Moving over to SSD or not?

[Tierborn 188]

5 hours ago, highflyer2020 said:

Not sure why anyone is still on normal HDD these days for gaming....SSD all the way. Load times are quicker and it'll be a lot smoother as less time spent waiting for the I/O to fetch stuff from disk since it's A LOT quicker.

 

Cost vs storage is why HDD is still the primary choice for PC rigs

[Gazzareth 808]

12 minutes ago, buspelle said:

237 GB, but  there is other things in there that take some space, so I hope it will be enough...😀

For your OS + FS + Everything else, nope don't even think about it....

 

G

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

17 minutes ago, buspelle said:

237 GB, but  there is other things in there that take some space, so I hope it will be enough...😀

Add a dedicated 500 GB Samsung SATA SSD... only $75 or so..

[Spam3d 54]

Having SSD used to be a novelty, as larger sizes were quite expensive but they have really come down I'm price. I only use regular hard drives for data storage now. You won't regret it. 

[Bobsk8 12,754]

29 minutes ago, buspelle said:

237 GB, but  there is other things in there that take some space, so I hope it will be enough...😀

Well MSFS takes about 150 GB so that doesn't leave much room. 

[kaosfere 3,115]

14 minutes ago, Spam3d said:

Having SSD used to be a novelty, as larger sizes were quite expensive but they have really come down I'm price. I only use regular hard drives for data storage now. You won't regret it. 

This.   Almost any "normal" needs can be satisfied with an affordable SSD these days, and the performance benefit is so great that there's little reason not to go that way for anything other than bulk storage.   Similarly, the old worry about write lifetime isn't a practical concern for home users at this point;  a new SSD is likely to reach the end of its useful life before it starts hitting the end of its total write lifetime.

Across the 5 PCs in my home (3 desktops, 2 laptops) I have 12 different hard drives online, and only one of them, the 8TB bulk storage drive I haven in my main workstation, is a spinner.  It's not really an extravagance any more.

 

[regis9 4,022]

I use a 500gb SSD for my OS - ran into too many space issues with 250gb despite my best efforts, and a dedicated 1GB SSD for MSFS.  Did the same thing with P3D and X-Plane when I used those.

[Dominique_K 10,150]

8 hours ago, buspelle said:

Hopefully I have the space I need...

A generally accepted recommendation is that you should not fill a SSD over 70/75% (% varies from expert to expert but stays in the same range) of its capacity as the performance then significantly degrades. For instance a 500 GB SSD  should not contain more than 350/375 GB of data.

Edited July 4, 2021 by Dominique_K

[in2tech 588]

3 hours ago, buspelle said:

237 GB, but  there is other things in there that take some space, so I hope it will be enough...😀

Just purchased a 1 TB SSD from Best Buy for $100.00 USD, about 2 weeks ago to move MSFS from my HDD to the internal SSD. I keep a really clean community folder. I went from an average of about 5 minutes loading to an average of a minute and a half. But wait there is more to this. I had no idea that Add On Linker would skip the start up splash screens if you use that option. At some point 237 GB is not gonna be enough, but only you know kind of when, along with how often we get large World updates. And another thing Add On Linker can help with, ONLY load what you need for a flight. Saves a ton of load time, even on an SSD! And that load screen when you select a different aircraft takes seconds now instead of minutes to load. Everything is faster for me at least.

Best $100.00 I have spent in awhile. For me anyway! 

And the reason a lot of us have HDD, is because we bought pre-built systems. Although they usually come with a small SSD, mine is ONLY 256 GB SSD, with an extra 1 TB HDD, and now a 1 TB SSD. I had no idea at the time to be honest, and MSFS got announced a few months after I bought it 🙂

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

THE GAME ITSELF

The game mainly reads data and does not write very much except during updates and addon installs, it reads data all the time (making an SSD worthwhile)  but the writes and in particular sustained writes are not huge. 

You can probably get away with putting the game on a dedicated 2.5" SSD if you lack space on your NVME.

To be honest though, even the much maligned QLC/QVO drives that everyone hates would be fine as the performance hit with QVO is on really large sustained writes (which the game does not do) nor are the writes it does do enough for the lower endurance to ever be an issue.     THOUGH ...   the promised massive price drop for high capacity 4TB+ QLC/QVO drives does not seem to have manifested making a regular SSD more sensible if it is a similar price.   

Basically even a QLC/QVO will be fine for the game if you find one that actually is substantially cheaper than a regular SSD but check prices as they are often no cheaper.

ADDON FILES AND COMMUNITY FOLDER

it is unclear how much the game accesses these in flight. Putting them on an SSD will clearly improve load times but it is possible you could even throw these on a NAS without causing too many stutters in flight - no idea. I am not sure if anyone has actually tested the effect of keeping the community folder files on a slower drive.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[Slides 1,552]

I never install flight sims or even any games on HDDs anymore. Both DCS and MSFS are on my 2GB M.2 NVMe SSD and it does help with load times. It likely also helps with stutters but I cannot quantify that.

[Fielder 3,682]

It takes 25 seconds to boot up my old desktop, it used to take 150 seconds (2.5 minutes) when it only had HDD's. Loading up FSX on my old desktop is way faster using SSD than when that desktop was HDD. Also loading every flight.

It takes 15 seconds to boot up my new desktop I bought 1 week after MSFS first came out.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Fielder

[phenoplastic 9]

People are still using spinning drives? Wow.

[kaosfere 3,115]

4 hours ago, phenoplastic said:

People are still using spinning drives? Wow.

I mean... I have about 23TB of RAID5 in the NAS in my basement, and that's all on spinning disks.   But that's a bit of a different usecase.  😄

 

Edited July 5, 2021 by kaosfere

[lgcharlot 22]

On 7/4/2021 at 3:29 AM, buspelle said:

Hi, just wonder, I have MSFS installed on my "normal" harddrive today... Its ok, but will I gain better preformance, and better fps/smoother "simming" and less stutter if I reinstall MSFS into my DDS drive?

Love

Buspelle

I installed MSFS last September, on an new Ryzen 5-3600 PC with a 500gB SSD. My experience over the next several months was that MSFS was very unstable, with frequent CTD's, especially when flying in high-density scenery like the San Francisco Bay Area. I tried all of the usual fixes for the CTD problem, like increasing the page file size and making extra Page files on an auxiliary HDD, and it didn't help very much. When I checked the Windows error log after these crashes, they were most often app crashes related to non-existant memory addresses.

In addition to the instability of MSFS, I was experiencing lots of problems with my graphics, just doing "regular" computer tasks like email or looking at YouTube videos. The graphics resolutions on the three monitors would suddenly change to different resolutions, or the left and right monitors would shut down completely, all of this at random intervals and for no apparent reason.
In March, 4 months ago, I started to wonder if the SSD was the problem, so I removed it from the computer, and re-installed Windows and all of my software on a spare 3 tB HDD that I had left over from a previous computer build. I can't claim that this fixed the MSFS CTD problem 100%, because I still experience CTD's, but they are now maybe one per 4 hours of flight time, instead of a CTD about every 20 minutes. Performance of MSFS on a hard drive is slower, Windows 10 takes 3 times longer to boot up than it did on the SSD, but overall, MSFS is far more stable and way less crash-prone on a hard drive that it was on the SSD that I had. Maybe I just got a bad SSD? It was a Seagate Baracuda, and only 2 months old when I installed MSFS on it, but I came away from that experience with a deep distrust of SSD's and the feeling that they just aren't quite "ready for Prime Time". I'm perfectly happy with the small performance decrease of a HDD, but way better reliability.