With Black Friday now "officially" underway, I am looking at upgrading to a SSD for Win 10 and P3D4.  I have several questions:

1.  Which SSD manufacturer would you recommend? 

2.  What size is recommended for the OS and for PD3.  I have ORBX, PILOTS latest terrain mesh, so I need quite a bit of space.

3.  Would you purchase two separate SSDs, one for the OS and one for P3D?  Or would you purchase one BIG SSD, granted that gets costly.

Any other suggestions?

Thanks!

Rich Boll

Wichita KS 

Hi Rich,

After pretty extensive research - I chose Samsung - I think you'll find many who agree... I have three now and have had them for years... Currently running my OS on one and FS on another - at this point I have no reason to ever switch brands... I'm a happy customer...

Size - only your wallet can determine that...

Regards,

Scott

31 minutes ago, richjb2 said:

1.  Which SSD manufacturer would you recommend?

+1 for Samsung - they manufacture all of their own memory and controller chips and have a great reputation for speed and reliability (and a warranty to match it) at a reasonable price.

31 minutes ago, richjb2 said:

2.  What size is recommended for the OS and for PD3.  I have ORBX, PILOTS latest terrain mesh, so I need quite a bit of space.

At least 500GB, and preferably more if you can afford it.

31 minutes ago, richjb2 said:

3.  Would you purchase two separate SSDs, one for the OS and one for P3D?

No reason why not but it isn't necessary. When everybody used HDDs, it was always suggested that you have your flight sim on its own drive to avoid potential performance issues caused by the fragmentation of files. This is no longer an issue with SSDs. Although some people claim that it somehow still improves sim performance by having the OS on a separate drive, there's only apocryphal evidence for this and I certainly haven't noticed any problems having both on the same drive. Modern SSDs tend to be so fast that you'd only be talking about fractions of a second anyway.

It's worth still having a HDD as well for data that doesn't need the speed of an SSD but needs plenty of storage space - photos, videos, music and so on. Big HDDs (2TB+) are excellent value compared to SSDs.

1) Samsung or Samsung.  If not those two, then Samsung.

2) 512GB to 1TB

3) SSD's aren't like spinners... the controllers in SSD's are far better at moving data than hard drives.  I have my OS (and programs, including my flightsim) installed on the same SSD without any issues.  An advantage too is that when I make a back-up image of the OS drive the image includes the flightsim.  I do have a second SSD I use for (small) storage and the Windows Page File.

Greg

Thanks everyone,

Newegg has pretty good deal on this SSD:

SAMSUNG 850 EVO 2.5" 500GB SATA III 3D NAND Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) MZ-75E500B/AM

$139.99.  

I'm thinking about getting two, one for the OS and for P3D and XP11.  They have a 1TB version on sale for $299.99.  Not sure about going to that size. 

I also have 2 x 1TB HDD that are partitioned, so that will remain. 

Will the 2x 500 GB's be enough for the OS and P3D & XP11?

Thanks,

Rich 

Hi Folks,

Wow - they've come down in price since I last bought...

Good luck...

Regards,
Scott

7 minutes ago, richjb2 said:

I'm thinking about getting two, one for the OS and for P3D and XP11.

Unless you have a lot of non-flightsim software, a separate 500GB SSD for the OS is going to have a lot of unused space.

2 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Unless you have a lot of non-flightsim software, a separate 500GB SSD for the OS is going to have a lot of unused space.

This a general purpose computer that also has MS Office and other business software, in addition to FSX, P3Dv4, XP11, and PSX installed. The partition drive (c:\) that has the OS installed has a size of 400 GB and it's about 70% used.  The flight sim programs, data, terrain, and ORBX are all on separate partitioned drives. 

I scratch my head at times trying to figure out what's taking up all this space.  I do clean up the disk and remove deleted files, etc.  

It seems I'm always running out of space or getting tight, which slows the computer down. 

Rich 

4 minutes ago, richjb2 said:

I scratch my head at times trying to figure out what's taking up all this space.

