Curious if anyone out there has done a comparison on load times for a flight with FSX being installed entirely on an SSD and then again on a Hybrid Hard Drive.. the hybrids are pretty cheap and should perform somewhere in the middle I would think.. searching around I dont see much data on this, yet..

 

Thanks in advance..

I have not looked at the hybrid drives but by thinking about it in a logic way tells me that the current ones that have a very small NAND cache will perform a lot more like a slow HDD than a SSD. Flightsim needs fast access time to all small scenery files to improve on load times. The small NAND cache in todays hybrids will only be able to cache a very small amount of scenery files, whilst most scenery will end up on slow access time 5400rpm HDD platters.

I've only compared pure SSD vs Velociraptor vs WD Black. Pure SSD is miles better than even the Velociraptor once the drive is only 1/3rd filled.

Sorry it doesn't actually provide an answer to your question.

My suggestion: go with SSD, forget about the hybrid ones, or rather, go for a Velociraptor...hybrid is just a marketing hype, you won't get any real advantage with hybrid disks

 

Enrico

My suggestion: go with SSD, forget about the hybrid ones, or rather, go for a Velociraptor...hybrid is just a marketing hype, you won't get any real advantage with hybrid disks

 

Enrico

 

I'm holding off till the price of a 960GB one hits around $200.. currently as low as $465.. a one drive, split partition for p3d and fsx ideally.  Even compared to a standard hard drive i'd be curious how load times got cut.. like for instance, going from say 4 minutes to load to 1 minute (if its that extreme).

My suggestion: go with SSD, forget about the hybrid ones, or rather, go for a Velociraptor...hybrid is just a marketing hype, you won't get any real advantage with hybrid disks

 

 

 

Strange, I've heard good things about hybrids. Faster than conventional HD's.

 

Are you basing your opinion on fact?

Hybrids are only faster for certain operations definently go ssd, I use intel rapid cache with a 60 gigs ssd as whilst it speeds up some os functions it does virtually nothing for fsx

I own Seagate's 1Tb SSHD running FS9.  Previously it used to take about 5 minutes to load.  Now it takes less than 2.  Considering the price/capacity difference between the HD/SSHD and SSD I am more than happy.  Since my FS9 machine is a desktop the size/robustness advantages of the SSD really are not a factor.  FS9 and FSX are of a vintage where the designers could only dream of the cpu/gpu/bandwidth now available.  Believe me you will be delighted with the result of ANY choice you make.

I got the chance to test one of the new 2TB SSHDs from Seagate.. sadly it was an UNderperformer.. performancetest diskmark resulted in only a 719, which was much less than my Toshiba 2TB HDD at around 1000.. reads were the biggest issue.. they were sub 50 for some reason.. the writes appeared to be good at around 180 MB/sec..

 

Just general use on a load of fsx showed excruciatingly long load times compared to the old 2TB standard Toshiba..

 

So maybe I had a lemon but this test was a bust.. incidentally, I know from searching online that the good test results should have had it come in around 1200 or so.. (for some reason my Toshiba 2TB is a bit high.. it should only diskmark in around 700-800.. but some sort of caching may be going on boosting it to the 1000 range).

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jasonevangelho/2013/04/21/crunching-the-numbers-should-you-buy-a-hybrid-ssd/

The "SSD" part of a SSHD is auto determined by the hard drive. I.e., the hard drive determines what goes on the SSD, you can't pick what to put on it (For example, Windows).

To further explain, simply, ... Seagate's new software understands the program/software that is loaded more frequently and caches that.  In my case the FS9.exe is loaded EVERY time. It loads faster. Nothing else does. That is what I want. You might want different.

My suggestion: go with SSD, forget about the hybrid ones, or rather, go for a Velociraptor...hybrid is just a marketing hype, you won't get any real advantage with hybrid disks

 

Enrico

 

I learned this the hard way when I ordered my computer. It's a 500GB Hybrid and I can't tell a difference in load times. I have a 1TB Conventional drive and I can see a difference with normal usage. I should have just thrown 100$ to newegg and picked up a SSD for a third drive.

 

Oh well, you know what they say... "Hind sight is 20/20"

Ok I have a question.

 

 

Is it possible to RAID (Just a bunch of disks) two SSDs? I mean, if I get 2 SSDs that are 512GB each, then RAID JBOD them, would't that make a 1TB logical partition? That sounds amazing!

Ok I have a question.

 

 

Is it possible to RAID (Just a bunch of disks) two SSDs? I mean, if I get 2 SSDs that are 512GB each, then RAID JBOD them, would't that make a 1TB logical partition? That sounds amazing!

 

 

 

EXACTLY the same video I saw before I posted that. LOL!