With the advent of Ortho4XP, there is an even greater need for more and more HD space. And if you are especially like me and want to use the higher zoom levels, there is a need for hard disk space of at least a few terabytes. 

Now I always thought that a SSD drive was not beneficial for flight sim performance and that it only helped in loading up a scenario faster. Don't know why I didn't question it, but that was what I thought I had read somewhere. 

But thanks to someone on a facebook group, I was informed that it definitely matters to have a SSD vs HDD when loading textures while in-flight. It makes sense. But I just wanted others to confirm this information aside from that one person.  No one else in the group really helped shed light on this. 

So I was thinking of getting a 3-5 TB HDD but now that I realize it might take longer to load textures while in-flight, especially with the larger size scenery tiles, I am having second thoughts about the HDD purchase, and I'd rather have SSD with smaller storage capacity because I care more about the quality of the overall scenery during flight. If textures are not loading up as fast, especially those in the distance, then I will never consider HDD for my flight simulation again.

Can you guys shed some light on this topic? I didn't want to get SSD just because it is faster, because I have some patience. However, if the SSD positively impacts the overall visual scenery display during flight, I'm not settling with HDD.

Thank you!

I have all of my Ortho photos on a 4tb HDD and was symlinking the tiles to my custom scenery folder. I've found that when tiles load in flight my fps dropped drastically. I just deleted all the symlinking and have started copying the tiles that I am flying in to my SSD and do not get the drop in fps. If you can afford it, I would definitely go SSD over HDD when Ortho tiles are concerned.

If SSD were the same prices as HDD, I'd rather use it for performance reasons.  In the mainframe world, where I work, all the "DASD" is SSD.  Nothing mechanical any more.  Just SSD that emulates the various 3390 models.