23 hours ago, IanHarrison said:

Funny that you should say that! My experience with an M.2 is that it is no faster than a SATA SSD. (Just taking benchmarks, in actual practice maybe it is better?)

"M.2" only defines the physical interface--there are both SATA M.2 drives and the much faster NVME M.2 drives.  An M.2 SATA drive is indeed no faster than a 2.5" SATA drive--it's the same electrical interface in a different package.  The NVME interface, however, is capable of much faster access and throughput than SATA, and most NVME drives are 10-20 times faster as a result (in benchmarks also, not P3D performance).

16 minutes ago, Doug47 said:

Yes no difference at all. But the constant reading / writing from the SSD used during the ‘game’ will shorten the lifespan of your SSD. 5 years if you’re lucky. Degraded performance after 3. 
I’ve got cheap ol’ HDD’s running solid after 20 years. I regret installing a SSD in my system at all.

P3D does very little writing to the SSD while running...it's a mostly read-centric program, and reading does not incur wear on the device, only writing does.  P3D really does not make any appreciable difference to an SSD's wear, which is typically on the order of 10,000 write cycles across the entire device before degradation occurs.  If you have so little physical RAM that P3D is forcing disk caching, then it would be thrashing the SSD more, but then again your frame rates would be in the single digits.

30 minutes ago, jfmitch said:

Concur with W2DR, once it's running no difference.

That's generally true if you are running the standard autogen-based scenery.  What Neil Hewitt was referring to above is photoscenery, and that behaves quite a bit differently than autogen--a SSD's faster access time and throughput *do* make a difference if you're running lots of photoscenery...not so much with autogen.

56 minutes ago, w6kd said:

"M.2" only defines the physical interface--there are both SATA M.2 drives and the much faster NVME M.2 drives.  An M.2 SATA drive is indeed no faster than a 2.5" SATA drive--it's the same electrical interface in a different package.  The NVME interface, however, is capable of much faster access and throughput than SATA, and most NVME drives are 10-20 times faster as a result (in benchmarks also, not P3D performance).

P3D does very little writing to the SSD while running...it's a mostly read-centric program, and reading does not incur wear on the device, only writing does.  P3D really does not make any appreciable difference to an SSD's wear, which is typically on the order of 10,000 write cycles across the entire device before degradation occurs.  If you have so little physical RAM that P3D is forcing disk caching, then it would be thrashing the SSD more, but then again your frame rates would be in the single digits.

That's generally true if you are running the standard autogen-based scenery.  What Neil Hewitt was referring to above is photoscenery, and that behaves quite a bit differently than autogen--a SSD's faster access time and throughput *do* make a difference if you're running lots of photoscenery...not so much with autogen.

Photo real is flat down low. Wouldn't mean a lot to a guy who flies A2A GA aircraft mostly. To a tube liner or corporate jet or twin turbine guy maybe. Not to low and slow me. Orbx replacement autogen looks real good. Better than the old FSX stock. Seen vids and screenies with it.  

I still want to know though if the NVMe drive needs a bios edit to be recognized. My board has an M.2 socket. Considering a 500 gig. Just for flight sims.

2 hours ago, Ray Proudfoot said:

Reading has no impact on the SSD. Writing does but why would the sim keep writing back to the SSD? Autosave in FSUIPC will but not normal flying.

Yeah I wouldn’t have a clue, as I just read it on the internet. And like all the other useless information out there, only one way to find out. All I know is I use both on my system and apart from initial loading times, not much else is any ‘quicker’ on the SSD. 

Use both with enough space on the SSD for the OS and the Sim. It’s quite annoying when the SSD is too small for anything other then the OS. 
 

 

3 hours ago, Gary1124 said:

Did you have to edit your bios settings for you board to recognize the NVMe drive? My Asus B450 has a M.2 PCIe jack. Between the CPU pedestal a d the GPU slot. I would think being on the PCIe bus that windows would detect it on it's own.

No, but I did have to change a BIOS setting to have 2 NVMe drives installed at x16. Usually it’s because the drive configuration will affect the PCIe bandwidth for some of the slots. 

1 hour ago, Gary1124 said:

Photo real is flat down low. Wouldn't mean a lot to a guy who flies A2A GA aircraft mostly. To a tube liner or corporate jet or twin turbine guy maybe. Not to low and slow me. Orbx replacement autogen looks real good. Better than the old FSX stock. Seen vids and screenies with it.  

