it comes to load time, not even the latest 1TB WD Raptor can keep up with the same load times as an SSD, bit it is getting fairly close. Especially if you just keep the large scenery on the Raptor and the main FSX installation on an SSD.

My question is, is it possible to have three 512 GB SSD drives in one computer so I would have 1.5 TB of ssd space?

 

Yes you can, but check that MOBO you want to buy is equiped with enough quantity of SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA 3.0) connectors. Chipsets designated to work with SB CPU offer only two SATA 3.0 connectors, rest are SATA 3 Gb/s (SATA 2.0).

SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate is about 300 MB/s, SATA 3.0 is much better and offer about 600 MB/s maximal transfer rate.

If you want fast SSD you should buy model equiped with SATA 3.0 and if you want to connect three the same SSDs you need to choose MOBO with additional SATA 3.0 controller, which will give you next two or four SATA 3.0 connectors, to these two coming with MOBO chipset.

Yes you can, but check that MOBO you want to buy is equiped with enough quantity of SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA 3.0) connectors. Chipsets designated to work with SB CPU offer only two SATA 3.0 connectors, rest are SATA 3 Gb/s (SATA 2.0).

SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate is about 300 MB/s, SATA 3.0 is much better and offer about 600 MB/s maximal transfer rate.

If you want fast SSD you should buy model equiped with SATA 3.0 and if you want to connect three the same SSDs you need to choose MOBO with additional SATA 3.0 controller, which will give you next two or four SATA 3.0 connectors, to these two coming with MOBO chipset.

I wouldn't worry too much about SATA 3.0 for FSX. The main reason improvement for FSX lies with very much improved access time. Transfer speeds are a lot less important

Hi Brian,

Where SSDs help the most are with load time (loading a flight) and launch time (starting up the FSX application after having booted up your computer). You can always Raid0 3 SSDs to get to 1.5TB. As you are using mostly photo scenery, I have to ask, what storage do you use at the moment? It's mainly access times that make the difference. Slow regular HDDs can actually slow down your texture loading. Most notable when flying fast. You can also speed up your texture loading with the help of HyperThreading and the correct Affinity mask. Especially notable if you have fast enough storage. Never the loss, when it comes to load time, not even the latest 1TB WD Raptor can keep up with the same load times as an SSD, bit it is getting fairly close. Especially if you just keep the large scenery on the Raptor and the main FSX installation on an SSD.

 

I have about 1.1 TB on my current 7200 RPM HD's. The big issue for me is load time, and waiting 15 minutes for FSX to boot at my home airport is very frustrating to say the least, so that's why I am asking about multiple SSD's on one rig. Thanks for your imput.

 

Yes you can, but check that MOBO you want to buy is equiped with enough quantity of SATA 6 Gb/s (SATA 3.0) connectors. Chipsets designated to work with SB CPU offer only two SATA 3.0 connectors, rest are SATA 3 Gb/s (SATA 2.0).

SATA 2.0 maximum transfer rate is about 300 MB/s, SATA 3.0 is much better and offer about 600 MB/s maximal transfer rate.

If you want fast SSD you should buy model equiped with SATA 3.0 and if you want to connect three the same SSDs you need to choose MOBO with additional SATA 3.0 controller, which will give you next two or four SATA 3.0 connectors, to these two coming with MOBO chipset.

 

Today I purchased a Asus P8Z77-V Pro motherboard (with 4 SATA III ports) and a Crucial 512 GB SSD. I will most likely add 1 or 2 more SSD drives. I will see how my new system handles the primary SSD drive and FSX boot times before adding another to handle the majority of my photoscenery. Thanks for the reply.

Slow regular HDDs can actually slow down your texture loading. Most notable when flying fast.

 

Sometimes I will get a slight hitch when a .wav file plays. I have assumed this was caused by HDD access to load the file into memory. I notice when the same .wav file plays again, there is no hitch. Do you think SSD's lessen or eliminate these hitches in FSX?

Sometimes I will get a slight hitch when a .wav file plays. I have assumed this was caused by HDD access to load the file into memory. I notice when the same .wav file plays again, there is no hitch. Do you think SSD's lessen or eliminate these hitches in FSX?

Yes it will.

I wouldn't worry too much about SATA 3.0 for FSX. The main reason improvement for FSX lies with very much improved access time. Transfer speeds are a lot less important

 

You are right about less importance of transfer speed in FSX enviroment but not in this case. As Sgt Summers said:

"The big issue for me is load time, and waiting 15 minutes for FSX to boot at my home airport is very frustrating"

It seems he has a lot of data to constant load if it takes 15 minutes. Significantly higher transfer rate with SATA 3.0 will allow to shorten this time.

 

Today I purchased a Asus P8Z77-V Pro motherboard (with 4 SATA III ports) and a Crucial 512 GB SSD.

 

As only model of Crucial 512 GB is Crucial M4 you did good choice, MoBo is also good. You should expect impressive performance gain. Wish you pleasant flying.

it seems he has a lot of data to constant load if it takes 15 minutes. Significantly higher transfer rate with SATA 3.0 will allow to shorten this time

 

Not really if the workload is not reaching 300MB/s and it's not the case in FSX since it's more about smaller, access time dependant, transfers.

 

For that 3rd SSD, it's MUCH better to have it running off a SATA II Intel port of the motherboard than some crappy SATA III PCIe controller that will actually give worse performance and won't support TRIM.

Controllers that out perform the mobo's SATA II ports cost over $300

Not really if the workload is not reaching 300MB/s

 

We don't know that but I assume that with large quantity of data to load, transfer easily may raise above 300MB/s. I suppose, that there is a lot to load if loading time continues up to 10-15 minutes.

