Hi guys,

I have played FSX for quite a long time at this stage, probably since it was released actually. I am only coming back to it not after about a 2 year break though. I'm thinking about installing X-Plane 10 now too. I have also recently finished putting together a new rig. It has the most up to date hardware, so performance shouldn't be an issue if the sim is configured correctly...along with my expectations! I just don't want the install to cripple or impact performance unnecessarily if it can be avoided.

Specs:

i7 4790k (stock speeds for the moment, 4.4GHz)
Corsair H110 CPU cooler
EVGA GTX 780 SC ACX
Corsair Vengeance Pro 8GB 1866MHz
Samsung 840 EVO 500GB
Asus Maximus VI Hero
Corsair AX760 PSU

Currently the SSD has about 250GB free as the OS and other games are currently on it. I have also just bought 2 WD Blue 1TB 7200rpm HDDs (WD10EZEX).

So my question is, where should I install X Plane? 

I know it will be faster to load on the SSD, but that performance will not be improved in the sim. Will it be smoother overall on the SSD? If I install X Plane on the SSD and addons on the other HDDs, will they work with it? I read somewhere that you might have to use symbolic links?

Also, I was thinking about setting up the two HDDs in RAID 0 with a 128kb stripe size and installing X Plane on there. Does RAID 0 cause issues (stutters/lower FPS, etc)

Any input is greatly appreciated! Thanks in advance.

Steve 

Woah, nice rig you have there! The only thing I'd suggest as far as hardware goes is plan to expand your RAM in the near future; as a 64-bit application, X-Plane can and will use whatever you can throw at it. 8GB is enough right now, but when the visibility distance is increased in 10.3X, the devs have suggested that you'll probably be thankful for the extra memory headroom that 16GB affords.

 

But more to your question: where to install X-Plane? As you noted, installing X-Plane on your SSD will decrease the loading times, but it generally won't affect performance. I have the sim installed on a 3TB 7200RPM WD Black HDD and, with my particular settings and suite of add-ons, it takes about 1-2 minutes to perform an initial load from the desktop, but once I'm in the air flying from place to place, scenery loads from the drive into RAM are almost always imperceptible. If you can live with slightly longer start-up times, I'd plonk X-Plane on a HDD.

 

The other reason I suggest this is that you'll more than likely be doing some heavy writing to your X-Plane drive. For perspective, I have a rather modest X-Plane install that includes full global scenery, the full collection of HD scenery meshes, about a dozen high-definition aircraft with numerous liveries, several detailed airports, and a few HD texture replacements; all this clocks in at about 150GB, and that's without any widespread photoscenery or World2XP coverage. Depending on the addons you collect and the kind of scenery you prefer to fly over, it's not without the realm of possibility that your X-Plane install balloons out to 250GB or beyond.

 

I've never attempted to use symbolic links within X-Plane, but I can't imagine that they'd help very much. If the major benefit of running X-Plane off of an SSD is the decreased loading times, you'd largely negate that by relocating all your intensive aircraft and scenery add-ons to a HDD. In my case, X-Plane easily spends the majority of its loading time reading scenery files, so bifurcating your installation this way may not do much to speed things up.

 

Unfortunately, I can't speak to RAID arrays and X-Plane performance as I've not tried this myself.

 

Hope this helps!

I recently switched from SSD to SSD RAID 0 - no improvements. I don't want to think about the fact that it could indeed cause negative effects ...

 

Well... modest improvements. Loading KEWR (HD Mesh, 16 AI Aircraft) took 2:00 from the quick start screen on the SSD. Now it's about 1:45 ... The majority of the loading time is needed to load the HD mesh.

A drive that seems to be being overlooked is Seagate's SSHD.  I have changed both of my desktops over to that drive.  Very economical offers plenty of space, and it does offer faster startups from a cold computer - about 70 seconds - and seems to start XPX faster - up the initial set up screen.  After that, maybe a little, if loading the same thing over and over, but not with new locations, aircraft, etc.

 

It's not as fast as SSD, but a good compromise.

 

Every little bit helps.

 

John

I agree with CapnSplat, 8g of mem is border line for XPlane, as far as the other specs, you should be able to run XPX with relatively high settings with a butter-smooth experience.

Hey guys,

 

Thanks for the input, very much appreciated!

 

I did leave out that I have FSX which I will be installing too. So to keep things simple, I have both sims on a seperate drive where addons for the specific sim will be going too. So FSX is going on the SSD along with its addons. There is 250GB free on it which should be plenty for the moment. Also, out of both sims, I think FSX is the one that could benefit from every little bit of performance it can get from any area.

 

X Plane will be going on the two mechanical drives in RAID 0 - 1.8TB of space, which should also be plenty. This also eliminated any issues addons would have if they were being placed on separate drives as the actual sim application itself.

 

Anyway, thanks again for the help on this and the opinions.

 

Steve