Jeff,

 

I've got a Vraptor drive exclusively for my FSX install and in addition to the other great suggestions on segregating your OS from FSX, make sure to invest in a very good HD defrag util. There are some camps that say there's no benefit to defragmenting your HD but I'm one who believes a clean house is a well run house. Keeping the fragmentation on the HD down and files contiguous will help load times and will mitigate scenery loading as you fly along.

I have had really good results with O & O.  I have been with them since version 13 and they are on version 16 now.  

 

NickN suggested in his install pamphlet, and I have had great results with the complete NAME solution.  If you don't know, that solution not only defrags your drive thoroughly, but also re-orders your file system for VERY fast file access and load times.  I can even see where O&O put FSX.  right on the edge of the disk where the load times are the fastest.

 

I have a 7200rpm HDD and from switch on to desktop is 1:09 seconds.  FSX loads rather fast as well.

 

Even though this is great, I am headed off tomorrow to get an SSD where FSX will be whilst my OS will remain on the HDD.  Too much info out there suggesting this to be the best set up.

Placing the OS and FSX on one SSD is moot, for me at least. With a current FS directory size of 150+Gb and growing, there would be no space for the OS and other applications on my 240Gb Vertex.

 

I will no doubt need to switch to something bigger within the next 12-18 months, particularly at the speed OrbX is pumping out new scenery

 

Then I could use two SSDs and have the system on a raptor, which is the current setup. SSDs have improved load times thanks to the massively reduced seek and access times when compared to HDDs. They have zero effect on fps performance. Remember that setting the Fiber Frame Time Fraction might actually negate the load performance gain of a SSD...

 

A

 

Andrew Entwistle

There's no single I/O queue with SSD's working on AHCI. That's what Native Command Queueing is for.

And that's why there's no penalty whatsoever in having both FSX and the OS on the same SSD.

It's not really because there are no moving parts on an SSD as you often hear, it's because NCQ allows for concurrent accesses to the drive

SSD's are quickly becoming a mass product. The fact that an SSD never requires defragging and can be filled to 90% capacity with no performance loss is reason enough to opt for it over an HDD. Fsx load times will improve but it won't improve your FPS. Fsx should be installed on its own dedicated hard drive in its own folder created by yourself, not the program/files/x86 path suggested by the installer.

For SATA and PCIe ... serial point to point device ... so if you have FSX on the same SSD as the OS ... so the OS is requesting data and FSX is requesting data ... they both end up in a single queue.

 

Move FSX to a separate SATA SSD from the OS, you now have two separate queues of I/O requests. 

 

Extend that to OS on one SSD, FSX on another SSD, and Scenery on a 3rd SSD ... you now have 3 separate I/O request queues rather than 3 I/O requests in a single queue.

 

Benefit is that FSX doesn't have to wait for the OS I/O request to finish before it can process it's own I/O request.

 

This is obviously over simplified, but it's essentially what happens.  It's a game of maintaining the best possible data flow.

 

 

Just in case anyone is a little skiddish on making changes to your registry.  Try this...

 

http://www.sevenforums.com/tutorials/61869-ahci-enable-windows-7-vista.html

 

I used this to make the change to AHCI  because I wasn't smart enough to change to AHCI in BIOS before I installed windows. 

 

Either way this is a good tutorial.

 

 

 

I opted for the Samsung 840 120GB SSD.  So far I am very happy with it and I am running my OS and FSX on it.  I want to eventually see if there is in fact a difference between having the OS and FSX vs FSX only on the SSD.  So far I can't see any difference

Somewhat on the same subject that I started with:   I have Win7 64-bit and FSX on one SSD.  I was going to install FS9 on a second SSD.  Should I also put a new install of Win 7 64-bit on the same drive as FS9 and basically have a dual-boot system or can I use the same install of Win7 for both FSX and FS9?  I have a Raptor for scenery, etc.

 

Thanks,

Jeff

Well, INMHO, I like having my OS on both my HDD, and SDD.  With the ACHI set up that allows the TRIM function I will continue to keep my setup where I boot from my SSD and leave the HDD for storage only. 

 

So I would simply boot off of one SSD and have a shortcut to my FS9 on the other.  If there is a better way, and I am sure there is, go with that.  I plan on setting up my new rig with SSDs only.  One for OS, Storage, and utilities.  The other strictly for all things FSX.  

 

Either way it's done, I am ditching the HDD system going forward.  The speed of loads, reboots, simplicity of operation, no defragging.  Kind of a no brainer for me.