Solid State Hard Drives

[leefree 12]

Hey guys,

I'm looking to finally buy my first solid state hard drive for flight simulator. I was told that SSD are better for FSX and P3D since a SSD has no moving parts so loading scenery and stuff would be a lot faster to do. I've been looking on Newegg for SSDs and I found a few that are pretty good in pricing but reviews on some of these drives are kinda making me not want to get a SSD. Most notable is these reviews, the drives fail after 3 or 4 months. Trying to avoid something like this. What do you guys recommend for a solid state hard drive? Budget is up to $500 may extend it to $600 if needed to get a really good SSD that won't fail after a few months of use.

[Lucifah 1]

I have excellent experience with Samsung Evo/Pro and Crucial SSDs. A pair of Crucial m500, which I bought more than two years ago, and which are in heavy use every day, are still going strong.

User reviews are always to be taken with a grain of salt. 3-4 months for failures sounds like FUD to me, even for very early SSDs years ago.

[Alpha Floor 237]

SSD are better for EVERYTHING; not just FSX or P3D

 

I have had the Samsung EVO850 120GB for 2 years now and no problems.

 

I recommend you install your OS onto an SSD first, it will make your computer and programs boot and read files MUCH faster. Then get another SSD for Flight Simulation files.

 

The problem with SSDs is that they have a limit on the number of "write" operations that can be performed. I, for instance, moved the WINDOWS TEMP and USER TEMP folder from the C: partition at my SSD to another HDD. That will get rid of 99% of write operations as I understood it.

[Luke 782]

I wouldn't sweat the limited writes. They have a capacity of around 1,000 TB - even on my heavy drives I write around 2-3TB a year. I will likely expire before they do.

 

Putting your temp directories and browser cache on an SSD is actually an excellent use case.

 

Cheers!

 

Luke

[vortex681 806]

I would also highly recommend Samsung SSDs. They're fast, reliable and have at least a 5-year warranty (10 years with the Pro series). With regards to the limited number of writes, even a conservative estimate would put the life of the drive at decades unless you write really massive amounts of data every day. Remember that most drive operations are reads rather than writes.

 

Performance wise, FSX will load much faster and the flight will start up faster but once in-flight there's no noticeable difference compared to a decent hard drive (I haven't got P3D but I would imagine that it's the same). However, if you use an SSD as your boot drive it makes Windows seem much snappier - I was surprised at just how much of a difference it made. Make sure that your motherboard supports at least SATA III or you'll lose much of the improved performance - I have quite an old board but bought an add-on SATA III card which also allows me to boot from the SSD (if you need one, shop around as, apparently, not all of them do).

 

The old advice was to put FSX/P3D on it's own dedicated drive but this was really only relevant to converntional hard drives where you would want to avoid fragmentation of the data. Since you don't need to defrag SSDs, dedicated drives no longer offer any significant benefit. You'll never notice the extra few milliseconds searching for the data on a combined drive.

[scottb613 1,188]

Love my Samsung's !!!

 

Regards,
Scott

[787flyer 633]

Ditto,

 

I have a 240Mb Samsung Evo Pro and everything has worked fine for the past 2 years without any problems. I only have this as my system disk though.

I am looking to relace my 1 Tb HDD with a larger SSD.

 

I also have to say the image copy process from the flightsim HDD to SSD went also quite smoothly.

[mibmab 6]

I can second that - my Samsung 850 EVO 1TB has been working superbly well since I did a fresh Win10 install last summer. The OCZ Solid 3 120GB SSD that I used before with Win7 initially needed firmware updates before it worked on my machine. In terms of price per GB, the Samsung 850 EVO 512GB is probably the best value at the moment, but if you can afford it, it's worth going for the 1TB version to have a bit more headroom. The Sandisk Extreme Pro has a slightly higher performance but costs a bit more.

Regarding possible writing limits of SSDs - that's only a theoretical concern, but for regular backups and occasional archiving I still use conventional harddisks.

[Psybear 23]

Good move.  Depending on cash available, Samsung Pro, Samsung Evo or Crucial, in that order. No defrag. I have 7 of these assorted  in various machines. None have failed.

[bbuckley 133]

Yep, I have two Samsung 850 EVO 500GB SSDs in my system. I clone one about every week or so then disconnect it. I run Win 10 and FSX from the SSD and install everything else to a conventional HDD.

[leefree 12]

Oh wow! Thanks for the responses guys. Yeah I'm getting a list of items together for my simulator because I really want to do a one seater B777 using the PMDG 777 as the base. I wanted to make sure I get a good SSD for my flight simulator.