I still want to know though if the NVMe drive needs a bios edit to be recognized. My board has an M.2 socket. Considering a 500 gig. Just for flight sims.

Yes, you might have to change a BIOS setting. But this will be detailed in the manual, which you can download at the Asus website if you don’t still have the paper copy. Sometimes you have to explicitly specify that a particular M.2 socket will be in NVMe mode and not SATA, although normally this is picked up automatically. 

Note that if you buy a PCI Gen 4 drive, it will work fine in a Gen 3 socket, but it will be restricted to Gen 3 speeds. Which is still a great deal faster than SATA. 

Edited May 15, 20215 yr by neilhewitt

5 hours ago, W2DR said:

 

 

Edited May 15, 20215 yr by IanHarrison
deleted.

4 hours ago, Doug47 said:

Yes no difference at all. But the constant reading / writing from the SSD used during the ‘game’ will shorten the lifespan of your SSD. 5 years if you’re lucky. Degraded performance after 3. I’ve got cheap ol’ HDD’s running solid after 20 years. I regret installing a SSD in my system at all. 

What kind of dodgy SSDs did you buy? My highest use SSD is my boot drive, an NVMe 970Pro is writing around 4TB a year. All modern SSDs can handle over 1000TB written so I will die long before the drive.

Cheers!

5 hours ago, Doug47 said:

Yeah I wouldn’t have a clue, as I just read it on the internet

It’s best to find reliable sources if you can. If in doubt, say now’t. 😉

4 hours ago, Luke said:

What kind of dodgy SSDs did you buy? My highest use SSD is my boot drive, an NVMe 970Pro is writing around 4TB a year. All modern SSDs can handle over 1000TB written so I will die long before the drive.

Cheers!

If you had of read my reply you would’ve noticed I said I ‘read it on the internet’. So it was more a assumption based on zero facts. 

Or put another way, I made it up. 
 

 

 

Small files incur more operating system IO actions, which makes them slower to read, copy etc.

That said SSD drives are magnitudes faster than spinning hard disks.

And NVME M.2 drives are magnitudes faster than SSD drives.

With all things equal, the biggest single speed improver that can be added to a computer is either an SSD or NVME drive (as compared to a spinning disk) and I've bought many an older computer back to a useful life by replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an inexpensive SSD.

Yes these memory types of drives do eventually wear out, but their reliability is higher, their price is lower and their capacity increases with each passing year.

Personally I run 5 of these memory type drives.

• A 240 GB SSD for the operating system.
• A 4 TB SSD data drive for things outside of flight simming.
• 1 TB NVME M.2 for P3D and various P3D addons.
• 2 x 1 TB SSDs in a striped raid array, again for P3D addons and P3D bits and pieces etc.

There is one final drive I use for Orbx libraries - a 10 GB ram disk.

The lot is backed up to hot swappable spinning disk drives via scripting to ensure recoverability, which I've had occasion to use when Orbx released some problematic updates and I needed to roll back their particular airport updates.

The final result is P3D starts in ~9 minutes loading some ~850 GB of addons and scenery data, a good trade off result for time vs. data imho.

I would imagine my next machine build will contain mostly NVME M.2 drives.

Cheers R

 

8 hours ago, Gary1124 said:

So, bios edit not needed? If I plug in a WD Black ar 500 gig to 1TB or what I choose then win 10 will detect it once I boot?

I plug my 20 year old HDD into my Windows 10 machine when I need files that I never bothered to transfer a decade plus ago. Works fine. 
And it should run another 20 years easily. I’m really doubtful my SSD will still be running after 20 years let alone 40. 
 

SSD vs HDD?
 

SSD loads a little faster into Windows  - a mute point when making a coffee after hitting the on switch - but that’s the only benefit. More expensive too. 
 

 

 

3 hours ago, Doug47 said:

I plug my 20 year old HDD into my Windows 10 machine when I need files that I never bothered to transfer a decade plus ago. Works fine. And it should run another 20 years easily. I’m really doubtful my SSD will still be running after 20 years let alone 40. 

If the drive is 20 years old it has a PATA interface, which no modern motherboard supports. That's going to be your bigger challenge beyond the media - physical connectivity. It wouldn't surprise me if in another 10 years SATA was deprecated and we were using USB and M2 for everything.

