I have just noticed that my entire P3D setup is less than 70gb and on that basis I realise I can quite easily afford an SSD drive to put it on. If I create a clone of my HDD using the SSD (and ensuring the SSD has the same drive letter), can I simply drop the new SSD in such that my P3D and all of the addons will not be affected.

 

I really don't want to go down the route of reinstalling everything again.

 

Thanks

 

Tom

I did the same thing except with a Samsung 840 Pro 500GB....but never really did benchmarks except to say that there are some glitches here and there and I replaced my old UTXUSA V 1 with UTXUSA V 2, last night....

 

I launched my NGX FLIFGT in TNCM, but the scenery was screwed up … And it was brought from flyTampa and still resides on my HHD, my ex P3D drive....gotta check that out.

 

I use the EMT, but it is not activated, yet my P3d GTN750 Is ######ing about my not running P3d...

 

Launched this am from sleep;P3D hung....restarted....P3D came up fine.

 

I like the speed and I'm getting good frame rates but that shouldn't have anything to do with the SSD.… So I'm not absolutely sure that I am getting the biggest bang for my buck's by putting P 3-D on an SSD considering the cost per gigabyte at this point.

 

I am going to attempt to load the test version of Windows 10 on it today. I hope this helps, nothing definitive yet...just trying to maximize my use of the SSD and a 27 inch touchscreen.

 

Regards,

 

Chas

Well it was a question really. I hear that installing p3d on to an ssd can help improve performance and so I was thinking I could do this. I just don't want to fork out for an ssd and find out I need to install p3d and various addons from scratch.

 

If it's possible to clone my old drive and drop that cloned image on the new drive then id be good to go.

 

But it sounds like it's not as easy as that from your experience :s if that's the case then I'll probably stay as I am.

 

Thanks

 

Tom

Yes, installing on and SSD will help some... the SSD is simply that much faster.

Now, what I did to replace my SSD was to make a system image of my original using DVD disks... it took 17 of them and a long time to make.

Once that was done, I installed the SDD which was larger in capacity than the original...you never want to go smaller if using a system image backup.

 

Once the system image was on the new SSD, I booted the system and if fire right up. HOWEVER, when I looked at the computer, it was reporting that my SSD was EXACTLY the same size as my old drive and had this huge unused partition.

The fix for that was to format the unused partition and then, delete the newly formatted partition. After that, I could expand the root partition to include all the space.

Now, after some little bit of work, I have ONLY programs and the OS on the SSD with data, such as photos, videos, documents, and other files subject to change on a regular basis, on the mechanical HDD. An SSD will be subject to sort of wearing out too early if it undergoes a lot of rewriting or things like defrag too often.

Hope this helps you decide

I did this last week.

 

1. Clone current drive

2. Disconnect current drive

3. Connect new cloned drive

4. Make sure the cloned drive has the same drive letter.

 

Nothing more nothing less. Everything worked out of the box for me.

 

@alhefner Current SSD's do not wear out that fast anymore. You will probably be replacing it long before it starts to wear out. I still use an old 80GB Intel Postville +/- 5 years old and that still has 95% health! And you should never defrag an SSD. no need they have Trim fucntions to clean up garbage.

@alhefner Current SSD's do not wear out that fast anymore. You will probably be replacing it long before it starts to wear out. I still use an old 80GB Intel Postville +/- 5 years old and that still has 95% health! And you should never defrag an SSD. no need they have Trim fucntions to clean up garbage.

 

Hmmmm, I'm only going by the 'best current' technical advise I had at the time I built my system... they were saying that the SSD's would fail quicker the more write cycles any given memory location went through... of course, the same could be said of magnetic media too I think so, you're probably right on target.

The original question - yes you can clone the HDD to the SSD with no problems. You need to enable AHCI in your bios for the SSD to work properly.

 

You will get faster loading times but no REAL performance increase like increased FPS.

 

With HDD when you get over 50% full, performance degrades. With SSD you can get to 90% before this happens.

 

Excessive WRITES wear the cells in the SSD but that could still take quite a while. FSX/P3D are mainly READ operations so it's really a non issue.

 

The problems that Chas references have nothing to do with the SSD except they are on the same system.

 

You should be good to go.

 

Vic

All sounds good. I may well take the plunge. I intend to keep the cloned image anyhow so if the drive does fail it wouldn't be catastrophic.

 

Thanks

 

Tom

Sorry to make you disappointed but an SSD does NOT improve P3D performance at all!!! Yes you get a few seconds faster inital loading of the sim, but that is all. You will NOT get one single fps more OR smoother performance. How do I know? I have tested that.

 

Also, my P3D installation is 237 GB with the released ORBX sceneries for P3D and a few of Aerosoft and some freeware, so anything less than 500 GB is a waste of money.

 

IMHO, the best solution is OS on an SSD and the rest on a fast HD.

Sorry to make you disappointed but an SSD does NOT improve P3D performance at all!!! Yes you get a few seconds faster inital loading of the sim, but that is all. You will NOT get one single fps more OR smoother performance. How do I know? I have tested that.

 

Also, my P3D installation is 237 GB with the released ORBX sceneries for P3D and a few of Aerosoft and some freeware, so anything less than 500 GB is a waste of money.

 

IMHO, the best solution is OS on an SSD and the rest on a fast HD.

Why is anything less than 500gb a waste of money? I'm assuming you are saying that the size of p3d and addons can grow? What if I were to say I'm happy with what I have and don't envisage installing 100's of gb's of addons, surely then anything above 500gb would be a waste of money for me??

 

I have my os on an SSD and it's fantastically quick, if there is no point in putting p3d on an SSD why bother putting 'the rest' on a fast hd? Surely a fast HD would be the same as an SSD if speed is of the essence?

 

I am leaning towards not bothering, I have p3d working nicely as it is, seems I could spend that money on another addon, or Xmas pressies.

 

Maybe in future if I have the cash spare

 

Thanks

 

Tom

An SSD will improve your loading times significantly. When you add new scenery you will not need to re-optimise your HDD to get the best access times. 

 

Reading scenery from an SSD will reduce any tendency for stuttering.

 

The faster access times of SSD will either reduce blurries or allow you to reduce the Fiber_frame_time_fraction; this can further reduce the potential for stuttering and may give a small FPS improvement.

It seems there are a lot of different views on SSDs I suppose there is no way to know how effective one will be unless you try it, particularly as systems vary widely.

 

Tom

AS always Tom - YMMV.

 

A lot really depends on how well your system is set up BEFORE going to SSD. If you have it really tuned well, you'll see little difference as others have noted. If it is not you will notice a difference just due to the SSD.

 

Bottom line - in the quest for the perfect sim experience we all tweak and test and test and tweak just to get the least little increase in performance. Faster load times alone are not the answer BUT it is one more obstacle out of the way.

 

Vic

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With HDD when you get over 50% full, performance degrades.

 

That's not true, performance only degrades because of fragmentation.

 

 

An SSD will improve your loading times significantly.

 

You see an increase, but significantly ? Meh... and mind you, that's based on a 500MBps read/write SSD in combination with a 4790K CPU.