Need advice - Planning to upgrade my hard drive systems

[biloo 20]

Hi,

I apologize if I sound amateurish but I am unable to decide the practical benefits of using ssd drive versus bigger and faster hdd drive.

I would like to have some practical and effective suggestions on how I can organize and/or upgrade my hard drive system.

Currently I have my c drive on an hdd drive (500 GB) that is nearing capacity and is causing CTD issues with my p3d v4 simulation.
My p3d v4 is installed separately into a small ssd drive of 120 GB and I am beginning to realize that this might be too tight for P3D installation.

My P3D V4 addons are mostly installed in my P3D Addons folder in documents folder located in my c drive.

I am planning to move my p3d installation to a bigger sized drive and replace my old hdd with either bigger hdd drive or ssd drive (unable to decide).

I understand that in the traditional mindset ssd drives are fast but die faster if you are doing a lot of writes to the drive whereas HDD drives are slower but are reliable to handle data files.

1. With keeping that in mind and considering that P3D traditionally require to upgrade, or re-install p3d software when fixes and new versions are released, is there a risk to damaging ssd drives in terms of its life length. I am not sure if I am being too over cautious in this matter and under estimating the power of modern ssd cards. (I recently purchased WD Blue SSD 500GB which was on sale. I haven't opened the box and I can still return or exchange it if you guys think this ssd card is too risky.)

Have you guys come across any reported issues from users running P3D v4 in a traditional HDD drive ?

Sorry for troubling you guys. I am just being confused if I am doing the right thing by moving the p3d v4 to a bigger ssd card.

2. I am also planning to replace my current 500 GB HDD with 1TB HDD drive (WD Blue 7200 RPM) and use this for data storage such as my documents folder, p3d addons folder, etc. and move my OS installation to the bigger SSD drive.
Have you guys come across any challenges when setting the system like this ?

[SteveW 1,792]

I've got four 2Tb WDs in RAID10 = 4Tb drive C: reliability and speed.

[biloo 20]

I was preconceived with the notion that SSD drives will die faster (a lot faster) if I am writing a lot of data to it.

After further research while the notion holds true about SSD lifespan, for an average user SSD's will still last quite a while and not die within couple of years (assuming the SSD state functions normally with normal expectation).

What I have decided to do is move P3D installation and P3D related addons to ssd.
I am also thinking of moving my Windows 10 installation to the same ssd while redirect users folder including appdata to the existing 500 GB HDD.

What do you guys think ?

[Bert Pieke 7,584]

Personally, I like to keep the OS disk separate from the flightsim disk.

It is just cleaner and easier to manage over time.

As for SSD lifespan, I would not worry too much about that.. hard drives can fail too - just keep good backups.

For the record, my drives:

120 GB Samsung Pro for the OS

250 GB Samsung Evo for P3D

250 GB Samsung Evo for FSX

1 TB WD harddrive for data

 

[vortex681 806]

9 hours ago, biloo said:

After further research while the notion holds true about SSD lifespan, for an average user SSD's will still last quite a while and not die within couple of years (assuming the SSD state functions normally with normal expectation).

See http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/3 for the final part of a long-term test on SSD lifespan. Even taking the drives which died earliest (at around 700TB of writes), you'd have to write almost 200GB of data to the drive every day for 10 years before the it failed - I doubt that many HDDs would survive that sort of usage. Random failures aside, you'd probably upgrade to a larger drive or newer technology long before you actually needed to replace a modern SSD.

[SteveW 1,792]

As someone said they are not seeing a seat-of-the-pants improvement in speed with flight sims on SSD, when the sim is running it's helped by being cached well by Windows and the sim can't saturate the PC with disk I/O usually.

And then SSD or HDD all fail at some stage, generally when we're having fun. Next comes the reinstall and all the messing around.

Instead consider RAID - simply swap out a dead drive and carry on as if nothing happened. In the RAID setup I have it's got a pair of fast HDDs in stripe that's a lot faster than a single HDD, mirrored by another pair 4x2Tb = singe 4Tb drive. But reliability is what I need. I might consider 4 SSDs in RAID10 for the next PC. Also, I find keeping a single drive C: is the simplest way to run a very complex setup like mine running every sim on the market and tons of dev gear, all sims in their intended default program files locations.

