FSX on SSD or dedicated? What is best?

[LukasBA 1]

Hey Guys

 

I need to ask a quick question. I have two drives. A normal Hard Drive, and an 180Gb SSD. I have installed Windows on the SSD, which means there is about 135Gb left on the drive. Where would FSX give me the best experience? on the SSD or on the conventional harddrive?

 

Best Regards

 

Luke

[Manny 1,293]

It would have been good if you had the OS installed on the HD and the FSX dedicated to the SSD.

 

But now having installed OS already, you can install FSX on the SSD also. But you need to monitor the space carefully. If you plan to add many addons, then you may want to consider another SSD.

 

Manny

[Kosta 122]

It would have been good if you had the OS installed on the HD and the FSX dedicated to the SSD.

Agreed. You can port though. Clone the drive from SSD to HDD, and boot from it, format SSD for FSX.

[CharliesP51 0]

In the past I've run FSX -and- Win 7 on the same SSD with no apparent negative impact. Just the opposite. Boot times and FSX load times were dramatically reduced. The drawback was running out of disk space on the SSD. Now using a dedicated 128G Crucial M4 for each and it is no less or any more speedy. Theoretically with the OS and FSX on the same SSD there could be some excess aggregate delays in access/seek times but only test equipment could measure it. With HDD's having a 30-50ms seek time and low-cost SSD's running about .1ms seek time no 'human' is going to notice an extra 1 or 2 tenths of a millisecond. ^_^

[riccardo74 36]

It would have been good if you had the OS installed on the HD and the FSX dedicated to the SSD.

 

But now having installed OS already, you can install FSX on the SSD also. But you need to monitor the space carefully. If you plan to add many addons, then you may want to consider another SSD.

 

Manny

 

Agreed me too. I have SSD only for fsx, and Velociraptor for Win7.

[OmniAtlas 93]

I'm using intel SRT technology so my 60 GB SSD ends up being the cache, and I dumb all my other software on the 1 TB hard drive. Caching is automated; I've also heard SSD can fail, so at least I have a backup on the hard drive.

[SAAB340 28]

Luke,

What kind of drive is your conventional HDD?

If it's an old and slow one I would keep both the OS and FSX away from it. If you keep the OS on a slow drive (high access time) you'll still get a few stutters inside FSX every now and again induced by the OS drive, even when FSX is installed on a fast SSD.

 

The OS is what will benefit the most from being on the SSD for your day to day usage. If you run out of space for FSX on it you can always get a Velociraptor or another SSD later on.

[LukasBA 1]

Luke,

What kind of drive is your conventional HDD?

If it's an old and slow one I would keep both the OS and FSX away from it. If you keep the OS on a slow drive (high access time) you'll still get a few stutters inside FSX every now and again induced by the OS drive, even when FSX is installed on a fast SSD.

 

The OS is what will benefit the most from being on the SSD for your day to day usage. If you run out of space for FSX on it you can always get a Velociraptor or another SSD later on.

 

Well, its not an old one. It's an WD Caviar Green with astonishing 2TB. So its not a bad drive, but nealy not as good as my SSD(Which by the way is an Intel520) So far I have a little over 120Gb after FSX installation for add-ons. I guess it will go for some time, or what?

[SAAB340 28]

 

 

Well, its not an old one. It's an WD Caviar Green with astonishing 2TB. So its not a bad drive, but nealy not as good as my SSD(Which by the way is an Intel520) So far I have a little over 120Gb after FSX installation for add-ons. I guess it will go for some time, or what?

The WD green is a drive with very slow access time which is bad for both an OS and FSX. The fact that it's capable of decent transfer speeds of large files is of no use for them. If you were to put the OS on that and FSX on the SSD you'll still get stutters within FSX induced by the slow access time on the WD green. Use it for storage of other files. If you run out of space on your SSD, get either a second SSD, a Velociraptor or a WD black to extend your FSX files on.

[LukasBA 1]

The WD green is a drive with very slow access time which is bad for both an OS and FSX. The fact that it's capable of decent transfer speeds of large files is of no use for them. If you were to put the OS on that and FSX on the SSD you'll still get stutters within FSX induced by the slow access time on the WD green. Use it for storage of other files. If you run out of space on your SSD, get either a second SSD, a Velociraptor or a WD black to extend your FSX files on.

 

So i'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. I should keep OS and FSX on SSD and storage files on Caviar Green?

[SAAB340 28]

 

 

So i'm not quite sure what you're suggesting. I should keep OS and FSX on SSD and storage files on Caviar Green?

Yes, keep both FSX and the OS on the SSD and away from the WD Green. Use the WD Green for other things like your movie, photo and music collection for example so you don't take up valuable space on your SSD with that sort of files.

[Manny 1,293]

Yeah..I hate those WD Green HDs. I use them as USB Backups.

 

The good WD HDs are the blacks with 6GB bandwidth?.

[SAAB340 28]

Yeah..I hate those WD Green HDs. I use them as USB Backups.

 

The good WD HDs are the blacks with 6GB bandwidth?.

Velociraptors are even better. 6GB bandwith or not is irrelevant for a HDD, what matters to FSX are access time.

Typical access times for WD HDDs:

Velociraptor: 7ms

WD Black: 12ms

WD Blue: 14ms

WD Green: 17ms

 

SSDs will have an access time of around 0.2ms

[Manny 1,293]

Velociraptors are even better. 6GB bandwith or not is irrelevant for a HDD, what

 

I have had two 10K RPM Velos for my FS9 once and I;ve had bad experience with it. But I have one of the Velo's in my current setp for "Downloads". I have that Hardisk read access metrics.. When I get home this week end I can post the images for you if need be. The 7.2K RPM Black with 6MB has much better numbers than my 10K HD. Ofcourse my 10K HDs are dated and not the recent ones..

 

Moreoever the limited HD space of the Velo's and price, I may as well go for the SSDs.. So in todday's world, Velos are neither here nor there... Just my opinion.

 

Manny

 

OK..I have an updated opinion on the 10K HDs...the price has come down drastically..

 

I saw this 1TB 10K RPM 6GB HD for $260

 

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822236243

 

Hmm.... I'd like to get that HD perfornnce numbers for these. I still don't trust them for RAID 0. But as a single HD, this could be a solution.

 

Manny

[SAAB340 28]

OK..I have an updated opinion on the 10K HDs...the price has come down drastically..

 

I saw this 1TB 10K RPM 6GB HD for $260

Yes. the price for storage continues down. On HDDs and SSDs. You still pay around twice the money for a Velociraptor compared to a WD Black. But you will get conciderable faster load times on the Velociraptor. An SSD is even better but you pay at least 3 times the money for it compared to the Velociraptor. And the improvements in load time starts to slow down.

It's access time that is important for FSX, not transfer rates. So RAID0 is not needed.

 

I have that Velociraptor you refer to. But i expect the old Velociraptors to perform very similar in FSX as well given that they have similar access time. You can see some performance numbers for it in my topic "How different HDDs and SSDs performs with FSX"