A couple years ago, I walked away from flight sim, partly because of frustrations with P3D and WidevieW working nicely together, spending more time troubleshooting problems than flying.

in the meantime, I saw much ado about MSFS.  I decided to stick with P3D for the following reasons, but unsure if my reason is factually correct:  Desire for multiple screens.  I have 5 external monitors / views.  One monitor for instrument panel and another for GPS screen.  It’s my understanding MSFS still doesn’t support this.

And one question:  I seem to remember that using an SSD for scenery files brings no advantage over a 7200 rpm HDD; is that still the prevailing opinion?

Thanks.

Scott

To be honest, I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the loading performance difference between my old 7200rpm Toshiba HDD and my new NVMe M2 SSD. I was expecting vastly improved performance, but that has simply not been the case. It makes me wonder if I have set something wrong in the BIOS. Whatever the case, it still takes a fair amount of time to load a scenario in P3Dv4.5HF2 with ORBx TrueEarth GB, although maybe a big chunk of the loading process is actually taken up by the CPU calculating stuff (like AI planes etc)?

Edited February 20, 20224 yr by Christopher Low

5 hours ago, Christopher Low said:

To be honest, I have been somewhat underwhelmed by the loading performance difference between my old 7200rpm Toshiba HDD and my new NVMe M2 SSD. I was expecting vastly improved performance, but that has simply not been the case. It makes me wonder if I have set something wrong in the BIOS. Whatever the case, it still takes a fair amount of time to load a scenario in P3Dv4.5HF2 with ORBx TrueEarth GB, although maybe a big chunk of the loading process is actually taken up by the CPU calculating stuff (like AI planes etc)?

going from a 7200 spinner to a m2 should be noticeable.  Boot times (Sim and OS) should be much quicker.  

Thanks for the replies.  My PC has two NVMe M2 SSDs, one for the Win10 OS and one for P3D.  The P3D 1 TB NVMe M2 SSD already contains > 600 GB between P3D, scenery (Orbx, RTMM, Aerosoft, etc), and other add ons.  I would like to add more scenery but am concerned about reaching some threshold of “too much” for the SSD capacity.  Since my PC motherboard can only take two NVMe M2 SSDs, my options appear to be non-NVMe M2 SSDs or HDDs.  CPU is Intel 9700K, Gigabyte Z390 AORUS motherboard, GPU is RTX 2080, and memory is 32 GB.  Thanks again.

Edited February 20, 20224 yr by ncngrr

10 hours ago, ncngrr said:

And one question:  I seem to remember that using an SSD for scenery files brings no advantage over a 7200 rpm HDD; is that still the prevailing opinion?

It is still the case that while running, P3D does not demand scenery anywhere near as quickly as an HDD can deliver it.
The only noticeable difference would be in the initial loading time.
My own solution is to have P3D on an M2 and the addon scenery on an HDD.
Even though the HDD is deathly slow in comparison, performance in the simulator is the same whether the addon scenery is active or not.
The initial loading time without addon scenery is significantly shorter, but I never fly without the addon scenery, so it is not really relevant.

Hi Scott, and welcome back...was wondering where you'd gone off to.

P3D does very effective forward scenery caching which loads scenery into memory long before it's needed, so SSD speed won't result in an appreciable increase in sim performance, with the exception of large photoscenery areas, where the short access times and higher throughput does make a significant difference.

For most consumer-grade SSDs, you'd normally want to leave 10-15% of the drive's capacity unused to allow the firmware to do wear-levelling and other internal housekeeping.

With SSDs, there's really no good reason any more to separate the OS and the sim, except maybe in the interest of organization.  With HDDs, you didn't want the head thrashing back and forth when switching between OS and sim tasks--with random access in an SSD, that's not a factor any more.  Add to that the ability to fairly easily put add-ons on any drive in P3D with the xml scenery library structure.  So if you have free space on your OS drive, you can expand into that, or if your OS drive is a very small one, you could replace it with a 1-2TB SSD and expand onto that.  Or you could add a SATA III SSD (assuming your mobo won't support an additional M.2 stick) and expand onto that.  You have lots of good options.

 

2 hours ago, Reader said:

…performance in the simulator is the same whether the addon scenery is active or not.

So… is it customary for folks to deactivate scenery not expected to be used in a given session so as to reduce initial loading time?

Hey, Bob.  
 

Good to hear from you too (although I’m sure you didn’t disappear from here)

Thanks for your input regarding the now-obsolete requirement to keep Sim from OS on an SSD.  I hadn’t really considered that option.  From a purely organizational perspective, I put the OS on a 250-512 GB SSD and the Sim + add ons on a 1 TB SSD (both NVMe M2);  It’s been easy to configure each machine the same.  Having filled the sim SSD to 2/3 capacity and wanting to add more scenery, I began looking for another drive, this time a 4-6 TB HDD for scenery only, thinking that would give me ample additional space to grow into.  The replies to this thread seem to support that notion.  Thanks.

1 hour ago, ncngrr said:

So… is it customary for folks to deactivate scenery not expected to be used in a given session so as to reduce initial loading time?

It is for me. I use the incredibly useful Lorby-SI 'P3D Add-on Organizer' freeware utility.

With copious amounts of photoscenery, City scenery and detailed airports on my SSDs, I group my add-ons so that I can disable vast parts of the world before I launch P3D. With just a few clicks in the utility, I can significantly reduce the load times.

1 hour ago, ncngrr said:

So… is it customary for folks to deactivate scenery not expected to be used in a given session so as to reduce initial loading time?

Yes, that is what I routinely do as well.

Well… okay then.  I’ll see about integrating that into my ops checklist.  Thanks.