Remember that with most flight sims the working data is always on the O/S drive irrespective of where the sim files are stored. So a backup of the 'FSX drive' or the 'P3D drive' won't contain all the required data.

[biloo 20]

On 7/3/2017 at 1:37 PM, Bert Pieke said:

Personally, I like to keep the OS disk separate from the flightsim disk.

It is just cleaner and easier to manage over time.

As for SSD lifespan, I would not worry too much about that.. hard drives can fail too - just keep good backups.

For the record, my drives:

120 GB Samsung Pro for the OS

250 GB Samsung Evo for P3D

250 GB Samsung Evo for FSX

1 TB WD harddrive for data

 

That's an interesting setup.
I will probably follow this setup. I did also purchase 500 GB WD Blue SSD (Was on sale for canada day sale). I will probably use 120 GB SSD for Windows OS, WD SSD for P3D and heavy programs, while I will use my existing HDD's for data. 

On 7/3/2017 at 7:45 PM, vortex681 said:

See http://techreport.com/review/27909/the-ssd-endurance-experiment-theyre-all-dead/3 for the final part of a long-term test on SSD lifespan. Even taking the drives which died earliest (at around 700TB of writes), you'd have to write almost 200GB of data to the drive every day for 10 years before the it failed - I doubt that many HDDs would survive that sort of usage. Random failures aside, you'd probably upgrade to a larger drive or newer technology long before you actually needed to replace a modern SSD.

 

That sounds good. Otherwise without a point of reference it was very hard to determine in tangible numbers how long would SSD's last.
 

18 hours ago, SteveW said:

As someone said they are not seeing a seat-of-the-pants improvement in speed with flight sims on SSD, when the sim is running it's helped by being cached well by Windows and the sim can't saturate the PC with disk I/O usually.

And then SSD or HDD all fail at some stage, generally when we're having fun. Next comes the reinstall and all the messing around.

Instead consider RAID - simply swap out a dead drive and carry on as if nothing happened. In the RAID setup I have it's got a pair of fast HDDs in stripe that's a lot faster than a single HDD, mirrored by another pair 4x2Tb = singe 4Tb drive. But reliability is what I need. I might consider 4 SSDs in RAID10 for the next PC. Also, I find keeping a single drive C: is the simplest way to run a very complex setup like mine running every sim on the market and tons of dev gear, all sims in their intended default program files locations.

Remember that with most flight sims the working data is always on the O/S drive irrespective of where the sim files are stored. So a backup of the 'FSX drive' or the 'P3D drive' won't contain all the required data.

This setup would be my ultimate goal. I will need to purchase a full size case and create a RAID (atleast mirror raid). However, this will require substantial amount of financial planning. 

 

My other question would be, what would be my best approach to transfer my existing OS from HDD to SSD. I don't mind formatting both hard drives and get fresh windows 10 pro install onto SSD with clean registry.

I can backup all my documents, desktop items, remove all my programs from HDD. I can create a fresh install into SSD. Redirect my documents, desktop, downloads, etc to newly formatted data drive but will I be able to transfer Windows Activation from the HDD to SSD?

Thank you

[SteveW 1,792]

4 x SSD's will not be cheap compared to my 4 x £50 WD HDDs 

[zmak 331]

1 hour ago, SteveW said:

4 x SSD's will not be cheap compared to my 4 x £50 WD HDDs 

There is also the hybrid drives. 4 tb for around $150? I Use for orbx scenery and photo. 

[SeanBH 9]

I just got the Samsung 960 Pro to use as my OS drive, and upgraded my old FSX drive which was a Samsung 830 to the 850Pro I was using for the OS. I also bought a new data drive (from my old WD 600gb Velociraptor) that is a WD Gold 2tb edition. It's a 7200rpm, and is workstation quality. But I can tell it's the bottleneck when I re-image my drives every week and I only get 1.3gb transfer speed, but the 850Pro to the old Seagate 1tb took twice as long (averaged 700mB/sec). I also agree keeping Sim separate from OS is a good idea.