Well, I wouldn't be buying faster storage for my current PC, but would consider it for my next PC after hearing about their 6x faster read rates which sounds really impressive for boot up and loading P3D.   But I tend to agree w/ your opinion that it's not being caused by disk i/o on my Samsung 840 as I've now got some other problems I never had before very recently--I'm unable to complete a flight nor complete a flight at KSAN and now KPDX and I have no clue why.  I tend to think all of  these issues began w/ installing OpenLC North America, which I've since uninstalled and reinstalled but to no avail.   I also discovered scenery doesn't load correctly, at all, at KRDD which I have FTX version of.   When I moved it in the scenery library below OpenLC NA scenery entries it now loads correctly, or at least did when I last did this adjustment.   I was hoping to avoid a complete reinstall until deciding on P3D V4 because at some point I will be upgrading hardware and so will be doing a complete reinstall of everything necessarily.    I can also restore a prior image which might be the quickest path forward to untangle whatever has gone awry after a couple years of trouble-free use.

5 minutes ago, Noel said:

Well, I wouldn't be buying faster storage for my current PC, but would consider it for my next PC after hearing about their 6x faster read rates which sounds really impressive for boot up and loading P3D.

Well, I wouldn't count on that either, as I said, saw no benefit from single SSD to raid 0 on load times, even at P3D startup. Booting the machine and opening other related things, that's another story, but P3D, not so much. Just fireup p3d and monitor your CPU usage, you'll see a CPU core pinned at 100%, that's the loading bottleneck, and it happens on single SATA SSD (at least on my testing :P).

6 hours ago, sebastorama said:

Well, I wouldn't count on that either, as I said, saw no benefit from single SSD to raid 0 on load times, even at P3D startup. Booting the machine and opening other related things, that's another story, but P3D, not so much. Just fireup p3d and monitor your CPU usage, you'll see a CPU core pinned at 100%, that's the loading bottleneck, and it happens on single SATA SSD (at least on my testing :P).

Thanks good to know.  Even so, MarkjHarris' testimony is pretty compelling, just not for P3D per se.   I wonder why it is the CPU is working so hard to load stuff into memory--no rendering, just setting up the initial load, and that would seem way more of a stress on I/O than the CPU at least intuitively, but I know what you mean I've seen the CPU fully busy when initializing a flight.  They're not all that pricey so makes sense to get one for my next build--6x is a whole lot more potent than raid 0, which I guess is around 2x.

On 11/18/2017 at 1:47 PM, Luke said:

... I'm reading around 32K/sec from my SSD. It's nothing.

Luke, can you point to what utility you're using to see this?  I used perfmon.exe and saw maximum of 78mb/read I believe it was (78,124 or something like that).  I'm not sure which parameter I should be looking at.

14 hours ago, Noel said:

Thanks good to know.  Even so, MarkjHarris' testimony is pretty compelling, just not for P3D per se.   I wonder why it is the CPU is working so hard to load stuff into memory--no rendering, just setting up the initial load, and that would seem way more of a stress on I/O than the CPU at least intuitively, but I know what you mean I've seen the CPU fully busy when initializing a flight.  They're not all that pricey so makes sense to get one for my next build--6x is a whole lot more potent than raid 0, which I guess is around 2x.

Honestly, I dunno what exactly the CPU is doing on the process. My guess is that a lot of memory objects are being created, some sort of SDK/Framework objects being processed and initialized (taking a ton of CPU time) and also that things like scenery has to be loaded _and_ heavily interpreted by the CPU (things like, where to put roads, autogen buildings, mesh, body of waters, and so on...)... 

On 11/18/2017 at 9:27 PM, Noel said:

What tool do you think?  I will see if filemonNT.exe is still available.

I would try using Process Explorer to help diagnose your new stutter.

I currently have Windows 10 on a Crucial MX300 275GB M.2 SSD and P3Dv4.1 on a Crucial MX300 525GB SATA SSD.  When at a high quality airport  when I change views the building are black for 1-2 seconds before filling in.  Would a faster Samsung Pro NVME help reduce that?  I am running a 7700K @ 4.7, 16GB ram and a GTX1080.