Moving over to SSD or not?

[Bert Pieke 7,585]

14 minutes ago, lgcharlot said:

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 am sorry to hear that, I have no idea what is going on on your system, but believe me, thousands of PCs run on SSDs and are perfectly stable...  I have not had a spinning harddrive for the OS or the sim, for several years..

If you are still getting CTDs, you have not yet solved the underlying problem.. 😉

[Dominique_K 10,150]

59 minutes ago, lgcharlot said:

 

 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.

Not ready for prime time 😏 ? 1.5 billion SSD have been shipped to users the last five years and I have never heard anything like that. SSD are very reliable. Actually data show that they are an order of magnitude more reliable than HD. Your experience is very singular. It is possible that you have a bad SSD but the odds are very slim.  Your system has more probably one or several flaws you should look into before losing valuable data.

The instability you describe could be, for instance, the consequence of a strong overheating due to bad ventilation and/or dust layers on components. It could be a power unit going bad or having loose connections to the components they feed  and so on and do forth.

   

[jimcarrel 688]

I started out adding ssd's to my system about 3 years ago. Was at first leery about them and was afraid to buy cheap, I purchased a 500gig Samsung and now have another 500gig plus a few months ago I got a 1TB for MSFS stuff. They are not the cheapest but you can get them on sale from time to time, I also use Samsung Magician for upkeep. Never had a problem. bad thing about electronic components, bad ones are not exactly rare. Over all my PC days since '86, I've only had three components actually fail, one was a graphics card (after 2 years use) an onboard network card and an onboard sound card. We all have our bad experiences.. 

[Der Zeitgeist 1,575]

3 hours ago, lgcharlot said:

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.

SSDs are generally very reliable.

I bought my first Samsung SSD eight years ago, and still have it in my current PC (that's actually several systems generations ago, so the SSD was essentially used in three different PCs so far), with several format and reinstallation cycles. I currently use it mostly for games, and it is in fact the current home for my MSFS installation.

Never had a single CTD with MSFS on it.

Edited July 5, 2021 by Der Zeitgeist

[kaosfere 3,115]

What the folks above have said about the "reliability" FUD is spot on.   I've personally owned probably close to 20 SSDs over the past decade or so and in that period of time I can't remember a single one failing, even under heavy use.   But, as they say, the plural of "anecdote" is not "data"...  so let me share these stats that Backblaze, who use a stupendous amount of hard drives and have routinely published reliability data, shared regarding the reliability of their SSDs vs HDDs.    Over the course of 8 years, and more than 3000 drives, HDDs had an annualized failure rate almost 10 times as high as that of SSDs used in an identical role.

(Full report is here, for anyone interested in the details beyond that.)

To be fair, this doesn't really factor in drive age, as you can see from looking at the average age and total drive days.   But I think it still proves the point pretty well: SSDs are reliable enough relative to HDDs for anyone to use.  End of.   One thing to bear in mind with them is the likely failure mode.  HDDs often give you a "warning period" when they're approaching failure, with increasing bad sectors, bad noises, and sometimes SMART errors.   The SSD failure mode tends to be more spontaneous -- there's often no gradual decline, it's just working fine one day, and not the next.

So, having reliable backups of your data is important.   But, having reliable backups of your data is always important.  You're already doing that, right?

Edited July 6, 2021 by kaosfere

[ThrottleUp 621]

I have an SSD on this old PC but I have installed MSFS on the old school spinner drive and the reason is I just KNOW the game is gonna grow massively in size with future world updates and when I go mod crazy.

In fact I plan to get a 4TB  spinner just for MSFS. Long load times aren't a big deal for me. Also once in-game I doubt I'll see much difference as confirmed by friends who play other games from their SSDs.

The LOAD times are very fast but IN-GAME they cant tell the difference. 

Also @kaosfere that is a very interesting table and link, thanks for sharing 👍

Edited July 7, 2021 by ThrottleUp

[flyinion 280]

As far as the "not ready for prime time"  I've been all SSD for almost two years  now (970 Evo Plus 500GB for boot/some games, 860 Evo 2TB for everything else) with no issues and will not go back to spinning except for mass storage of things like ripping my DVD/Blu-Ray collection.  

 

As far as game/sim performance, there is definitely a noticeable reduction in load times.  Since I don't have a traditional spinning drive at the moment I don't know how it might affect flying in MSFS with the whole streaming of data/imagery.  However, I suspect if you're flying in a manual or rolling cached area it would be a similar effect to FSX with things like OrbX scenery where since the sim is constantly hitting the drive to load textures as you fly and running FSX on a SSD was supposed to help with microstutters from loading the new textures as you flew.

edit: My current setup on the drives for MSFS is Windows on the M.2 500GB drive, MSFS and addons on the 2TB SSD due to overall size, MSFS rolling cache of 20GB on the M.2 drive since if SSD does help smoothness of sim when loading cached scenery M.2 is significantly faster than SSD even.

Edited July 7, 2021 by flyinion

[in2tech 588]

On 7/4/2021 at 7:48 AM, buspelle said:

Thanks for Your kind and helpfull answers! I will uninstall MSFS from its present place, and reinstall it on my SSD... Hopefully I have the space I need...

