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Does a good SSD improve the Simulator performance?


andreDBU777

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Hi there! I wanna get a 1TB SSD just for the simulator and 500GB for other uses.

I am looking between the Samsungs SSD's, everybody recommend me those and I like it. 850 Pro, 850 EVO or M.2?

which of these should I get with 1TB just for the Sim with heavy loads / addons?

for the other 500GB I think the 850 Pro is perfect for general uses.

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I can only answer to your title about an SSD improving performance. It will not give you better frame rates or smoother performance. It will give you faster load times, meaning when you double click the FSX.exe to start the Sim and maybe when you press Run to start your flight.

Still thinking about a new flightsim only computer!  ✈️

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I can only answer to your title about an SSD improving performance. It will not give you better frame rates or smoother performance. It will give you faster load times, meaning when you double click the FSX.exe to start the Sim and maybe when you press Run to start your flight.

Yeah I know about that, but which of those do you think is the best one overall? I think the 850 pro might be the best option

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Performance wise, you are not going to see any visual difference running FSX between one SSD and another. Get the best you can afford known to be reliable. Bigger is better.

 

The largest considerations are making sure your OS is on SSD along with your swap file (cache.) Anything which slows down your OS also slows down FSX. FSX will load many times faster even if it's on a mech drive as long as the OS and swap are on SSD.

 

-Pv-

2 carrot salad, 10.41 liter bucket, electric doorbell, 17 inch fan, 12X14, 85 Dbm
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After many years of experimenting and frustrations I settled for this: I am using swappable drive bays to run dedicated SSDs for each sim. For my normal Windows activities I am using SSHDs.

 

The setup for the sims is as follows:

- 1 TB SSD with Windows (7), the sim, programmatic addons and aircraft - nothing else (not even Antivirus - nothing gets downloaded directly to these drives). Windows is tailored to a bare-bones state - only those options and services are active that are needed for the sim.

- 1 TB SSD with HD mesh and airports

- 1 TB SSD with photo scenery

- 16 GByte RAMDrive for AI aircraft liveries

 

As for the make and model of the SSD: it doesn't really matter. I would save some money and buy the cheaper option. I am using SSDs from Samsung, SanDisk and Transcend, both "Pro" and "Amateur" - drive benchmarks don't reveal any discernable difference. If anything, then the SanDisk 960 GByte drives seem to be the fastest.

 

And get a suitable backup strategy in place. SSDs can only take that many write access operations. And when they give out, there is no recovery possible, the data is lost. I bundled my old HDDs up in an external JBOD case and run full system image backups for each sim drive.

 

I disagree with the general notion that an SSD does only help with initial loading times - it helps with all loading times. And the simulator is accessing the disk very often if you are running a setup that requires the constant streaming of large amounts of data (4,75m mesh, HD photo scenery and lots of AI traffic).

 

In my experience an SSD and a RAM Drive will help with the following issues:

- AI aircraft are black for a short moment when you pan the view

- Elevation is "popping", when you fly, especially at higher airspeeds

- blurry textures that slowly improve.

- Microstutters/hold-ups related to access conflicts on the drive (but for that you should use several discrete SATA controllers too)

 

YMMV of course

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The setup for the sims is as follows:

- 1 TB SSD with Windows (7), the sim, programmatic addons and aircraft - nothing else (not even Antivirus - nothing gets downloaded directly to these drives). Windows is tailored to a bare-bones state - only those options and services are active that are needed for the sim.

- 1 TB SSD with HD mesh and airports

- 1 TB SSD with photo scenery

- 16 GByte RAMDrive for AI aircraft liveries

 

Sounds good, really. But the common user will hardly be able to afford 3 TB SSD. And that for a simple FSX!

 

 

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Paul,

 

This means that instead of starting with migrating the HDD where I have FSX to SSD, I should actually migrate my OS drive to SSD first?

 

Jorgen

 

If you intend to do both, then order isn't that important, but the biggest improvement to how well FSX starts up, loads saved flights, etc. will be when the OS runs on SSD as well as the Windows Cache.

 

-Pv-

2 carrot salad, 10.41 liter bucket, electric doorbell, 17 inch fan, 12X14, 85 Dbm
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Sounds good, really. But the common user will hardly be able to afford 3 TB SSD. And that for a simple FSX!