I just copy everything over when I upgrade my server. Every few years drive capacities increase by a half order of magnitude and everything just gets copied over.

Cheers!

Edited May 16, 20215 yr by Luke

13 minutes ago, Luke said:

If the drive is 20 years old it has a PATA interface, which no modern motherboard supports. That's going to be your bigger challenge beyond the media - physical connectivity. It wouldn't surprise me if in another 10 years SATA was deprecated and we were using USB and M2 for everything.

I just copy everything over when I upgrade my server. Every few years drive capacities increase by a half order of magnitude and everything just gets copied over.

Cheers!

Exactly. It’s true. Although it is still readable. Surprisingly. SSD is the way to go. But I like having a HDD 2nd storage...just in case. 

3 hours ago, Rogen said:

Small files incur more operating system IO actions, which makes them slower to read, copy etc.

That said SSD drives are magnitudes faster than spinning hard disks.

And NVME M.2 drives are magnitudes faster than SSD drives.

With all things equal, the biggest single speed improver that can be added to a computer is either an SSD or NVME drive (as compared to a spinning disk) and I've bought many an older computer back to a useful life by replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an inexpensive SSD.

Yes these memory types of drives do eventually wear out, but their reliability is higher, their price is lower and their capacity increases with each passing year.

Personally I run 5 of these memory type drives.

• A 240 GB SSD for the operating system.
• A 4 TB SSD data drive for things outside of flight simming.
• 1 TB NVME M.2 for P3D and various P3D addons.
• 2 x 1 TB SSDs in a striped raid array, again for P3D addons and P3D bits and pieces etc.

There is one final drive I use for Orbx libraries - a 10 GB ram disk.

The lot is backed up to hot swappable spinning disk drives via scripting to ensure recoverability, which I've had occasion to use when Orbx released some problematic updates and I needed to roll back their particular airport updates.

The final result is P3D starts in ~9 minutes loading some ~850 GB of addons and scenery data, a good trade off result for time vs. data imho.

I would imagine my next machine build will contain mostly NVME M.2 drives.

Cheers R

 

I think I will just make room on my 240 gig drive C. After cleaning it up I made about double the space a I would need for vanilla P3d 4. My basics for that are ASN, UT and GE P3d. My two favorite A2A aircraft after repurchasing, and Realityxp. Once that is all set then I remove FSX-SE to my Drive D Steam library. Then I can think about adding any Carenado models or UT Live or even trying an Orbx package.

I want to fly planes, not the PC.

3 hours ago, Rogen said:

Small files incur more operating system IO actions, which makes them slower to read, copy etc.

That said SSD drives are magnitudes faster than spinning hard disks.

And NVME M.2 drives are magnitudes faster than SSD drives.

With all things equal, the biggest single speed improver that can be added to a computer is either an SSD or NVME drive (as compared to a spinning disk) and I've bought many an older computer back to a useful life by replacing the spinning disk hard drive with an inexpensive SSD.

Yes these memory types of drives do eventually wear out, but their reliability is higher, their price is lower and their capacity increases with each passing year.

Personally I run 5 of these memory type drives.

• A 240 GB SSD for the operating system.
• A 4 TB SSD data drive for things outside of flight simming.
• 1 TB NVME M.2 for P3D and various P3D addons.
• 2 x 1 TB SSDs in a striped raid array, again for P3D addons and P3D bits and pieces etc.

There is one final drive I use for Orbx libraries - a 10 GB ram disk.

The lot is backed up to hot swappable spinning disk drives via scripting to ensure recoverability, which I've had occasion to use when Orbx released some problematic updates and I needed to roll back their particular airport updates.

The final result is P3D starts in ~9 minutes loading some ~850 GB of addons and scenery data, a good trade off result for time vs. data imho.

I would imagine my next machine build will contain mostly NVME M.2 drives.

Cheers R

 

You sir are way more advanced in IT than I am. Didn't grow up with it or get any training. Didn't even have a PC until around '98.

First sim was Jane's F-15. Then Jane's F-18:Super Hornet. The carrier ops were cool.  FS2000 was my first regular sim. Flew around the world in the Lear 45. Took a week of sessions.

I think my Asus B450 only has one m.2 socket. It is I read a mid grade budget board.