 

 

For that 3rd SSD, it's MUCH better to have it running off a SATA II Intel port of the motherboard than some crappy SATA III PCIe controller

 

I agree, it is wise advice to connect two SSDs to only two native (Intel's PCH) SATA III ports and connect third SSD to one of native (Intel's PCH) SATA II ports. It is hard to know about third party controllers real performance before building a rig and testing it in practice.

Sgt Summers, only two from 4 SATA III ports avaliable on P8Z77 are Intel's PCH native, next two come with third party controller. That is due Intel's chipset limitation to only two SATA III ports, all motherboards built on Z77, H77, P67 chipset have the same limitation, so don't worry about your choice of MoBo.

We don't know that but I assume that with large quantity of data to load, transfer easily may raise above 300MB/s. I suppose, that there is a lot to load if loading time continues up to 10-15 minutes.

 

OK, lets be a bit sensible here. If we were to pull 300MB/s for 10 minutes we would end up transfering 180GB of data from the storage to the RAM. Does that sound like somthing that would actually be happening?

Nope. Most of that load time is down to the CPU having to wait for small pieces of data to be pulled from the storage.

 

I have done a lot of recent testing on load times with FSX and different storage. I have for example used two different SSDs. One Intel X25-M G2 and one of the first real consumer SSDs, the OCZ SATA II SSD (a rebranded Samsung SSD). I have not published my findings yet as I am a bit bussy moving house at the moment.

 

Never the less, even thou the Intel SSD is capable of 2-3times faster transfer rates than the OCZ SSD (it's around 3 times faster at small file sizes), load times are only cut with around 20%.

 

I also have the latest 1TB Velociraptor and that one is almost capable of the transfer rates of the Intel SSD (around 90%). But the Intel SSD is still around 40% faster with FSX load times.

 

And the transfer rates of the Velociraptor are more than twice as fast compared to the OCZ SSD, but the Velociraptor is slower anyway.

 

It's the fast access time on any SSD that is making the most improvement with FSX load times. Having a faster SSD does indeed help a little more, but it doesn't scale well. With an SSD you are making your CPU as the main bottleneck for FSX load time instead of your storage.

Oh, and I forgot to add that the Intel G2 SSD is capable of achiving a load time that is only aound 10% slower than what you get when all the data is already cached in the actual RAM. That would be a good indication on how much (little) improvement a faster SSD could actually bring.

 

Sure enough, I don't have the fastest CPU any more either. A highly clocked Ivy/Sandy bridge is probably around 50% faster than my overclocked Lynnfield and therefore needing to be feed data quicker. But the X25-M G2 is a fairly slow SSD compared to the SSDs of today.

Having a faster SSD does indeed help a little more, but it doesn't scale well.

 

If we are comparing SSD with HDD it is obvious that main benefit of SSD is short access time. But if we are talking only about SSD and comparing its performance with SATA III to performance with SATA II, again transfer rate is most important parameter. If you look at my first post in this topic you should notice that I was talking exactly about such situation (performance of SSD in dependance of SATA interface version).

 

To describe that, about what I was talking, more clearly I show two examples below.

Formula of total time for getting file from disk, starting from request and finishing after transfering file to ram is:

total time = seek (access) time + read (transfer) time.

File 5 MB of size. With SSD like OCZ Vertex 4 we have teoretical access time <0.1 ms

 

1. example: reading transfer rate 250 MB/s (SATA II), so that gives us:

0.1 ms (seek) + 20ms (transfer) = 20,1 ms total time

 

2. example: reading transfer rate 500 MB/s (SATA III)

0.1 ms (seek) + 10 ms (transfer) = 10,1 ms total time

 

It is only simplified example of real benefit of higher transfer rate in SSD, we can have whole range of variety situations, like random reading of few files, random read of higher quantity of files or sequential read of many files, but in all, if we stay at SSD type of drives, most important is transfer rate. More files to read higher benefit of high transfer speed.

If we are comparing SSD with HDD it is obvious that main benefit of SSD is short access time. But if we are talking only about SSD and comparing its performance with SATA III to performance with SATA II, again transfer rate is most important parameter. If you look at my first post in this topic you should notice that I was talking exactly about such situation (performance of SSD in dependance of SATA interface version).

 

To describe that, about what I was talking, more clearly I show two examples below.

Formula of total time for getting file from disk, starting from request and finishing after transfering file to ram is:

total time = seek (access) time + read (transfer) time.

File 5 MB of size. With SSD like OCZ Vertex 4 we have teoretical access time <0.1 ms

 

1. example: reading transfer rate 250 MB/s (SATA II), so that gives us:

0.1 ms (seek) + 20ms (transfer) = 20,1 ms total time

 

2. example: reading transfer rate 500 MB/s (SATA III)

0.1 ms (seek) + 10 ms (transfer) = 10,1 ms total time

 

It is only simplified example of real benefit of higher transfer rate in SSD, we can have whole range of variety situations, like random reading of few files, random read of higher quantity of files or sequential read of many files, but in all, if we stay at SSD type of drives, most important is transfer rate. More files to read higher benefit of high transfer speed.

As I said. I have indeed tested with 2 different SSDs with one of them achieving more than twice the transfer rates from the other. And improvement is only around 20%. And you are than only 10% slower from the load time you get with all the data already cached in the RAM. You won't load faster than that. It's your CPU that is now holding you back. SATA III or SATA II, you won't be faster than the RAM anyway.