 

Well, the OP is planning to build a system around a $1200 CPU (see his other threads in the P3D forum). I thought it couldn't hurt to point out some bottlenecks that not-really-simple sim setups can run into when it comes to drives.

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I have a Samsung 850 EVO SSD I installed a while back for my laptop and I saw an amazing performance increase in loading times and FPS.

In my opinion, an upgrade to a SSD (especially for gaming), is an essential addition for performance and quality to the FSX experience.

I am very happy with my SSD and say that even though others might say different from this, I really, really recommend this upgrade for anyone with a CPU

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  • 2 months later...

Hi, I'm going to install both the OS and FSX but not sure how to arrange them onto the different drives. I've 2 SSD's, a Samsung 840 PRO 128Gb and a 850 EVO 250Gb, plus a 1Tb WD SSHD. Unfortunately the motherboard has only 1 SATA6Gb connector. The others are only SATA3Gb.

 

Gone through plenty of forums I'm still confused about the proper way. Currently I've the following ideas:

 

1.

 

SATA6Gb: 850 EVO 250Gb with OS and FSX (with addon aircraft) on separate partitions

 

SATA3Gb: 840 PRO 128Gb with FSX addon sceneries (ORBX global base/vector, some FTX regions, 6-8 payware larger airports) and ASN.

 

SATA3Gb: 1Tb SSHD with REX + Soft clouds and other, not FSX related stuff

 

 

2.

 

SATA6Gb: 840 PRO 128 Gb with OS

 

SATA3Gb: 850 EVO 250 Gb with and FSX and FSX addon sceneries (as listed above) and ASN but on separate partitions.

 

SATA3Gb: 1Tb SSHD with REX + Soft clouds and other, not FSX related stuff

 

 

I'm tempted choosing the 1st option but not sure and maybe there other solutions that better than my two ideas.

 

Anyway, till now the OS was on the 128 Gb SSD and the FSX with all bells and whistles on the SSHD. It worked acceptable but now I change from win8 to win7 and received a new 250Gb SSD.

 

Thanks in advance for your advice.

 

Zoltan

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Zoltan,

 

this is what I have done so far: I have migrated my F: drive, where FSX itself and my aircraft and scenery other than photoscenery resides, and my E: drive, where my photoscenery is, to two Samsung 1 TB 850 Evos. Then the local store ran out of these SSDs. I have one on back order, my C: drive will be migrated to that.

 

But I will retain one HDD, where I'll be doing my write-intensive work, like downloading, unzipping and so forth. This will then become the G: drive.

 

All running under Windows 10.

 

Jorgen

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Jorgen, thanks for the advice, finally I almost finished installing everything. System and FSX to the 250 Gb SSD into different partitions. Addons (FTX, airports, aircraft) will be moved later to the other SSD that is unfortunately limited by the 3Gb SATA connector but I hope it won't have strong effect to the overall performance.
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I have an Alienware liquid cooled system with dual 7200 rpm hd's. One of them is dedicated to MSFSX. With the i7 Intel Core overclocked at 3.9 ghz, 16 gb RAM, and 1.25 gb GeForce 560. I have never had fps or hesitating problems. I have REX and 3 GEX addons along with fsuipc controlled CH pedals, throttles, and yoke.

Alienware Aurora R4 Liquid Cooled Intel Core i7 3930K,,,overclocked @ 3.9 ghz 16 GB 1600mhz RAM

1.25 GB NVIDIA GeForce GTX 560 video card 1 TB SATA 6 GB/s (7200 rpm) 32 mb cache 2 each,,, one dedicated to MSFSX 750 W power supply Sound Blaster X-Fi sound

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Again, a SSD is wonderful for a fast load to start the flight. And it may speed things up in other programs which are a decade or so newer than FSX. However while "flying" in FSX any FPS or other improvements just don't happen at my house because of a SSD.

 

Since I started "flying" with FSX, I've tried to make sure I had the fastest CPU and Ram I could afford at the time. Despite that, I've always found myself limited because the software designers of FSX assumed we'd be running 10Ghz. or so single core CPUs by now.

