BEFORE and AFTER FSX load time after 10K RPM HDD to NVMe drives

[dogdish]

With WD VelociRaptor 10K RPM mechanical HDD's...

 

5 minutes, 17 seconds

 

With WD SN750 NVMe drives...

 

2 minutes, 42 seconds

 

I'm satisfied with my processor performance, so not ready for a MB, CPU, memory swap. However seduced by the NVME performance I've seen.

 

Before the upgrade changed the SHOW_OPENING_SCREEN=1 to 0. Measured times are clicking the FSX icon to when airport pops up on the screen. Have FSX Gold, ORBX Global, Ultimate Traffic Live, booting to NL2000 Netherlands Schiphol with a QW 757, both times.

 

My motherboard has one M.2 slot however it only runs off the chipset at 10 Gigabits per second. So I found this beauty...

 

 

It plugs directly into a PCIe slot and NVMe drives run directly through the CPU at x4 instead of slower SATA 3 speed. Card is a 8x and has a bifurcation chip onboard since my motherboard/BIOS does not support bifurcation. I went this route so I can keep Windows 7 and all my games on the single board. When FS2020 comes out will be able to swap in and out with another board/NVMe drive setup with Windows 10 and FS2020 with only one screw.

 

Had a 250GB and 1TB VelociRaptor HDD so chose 250GB and 1TB WD SN750 NVMe drives.

 

Updated my BIOS to support for "Future NVMe drives." Windows 7 does not natively support NVMe, so had to install a KB2990941 update (Microsoft has removed probably to force Windows 10 and can be downloaded else ware.)

 

Cloned my HDD's to the NVMe drives, removed them, then changed the NVMe drive letters to C: (Windows 7) and D: (FSX)

 

Cloning made everything a snap. Windows worked as before, FSX as before, ORBX as before, etc. (only faster). The only issues I had were Flight1 products that only needed license refreshes and then they all worked again.

 

The NVMe board I got was expensive, however I've seen single NVMe PCIe slot boards for around $20 and the prices for PCIe v3 NVMe drives are falling I think because PCIe v4 is driving them down.

 

Of course everything else now snaps open as well :)

Edited September 6, 2019 by dogdish