I can only have one or the other, not both, so which do you think is best, putting P3D on my SSD or putting scenery on it? My initial thought was to have the scenery on it for faster loading, but I'm interested in hearing from others who may have crossed this bridge already. Thanks!!

P3D would be my choice but why not try both ways out with a couple of sceneries to see which you prefer.

P3D on operating system

And I bet that visually you will not see one iota of difference regardless of which goes where.  I think a lot of what we do is a matter of fad and self delusion rather than of any real difference.  IMHO & let the screamers begin.

I have both on the SSD and can confirm it loads faster than on a Western Digital black HDD. It wont improve FPS though.

Definitely use it for P3D. 

 

I did a little self experiment testing add-on photoreal scenery which means hundred's of individual textures loading and unloading.  So I put the same entire state on a SSD, a WD Velocerapter, and a 7200RMP HDD.  Switching back and forth I could detect little to no real difference between the three with my typical flying.  At least, not to the point saying one was unanimously better than the others in performance, adding extended blurry time, etc.  They were all very good in P3D.  So I use the 512GB SSD for P3D and now just purchase 3-4TB 7200 HDD's as the price is good, holds a ton of addons, and no big performance drop.

I don't get the question so well. Put the whole P3D together with its total content on the SSD.

Spirit

I used to have P3D on an SSD and when 2.2 came out it went on a normal hardrive. There are some stutters but I suspect a weak video card and the load cloud shadows place on the poor video card. 

 

Shorter loading times definitely a plus. However, a well designed program such as P3D will constantly be looking ahead and preloading scenery into memory based on your direction of travel. However, if you are looking around, and changing course, then it has to quickly grab stuff from the disk to meet the need of the new course. Autopilot at 35,000 feet is a waste of money for an SSD.

 

I have a train simulator with old, and very poor, buffering. I put it on the SSD because of that, It benefitted and the pauses a very minimal. Yes it used to pause. 

Since it wasn't mentioned in the initial post or subsequent suggestions, I find it to be best to always (*always!) put your operating system and day-to-day programs on the SSD first and foremost. It will make the absolute biggest impact to your daily computing and be far more valuable to you than having a fast-loading simulation.

 

SSD's will improve the flight loading times for both MSFS-based simulators and X-Plane, however it will not substantially improve the in-sim performance in either FPS, smoothness, or texture loading. It's been my experience that an SSD's capabilities are far better leveraged when applied to the computer as a whole - the OS and your apps - rather than just the games and sims.

 

If you HAD to choose between the sim itself and some scenery going on the SSD, I'd have a hard time choosing. You're using such a small percentage of both collections at any one time while flying that it's hard to quantify which one should get the loading speed boost. I'd probably opt to put the simulation itself and high priority scenery on the SSD, with a traditional drive holding the rest.

 

Ideally speaking, (2) SSD's would be grand.... one for the OS and apps, another for your simulations.

 

Good luck in your decisions!

-Greg