No doubt about it - Sim Nirvana

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I received the Samsung T5 2TB SSD drive I ordered two days ago and put it to the test, porting all my P3DV4 MSE Photo Scenery to it.  WOW!  A huge different, P3D used to take five-ten minutes to start up in a photoreal area, now it takes about a minute.  And flight is so fluid and stutter free, I have always felt the rare stutters I got before were due to i/o off of a slower hard drive.  And I know Samsung products last, my twelve year old monitor is a testament to that, still at its best since I bought it twelve years ago.  It is said Samsung has new battery technology, solid state, just around the corner.  If such technology is to come, I know it will be from Samsung.  I am one happy camper with my biggest hardware investment in two years.  I have cruised the hardware forums and have heard the benevolent posts of those who added SSD's to their system.   Several years ago, they were Hocus Pocus.  They are no more, they are a simmers best friend, and my computer has become a lot more powerful--memory is key!

John

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I am well into my setup of my new sim photo real environment for both Xplane11 and P3D4.5.  I have been Gobsmacked by the improvement in fluidity and performance of both sims since offloading my photo scenery and add-on scenery to my SSD drive.  Regardless of brand, if you want the beauty of a fast system without cpu, it is getting SSD memory that will boost your sims performance the most, without having to go full bore and buy a new system, given my middle of the line specs, actually lower tier given today's systems. 

My hobby has always been focused on maximizing my sim time, my study time, and being as efficient as I can be when it comes to hardware longevity and storage space.  I learned that from years in the field supporting WAN's, in having lean, mean, and reliable business systems with little to no downtime.  That is what I apply to simming, and every couple of years I see what is new, take stock, and enjoy the hobby with the ultimate goal of getting my LSA license sometime this year, after years of putting it off.

I was worried about how I would get Xplane11 to see my new location for the photo scenery, given the way Xplane11 wants to see a Custom Scenery folder within its folder hierarchy.  So I wrote a simple example and used it, to slave my new SSD folder to where Xplane11 expects to find the custom scenery folder:

mklink /D "D:\X-Plane 11\Custom Scenery" "G:\Custom Scenery"

With D being Xplane's root install, and G being my new SSD location.  Xplane11 now loads incredibly fast, finding the scenery where it expects it to be with a pointer to the real, faster location.  Using the mklink command is better that using some third party go between that essentially does the same thing.

With P3D it does not matter as much, given the way the scenery.cfg entries can be mapped to any location, and those links have worked well for me in my tests in the last 24 hours.

I know this thread has not seen much response, not everyone can afford to go out and get a SSD drive, but the alternative of thinking cpu power is what you need is wrong--it is data thruput, the large thumping of scenery and textures and mesh, that can slow the sim environment.  So you can have a marginal cpu and graphics card, if you have fast, solid state USB RAM that SSD offers thru USB 3.1

John

 

[Jude Bradley 659]

I bought a Samsung 840 Pro 256 back in 2013 and it's still going strong (touch wood). I only us HDD for storage, not for applications. 

 

[Luke 782]

30 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

I know this thread has not seen much response, not everyone can afford to go out and get a SSD drive

If you can't afford an SSD, you can't afford any upgrade. I'm seeing 500GB 860 EVOs going for under $80 on newegg today.

Cheers!

[Mace 1,908]

33 minutes ago, John_Cillis said:

I know this thread has not seen much response, not everyone can afford to go out and get a SSD drive

Like J.R. Ewing famously said on his J.R. Beer can, "If you have to ask how much my (beer) SSD costs, you probably can't afford it."

John I am surprised you are just now getting on to the SSD train.  The SSD prices have fallen a lot in the past couple of years -- good for us as we need fast storage.

[Mengy 814]

I have never purchased an SSD yet, my PC is full of three old Western Digital spinning HD's.  But then my PC is ten years old too, at least I did upgrade the vid card to a GTX970 many years ago.

I should build myself a new PC, lol.

[John_Cillis 2,406]

I made an early mistake with my SSD, I falsely assumed all my USB ports were USB 3.0 but they were not.  Unbeknownst to me I did have one though, not at the back of my computer where I was plugging in my USB periphs, but the front, so I plugged my SSD drive in there and speeds really jumped up!

John

[Luke 782]

USB 3.0 ports are blue, not black.

Cheers!