Love

Buspelle

 

So did you ever move your MSFS to your SSD? If you did, just curious what you think? And did you put it on your existing SSD, or purchase a new one? Wonder when HDD's will go away like floppy disk? Seems like it is going to take a very long time. Manufacturers love to add HDD's, usually as the second drive to save on cost? They also usually give you a small NVME m.2 ( hope that is right ) as the main drive. Fairly sure it is so you can choose a higher capacity when customizing it on their website, therefore they make more money, which makes total sense. Of course if you build your own, you do you 🙂

What's funny is since I bought the 1 TB SATA SSD ( didn't have another m.2 slot ), and this is gonna freak people out. I have way too much storage space. Flight sim is my main hobby and other games, which  I have very few, get off loaded. Why, cause I can 🙂 I fly DCS World, play World of Warships, Tomb Raider, like a few times a year. Mainly cause I stink at them 🙂

So now I have:

Main NVMW m.2 256 GB SSD - 1/3 to half full

1 TB HDD - 803 GB free space

1 TB SSD - 703 GB free space ( soon to be just MSFS, had to try some other games on it, it's awesome for a SATA drive )

500 GB HDD External - 437 GB free space

Anyone need storage space 🙂 I know I'll call it Google Drive Lite 🙂

I'll bet most people's are close to maxed out? Except their new SSD's and m.2's for MSFS ONLY, they just bought! Or got with their new PC builds?

And my Community Folder, usually max 20 items at a time! Even with Add On linker. But I admit that could change 🙂

Happy flying, PC, X-Box, any sim, etc...

Edited July 7, 2021 by in2tech

[Noel 4,507]

On 7/4/2021 at 6:01 AM, highflyer2020 said:

Not sure why anyone is still on normal HDD these days for gaming....SSD all the way.

Absolutely, and if not for faster loading then because that HDD is probably close to failing!  

I have m.2 NVMe 2Tb drive and everything is on it:  OS, MSFS, P3D (dunno why at this point, mainly because of the massive pain to setup and maintain), Ghost Recon:  Wildlands, and that's about it.  No MS Office, or other targets of malware.  Boot time is almost instant.

In fact that massive pain reared its ugly head this morning, when for the first time in maybe 2-3 months I decided to take the NGXu up from KDEN > KSFO.  My flight plan failed to load when the popup said I needed to enter the product key for the NGXu as it wasn't activated.  Oh, I see, it was for a couple of years.  I did, it said it couldn't corroborate w/ something or other, so that was the end of a 20 minute setup for that flight using FSCaptain & GSX & ASN4.   So it's the usual BS:  I have no idea why the absolutely correct product key didn't work, which opens up a pandora's box of troubleshooting just to get back to square one.

Edited July 7, 2021 by Noel

[in2tech 588]

5 minutes ago, Noel said:

I have m.2 NVMe 2Tb drive and everything is on it:

How much faster are NVMe m.2 over SATA? I have heard up to ten times depending on motherboard. Is that true? Or actually I think they said as fast as the motherboard could provide?

Edited July 7, 2021 by in2tech

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

1 hour ago, in2tech said:

How much faster are NVMe m.2 over SATA? I have heard up to ten times depending on motherboard. Is that true? Or actually I think they said as fast as the motherboard could provide?

How long is a bit of string.

Not all NVME drives are the same specs but generally speaking ON PAPER they are substantially faster.

In practice the difference is not always particularly noticeable.  This is partly because other things in your PC may stop the NVME achieving it's theoretical maximum.  However more importantly reducing  a load time from 5 seconds on a legacy HDD down to half a second on a SATA SSD is very noticeable to the average user as the legacy HDD with its 5 second load time is just annoying whereas half a second is usually fine. Reducing that again with NVME from half a second to say a tenth of a second - the difference feels to the user to be not so much (half a second load is generally already seen as quite good).

The only place you see a HUGE difference with NVME is if you are doing something like continuous database read/writes. Things like searching for and extracting a few million records from a DB and writing them to a new file.

There are however other advantages to NVME not least of which being they are small and do not have cables running everywhere so they tidy up your case and improve airflow.

Disadvantages ? Cost and some examples of NVME can run very hot under sustained read/write and may need heatsinks.  In particular putting an NVME in one of those little NVME USB 3.1 external drive cases can notoriously have issues, particularly if you are copying an entire HDD of data. 

 

Edited July 8, 2021 by Glenn Fitzpatrick

[Noel 4,507]

1 hour ago, in2tech said:

How much faster are NVMe m.2 over SATA? I have heard up to ten times depending on motherboard. Is that true? Or actually I think they said as fast as the motherboard could provide?

Ask yourself how long it takes, after POST, to get to the Win 10 desktop with whatever you're using now.  It's about 1 second w/ the m.2 NVMe.  It's as good as it current gets, at least at this price point.  I paid $220 apiece for two 2Tb drives.  They are around 3-4x faster han SATA III SSD. 

by Taylor Hodgetts, on Nov 15, 2019 3:19:16 PM, https://www.promax.com

This makes NVMe drives more expensive to produce, however it also means the drives can run parallel read and write operations as PCIe is bi-directional and run at astronomical speeds. Current generation NVMe drives use a PCIe 3.0 connection, typically in a x2 or x4 mode. A PCIe 3.0x2 connection can run just under 2GB/s, and x4 just under 4GB/s respectively. This puts NVMe drives at speeds upwards of 2000MB/s compared to your typical SATA III SSD running under 600MB/s. With the upcoming PCIe 4.0 standard NVMe SSDs are only going to get faster, with projected figures at nearly 5000MB/s."

Plus, just in terms of materials, these 2Tb 'drives' is about as big as a stick of gum.  I bought two, to have a cloned copy.  I kind of wish I didn't now because that idea, having a simple plug n' play clone, came from legacy strategy to cope with the laborious process it takes to get P3D up and running w/ all of its content and addons. Those days are gone now w/ MSFS.  This makes reinstall a relative snap.  I have only 5 add-on airports, 3 were from the Marketplace and 2 from Orbx, and at this point I won't buy another airport from Orbx until they address the issue of omitting the auto-tuning capability of ILS freq in their airports--at least the two i bought and I expect most all others they produce or market.

 

 

 

 

 

Edited July 7, 2021 by Noel