December 17, 20214 yr Hello Guys, I have dedicated SSD NVMe 1Tb for the P3D and addons. However the space available is shrinking. I am thinking about buying few HDD to put mainly the scenery on it. My aim is to keep P3D SSD NVMe, but scenery like Airports/ORBX, etc. on new HDD drives and link it using the Addon XML method. My question is, will I notice a significant decrease in loading times in P3D booting using these method? Or the booting times does not matter as long as the P3D is installed on the SSD? Thank you for your help.
December 17, 20214 yr Moderator 1 hour ago, ark4diusz said: My question is, will I notice a significant decrease in loading times in P3D booting using these method? Or the booting times does not matter as long as the P3D is installed on the SSD? Don't do it. Scenery loading is a significant part of P3D and a HDD is a lot slower than an SSD. Ray (Cheshire, England). System: P3D v5.3HF2, Intel i9-13900K, MSI 4090 GAMING X TRIO 24G, Crucial T700 4Tb M.2 SSD, Asus ROG Maximus Z790 Hero, 32Gb Corsair Vengeance DDR5 6000Mhz RAM, Win 11 Pro 64-bit, BenQ PD3200U 32” UHD monitor, Fulcrum One yoke, Fulcrum Throttle Quadrant. Cheadle Hulme Weather website.
December 17, 20214 yr Yes, steer clear of spinning disk drives, SSD's are magnatudes faster in all instances. I fired up an old laptap (with spinning disk drive) the other weekend and it took ages to boot up and get running, I'd forgotten how slow things were prior to SSD'd becoming the norm (now NVMe's are becoming the new mainstream). Spinning harddrives do have their place capacity wise, e.g. all my major backups go onto 4 x 8 TB spinning harddrives and a rule of thumb for a successful backup regime is 4 x the capacity of the material being backed up, and alternate the backup drives/media. Back to P3D... my instance loads some 1,375 GB of Addins and Scenery in ~7 minutes and 43 seconds from P3D icon double click, to scenario chosen and loaded. It's a pretty highly optimised loading time and I find it just the right amount of time to get organised, clear the desk, organise flight thoughts, cup of coffee etc. The data is spread out over 4 x drives, being 1 x NVMe (1TB), 2 x 1TB SSD raided (striped) for a 2 TB drive, and a 10 GB ram disk for Orbx libraries. The biggest chunk of the data is in the Addon Scenery which sits on the raided drive - note this is not the xml addons locations, it's just the standard default Addon Scenery folder, only located on another drive instead of inside the P3D main application folder.. P3D is very flexible in where it can store data, I've even defined 12 x auto discovery addins locations to drop addins into and have them automatically picked up. Cheers Ryzen 5800X clocked to 4.7 Ghz (SMT off), 32 GB ram, Samsung 1 x 1 TB NVMe 970, 2 x 1 TB SSD 850 Pro raided, Asus Tuf 3080Ti P3D 4.5.14, Orbx Global, Vector and more, lotsa planes too. Catch my vids on Oz Sim Pilot, catch my screen pics @ Screenshots and Prepar3D
December 18, 20214 yr Most of my scenery are in HDD except some very detailed airport, the Loading time of course slower, but I didn't noticed any in-game performance change, so that's a go for me. It takes me half a hour to prepare paper works for a typical flight anyway, so the loading time didn't matter for me if it's 20s or 2min.
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