Scenery on HDD

[kingm56 1,031]

My SDD is quickly filling-up; having multiple sims is really starting to be a pain :).  I was wondering if any of you had your scenery files on HDD, while P3D remains on the SDD?  I was thinking of keeping all my ORBX scenery on my SSD, but move my airport sceneries (e.g. FlyTampa, FSDream, etc...) to an HDD.  Do  you see any issues with this COA?  

[neilhewitt 493]

Spinning rust is slow in terms of access and transfer speeds compared to SSD (which is then slow compared to NVMe), so the downside is that loading scenery objects and textures will take longer. This may be the difference between smooth and a bit stuttery. You could just try copying the sceneries you want to move over to the HDD and then point the addon.xml to the new location, and give it a try like for like vs the same scenery on the SSD. If you don't see any performance hit then you're good; if you do, it's case of how much you care about it. I have FlyTampa EHAM and it's a beast in terms of initial loading, and it definitely loads a bit more smoothly on SSD and even more smoothly on my NVMe drive. Of course, HDDs themselves vary in performance considerably, but even the fastest lag cheap SSDs in terms of raw transfer speed for large files. 

Once NVMe drive prices come down again next year (storage has spiked in price mostly as a knock-on from COVID-19 production issues in China) I'm going to grit my teeth and get 2 x 2TB NVMe drives for each of my sim machines (so 4 in total) and run them as RAID arrays for scenery storage. The price is still going to hurt, but the performance will be as good as it gets with current technology.  

[Aeronildo 4]

Not a problem. I keep the sim in a SATA 3 SSD and the P3D addons folder in a HDD using the mklink command. Loading times are slightly slower, sim performance is the same.

Edited November 23, 2020 by Aeronildo

[d.tsakiris 418]

I was thinking of something similar, namely putting big sat pic sceneries, plus their AG files, on a large HDD, and the rest on SSDs. Someone have experience with that?

[F737MAX 5,598]

1 hour ago, d.tsakiris said:

I was thinking of something similar, namely putting big sat pic sceneries, plus their AG files, on a large HDD, and the rest on SSDs. Someone have experience with that?

S....L....O....W

You're demanding a lot more data for photo scenery than airport scenery to be transferred at a slower rate. Expect long load times and blurries if you hold photo scenery data on HDD.
 

Edited November 23, 2020 by F737NG

[ha5mvo 253]

I have it this way for quite a while now and find it to be a reasonable trade off.

The textures take a while longer to load for detailed scenery once they enter into your LOD radius but it does not cause a very significant performance hit.

Mine is a modest, aging rig (6700k/1060  6g/16 G @ 3000 for memory) so I guess newer systems will perform even better.

[C2615 319]

Most of my secnery except some Large airport with Gees of Texture are set on a HDD

Unless the volume is in such concentrate, I really didn't see any difference for in flight performace, the loading time before flight is not in my consider, and it's not by any mean slow on my system