Get TreeSize Free: https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/. You'll be amazed at where all the rubbish is hiding! On my old system I had Win7 and FSX (with a lot of add-ons and scenery) on a 256GB SSD with some space to spare.

I've used Samsung variants and Western Digital, both have worked very well.  For flight simulation (P3D, XP11, FSW, AF2, etc.) anything above about 300MB/sec sustain transfer raters isn't going to be noticeable and not a hindrance to performance (at least for now anyway).

For OS 

256GB to 500GB  (if P3D go for 500GB as some 3rd party install scenery/textures into the Add-On folder on C: as default)

For Flight Sim

1-2TB  (2TB if you plan to use a lot of photoreal scenery i.e. OrthoXP or MSE on P3D side)

SATA6 or M.2 or U.2 will not make a difference in load times or FPS and so long as it's above 300MB/sec sustained and no latency issues

To be noted that some (not all) bootable M.2 NVMe and more recent chipsets seem to have issues with Windows 10 1709 "update" (fresh install resolves the issue).

Cheers, Rob.

4 minutes ago, vortex681 said:

Get TreeSize Free: https://www.jam-software.com/treesize_free/. You'll be amazed at where all the rubbish is hiding! On my old system I had Win7 and FSX (with a lot of add-ons and scenery) on a 256GB SSD with some space to spare.

Thanks for the info!  I'll get that program.

Rich 

4 minutes ago, Rob Ainscough said:

 

For Flight Sim

1-2TB  (2TB if you plan to use a lot of photoreal scenery i.e. OrthoXP or MSE on P3D side)

SATA6 or M.2 or U.2 will not make a difference in load times or FPS and so long as it's above 300MB/sec sustained and no latency issues

 

Thanks Rob!

I do not use photoreal scenery as I find it's not very realistic (no or limited autogen, no seasonal textures).  I found ORBX to be the most lifelike and realistic scenery, so I use it along with PILOTS terrain mesh, both of which use a lot space.

I use ORBX for both P3D and FSX.  I use PILOTS mesh for PD3, but use FS Genesis 2.0 mesh for FSX.  Will a 500 GB drive be enough for both simulators, or do I need to look at a 1TB for just these simulators?  I may keep XP11 on one of the HDD since it don't use it that much.  

Both are on sale at Newegg, I just need to pick the right ones!

Thanks,

Rich

"Samsung" as mentioned should be the way to go. There's another brand I've been very lucky with, and cheaper, it's "Crucial". As for sizes I would never look for anything less than 1 GB nowadays.

Cheers, Ed

 

Hi Rich,

Another vote for Samsung - great drives and very reliable. You can never have enough space - look at my signature: 4 x 1 TB drives seems to have become my sweet spot. It's amazing how quickly your drives seem to fill up. In the past I was always too conservative and ended up regretting it. This time I decided to adopt a different approach 😉

Windows 7 Pro 64bit (SP1) on C: along with some Apps and stuff that insists on being on C:

Prepar3D v4.1 on D: plus many P3D specific 3rd Party installations, including ORBX.

E: I reserve mostly for Archived data and stuff like Mesh, Active Sky/ASCA, Alternative terrain textures, etc.

H: Mostly Steam related installations - Flight Sims and Games

Fortunately Steam allows you to move installations around easily from drive to drive which turned out to be a godsend.

Now I have a decent distribution of occupancy across all 4 drives with oodles of space in reserve, especially on D:  (just under 600GB free) However, the less said about C: the better - over 800GB Free! LOL! 

I use a Samsung M3 Portable 4TB HDD for drive image backups (Macrium Reflect).

Regards,

Mike

 

52 minutes ago, Cruachan said:

Hi Rich,

Another vote for Samsung - great drives and very reliable. You can never have enough space - look at my signature: 4 x 1 TB drives seems to have become my sweet spot. It's amazing how quickly your drives seem to fill up. In the past I was always too conservative and ended up regretting it. This time I decided to adopt a different approach 😉

 

 

Thanks Mike,

I think I'm going to go with the 1 TB drive. 

Rich