The laws of fiddling with things that are not broken........

I purchased a Samsung 860 Nvme and installed MSFS on it, partially in anticipation of the implementation of DirectStorage on windows 11.

The sim ran fine, high FPS, no stutters etc, but of course I'm a simmer, and couldn't leave well enough alone.

Accordingly, I ran performance tests between my regular SSD's and My NVME and noticed that the SSD (Using Samsung RAPID mode) was apparently much faster on sequential read/writes than my new NVME.

After years of using regular hard drives, this sounded like a good thing, and as an experiment, I deleted and reinstalled MSFS (I was also interested to see if I would encounter the same installation issues people were reporting) and moved the "Community" folder and the "Official" folder onto the regular SSD that was using RAPID mode.

Game boot time seemed to improve slightly, but suddenly I was experiencing constant intermittent hitches that seemed very much like loading stutters.

I changed my ingame settings higher to lower with no improvement (FPS was also lower than previously) and so eventually tried deleting my overclock, also with no improvement.

casting around for ideas, I looked closer at the drive speed tests and noticed that while the SSD beat the NVME on sequential read/writes, the NVME trounced the SSD on Random OPS.

But which of the two was "Better" for MSFS?

Lets see! (said I)

So this morning, I again deleted MSFS (I do that a lot while trying to figure out why I don't seem to have many of the issues that plague others) went partially through a reinstall, but manually transferred my already downloaded Community and Official folders back onto the NVME.

POOF!!! Stutters gone, framerate higher (pretty much matching the FPS of my previous and now deleted overclock)

Sim purring like a kitten, and some occasional late-loading-textures that I was assuming were possibly due to reported server streaming issues...... were now fine.

Hmmmmmmm.......

So now I ask the people who know more about it than I do. Which is more important for MSFS?

Sequential read/write speed, or random IOPS?

 

2 hours ago, HiFlyer said:

Sim purring like a kitten, and some occasional late-loading-textures that I was assuming were possibly due to reported server streaming issues...... were now fine.

Hmmmmmmm.......

I am willing to bet you a fine bottle of wine that this had nothing to do with your choice of SSD... 🙂

The servers have been acting up and users are pulling out their hair to get things working again (not you BTW..)

Edited September 22, 20214 yr by Bert Pieke

1 minute ago, Bert Pieke said:

The servers have been acting up and users are pulling out their hair to get things working again (not you BTW..)

The sudden hitching has been for the last few days, since I initially transferred from the Nvme to the SSd (and now back)

So I'm still curious. (I guess I could always switch back again and see whut happens.......)

The SATA SSD sequential results are wrong. Try these tools:

AS SSD Benchmark

ATTO Disk Benchmark

Crystal Disk Mark

 

With regards to bandwidth issues, there have been and still are some large scale ddos attacks going on currently. Whether or not they are hitting the MS servers, the crazy amount of traffic moving through the interwebs and global routers certainly affects both bandwidth and pings. 

The most important thing on most SSDs to make sure you purchase one big enough to always have at least 20% or so free during normal day to day operations.

Most SSDs slow down substantially as they approach full.

You should regard that last 20% as a temporary space you can use for a short time while transferring stuff about between drives,  but in normal day to day use try and keep a fair chunk of free space as it helps performance substantially on most drives, especially consumer ones.

Could your NVME drives be conflicting with any other drives you have installed in your SATA ports? Check your manual and see if any sata cables are plugged into sata ports to which the manual would show with a tick or a cross.If so then the lanes would divide into AHCI and not PCIE which would limit the speed.

Edited September 23, 20214 yr by 40track

1 hour ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

You should regard that last 20% as a temporary space you can use for a short time while transferring stuff about between drives,  but in normal day to day use try and keep a fair chunk of free space as it helps performance substantially on most drives, especially consumer ones.

I found that out the hard way when I noticed drives with literally 100's of gigs free announcing that they were short on space....

Shouldn't the nvme be like 20000 random read?

1 minute ago, ryanbatcund said:

Shouldn't the nvme be like 20000 random read?

Test shows 280761

One of the biggest difference between Samsung QVO, EVO and PRO is how they perform as they fill up with QVO being worst as it gets full and PRO being the best.

Edited September 23, 20214 yr by Glenn Fitzpatrick

9 hours ago, Rob_Ainscough said:

Agree, very wrong ... Devon's Samsung SATA 850 EVO results are almost as high as my Samsung 980 Pro NVMe (7138/5196).  I can't help think Samsung wouldn't sell a cheaper older drive that performs almost as well as their high end Pro series NVMe?  My two EVO 1TB 850's SATA6 in RAID 0 barely hit 980MB/s read.

Devon, try SiSoftware Sandra 2021 (or some other vendor) for benchmarking your drives ... SiSoftware also provide compares to other tested drives to show you relative performance difference across brands.

 I'd check you don't have some type of PCIe sharing problem and/or driver issue and/or BIOS settings issue ... not because of your benchmark results but because both of those drives are NOT bottlenecks and both can provide more than enough performance to keep a stutter free experience in any flight sim.

Cheers, Rob.

Doing more tests..... It seems apparent now that something is off slightly and I need to take a closer look.

A nice gentleman from another forum saw my post here, and PM'd me there (he does not do Avsim) giving me a detailed chronicle of his own findings when using Samsung's RAPID mode, which apparently included lots of CRC errors.

I will have to take a look at that, as well.

EDIT: By the way, MSFS shows a palpable difference now that its back on the NVME. Those little hitches are things that possibly would not have even been noticed by a lot of folks, but I always treat even the slightest anomalies on my machine as a good excuse for some diagnostics. Seems the sims new permanent home is the NVME.

Edited September 23, 20214 yr by HiFlyer