 

Microsoft obviously didn't plan for a several core CPU and frankly despite the improvements when using "Acceleration," the basic clock speed of the CPU is still the limiting factor with FSX, Steam, and from my experience P3D. Despite the fact I'm now running a 4.4Ghz i7 with DDR4-2400 ram and a GeForce 960 video card. I'm still limited in my settings and FPS by the speed of my CPU!.

 

I have a 1Tb SSD dedicated to FSX. I also left FSX on my 1.5Tb 1040 mechanical drive as well. I have made several comparison flights using the same plane and the same scenery but using either the SSD or the mechanical hard drive. I feel a SSD is really wonderful for quick setup and loading of a flight. But I have found no detectable differences in any part of the flight, once loaded, between the SSD and the mechanical drive.

 

IMHO: Anyone who chooses a SSD for quick loading of FSX will be well pleased. :cool: However, should you expect better performance or the ability to move your sliders farther to the right while using a SSD, you will be hugely disappointed.:o:o:o

Being an old chopper guy I usually fly low and slow.
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My PC originally wasn't built to run FSX: i5 3470, GTX660, ASUS P8B75M-LE, 2x4Gb RAM, 128Gb SSD. Despite of the weak config FSX ran more or less smooth and acceptable fps but was a bit unstable. Now I changed win8 for win7 and improved storage capacity with a 250Gb SSD. Unfortunately the MoBo has only one sata 6Gb/s connector so I had to decide which to connect there and how to install OP and FSX. I didn't wait miracles but wanted to get the maximum performance from the given config. Simply I didn't know that FSX need continuous data transfer from HDD/SSD or not and this is why I wrote my first post here.

 

Finally I installed and set the most stuff, FSX is stable (no CTD's with PMDG NGX at end of flight), no fps improvement (not even expected) but run slightly smoother. Considerably shorter loading time that is totally indifferent for me. :) I'm satisfied with the result because I think this is the maximum performance I can expect from this config. Perhaps new year, new PC. :)

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Thanks for the reply. I see you have things under control.

I was hoping I might find an extra SATA-3 (=6gb/s) ports somewhere in the specs of the mainboard. But no. As I said, you have it under control.:)

 

Maybe to late now, but always a good idea to make a backup of your fsx folder directly after the install. Helps a lot to have the files in case you accidentally delete a file in the future.

 

anyway, Happy Flights,

il.

 

Just in case, here's a link to the specs:

https://www.asus.com/Motherboards/P8B75M_LE/specifications/

[sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
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I just realised, there is a way to add a Sata3 port (two even).

An expansion card, that slots into a PCI-Express port, and creates two Sata 6Gb ports either internally or externally (or both even).

 

I had a look on NewEgg, and there are quite a few.

However, most are for PCI-E x2

 

As far as I can see you only have PCI-E x4 possibly available.

There are some PCI-e x4 to Sata cards as well, but at first glance those look more expensive.

 

this is the whole group of results:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?N=100007607%20600022631&IsNodeId=1&Submit=ENE

 

This is when I limit the selection to "only PCI-E 2.0 x4 cards"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?N=100007607%20600022631%20600362381&IsNodeId=1&Submit=ENE

 

They all mention RAID.

 

I don't think you want to use RAID.

I'm not sure if you can use them to simply connect a drive without using RAID. I would expect you can, but I suggest you do some research about that.

[sIGPIC][/sIGPIC]
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I just realised, there is a way to add a Sata3 port (two even).

An expansion card, that slots into a PCI-Express port, and creates two Sata 6Gb ports either internally or externally (or both even).

 

I had a look on NewEgg, and there are quite a few.

However, most are for PCI-E x2

 

As far as I can see you only have PCI-E x4 possibly available.

There are some PCI-e x4 to Sata cards as well, but at first glance those look more expensive.

 

this is the whole group of results:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?N=100007607%20600022631&IsNodeId=1&Submit=ENE

 

This is when I limit the selection to "only PCI-E 2.0 x4 cards"

http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?N=100007607%20600022631%20600362381&IsNodeId=1&Submit=ENE

 

They all mention RAID.

 

I don't think you want to use RAID.

I'm not sure if you can use them to simply connect a drive without using RAID. I would expect you can, but I suggest you do some research about that.

 

Actually I didn't even hear about that kind of card but good to know that exists. Thank you very much for your research and advice. However I wouldn't spend money to improve the current PC as I plan building a new one in a year.

 

Zoltan

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