SSD vs HDD, big difference

[ryanbatc 12,857]

On 6/4/2023 at 12:31 PM, Dillon said:

I broke down and purchased a 2TB SSD drive for FS after my 1TB drive was filling up.  Before the change I noticed stuttering performance at some ad-on airports and the ATL area in general.  Upon copying over my data to the new SSD drive those issues are gone.  Taking care of the load times from a legacy drive really made a difference in MSFS performance. 😏🍺

At this point I'd recommend anyone using a legacy drive with MSFS seriously consider an SSD drive.

Oh my goodness you were using a spinny drive?   I'm happy for you now hehe.  What sort of load times were you getting with the old drive?

[Dillon 2,197]

23 minutes ago, ryanbatc said:

Oh my goodness you were using a spinny drive?   I'm happy for you now hehe.  What sort of load times were you getting with the old drive?

I don't have the numbers but as the drive got filled up load times were horrendous with third party major airports.  Totally different sim now.

[Bobsk8 12,735]

2 hours ago, Fielder said:

If anyone is upgrading drives, and you only are going to have one drive, then a 2TB drive is a much better purchase choice than a 1TB drive. And the prices on drives are much cheaper than 2 years ago. With all the updates from MSFS, my MSFS is over 800 GB (official + community). 

I have 356 GB , MSFS including community. I uninstalled all the aircraft, lessons, blah blah, that I never use, which saves a great deal of space. 

[Glenn Fitzpatrick 3,798]

Just be aware that with any SSD,  if you use more than 80 to 90% of the capacity they slow down an awful  lot.

That last 20% or so should be reserved for occasional temporary storage when moving stuff about.  Think of it as like the reserve fuel on an aircraft, it is space that is not intended for regular day to day use,

[Bob Scott 7,721]

12 hours ago, Glenn Fitzpatrick said:

Just be aware that with any SSD,  if you use more than 80 to 90% of the capacity they slow down an awful  lot.

That last 20% or so should be reserved for occasional temporary storage when moving stuff about.  Think of it as like the reserve fuel on an aircraft, it is space that is not intended for regular day to day use,

If you go past ~90%, writes to the SSD will slow down...read speeds are largely unaffected.  So if the device is used for "write once read many times" (e.g. scenery/aircraft add-ons) you can fill it up, but putting something like the rolling cache on a full drive would be a problem.

SSD storage is getting so cheap now that it's a crime to fill one up, anyway.  I saw a 2TB Samsung 980 PCIe4 NVME drive on sale at Newegg for $134 the other day.