SSD and FSX

R

rwmarth

Charter Member
Anyone try using a solid state drive (ssd) for FSX? Any performance increases? This is the drive of the future and supposedly blazing fast compared to any mechanical drive. Seems a good fit for FSX especially with prices going down making a small drive (dedicated for FSX or a couple other programs) not all that unreasonable.....
 
Haven't tried one myself, but I did notice a couple of months ago that the boutique-shop PC builders in the UK have been advertising their builds in PC Pilot magazine that feature an SSD so that flightsim can have its own disk.

Sounds like a very logical step.....:typing:
 
I even wonder that perhaps it might have some benefit at installing FSX on a regular flash drive which is afterall what SSDs are. That should run faster even if it's just USB connection since the whole premise of ready boost is that flash drives are significantly faster than mechanical ones even if connected via USB.... 32gb flash drives are well under 100 dollars now along with SSD drives of similar sizes being close to that price as well.
 
There used to be a lot of problems with solid state drives degrading alarmingly quickly and actually offering not that much of a performance increase. This was some time ago, I'm sure they've worked the kinks out now, but at one stage they were talking an 80% performance drop after six months of use. Here's an article from April last year:

http://perspectives.mvdirona.com/2008/04/25/LaptopSSDPerformanceDegradationProblems.aspx

It does seem comparing even the latest solid state drives to traditional ones even though they use less power, are quieter and seek faster they are slower at consecutive reading in many instances.
 
rwmarth said:
I even wonder that perhaps it might have some benefit at installing FSX on a regular flash drive which is afterall what SSDs are. That should run faster even if it's just USB connection since the whole premise of ready boost is that flash drives are significantly faster than mechanical ones even if connected via USB.... 32gb flash drives are well under 100 dollars now along with SSD drives of similar sizes being close to that price as well.
Click to expand...
I have tried that well actually a usb external drive
but its slow
H
 
rwmarth said:
I even wonder that perhaps it might have some benefit at installing FSX on a regular flash drive which is afterall what SSDs are. That should run faster even if it's just USB connection since the whole premise of ready boost is that flash drives are significantly faster than mechanical ones even if connected via USB.... 32gb flash drives are well under 100 dollars now along with SSD drives of similar sizes being close to that price as well.
Click to expand...

I think you misunderstand the purpose of ready boost. Ready boost simply acts as high speed virtual memory, not high speed storage, and virtual memory is only used when you run out of physical RAM.

If in fact you are running out of physical RAM you would be far better off buying more RAM than attempting to utilize ready boost in it's place, but if you can't add more ram then ready boost it an alternative way to avoid having to utilize the hard drive as virtual memory.
 
I'm running 2x 64GB Samsung ssd drives in my current main pc and one in my notebook (cost ~€700 each over 12 months ago :help:).... 1 for the OS and the other for fsx photo scenery. I have tried every other combination of hdd's too...300gb Velociraptors, 36gb/74gb/150gb & 160gb Raptors, Samsung F1 7200's etc and have found that system performance has definitely increased since i've gone with the ssd drives. From powering on the pc to desktop takes around 20 seconds.
The second ssd is perfect for fsx photo scenery.......bye bye blurries.
With hindsight would I still have bought them?........hell NO. When I was assembling the parts for this build over 12 months ago I decided to buy the absolute best components that were available on the market...and this included the desire to try out SSD technology.
The best price - performance hard drive for FSX is the WD Velociraptor, imho.
 
SolarEagle said:
I think you misunderstand the purpose of ready boost. Ready boost simply acts as high speed virtual memory, not high speed storage, and virtual memory is only used when you run out of physical RAM.

If in fact you are running out of physical RAM you would be far better off buying more RAM than attempting to utilize ready boost in it's place, but if you can't add more ram then ready boost it an alternative way to avoid having to utilize the hard drive as virtual memory.
Click to expand...

Yeah, I was confused.... I must have just been thinking that if USB memory was faster than using the harddrive when the system is scarce on ram somehow would correlate into flash drive being faster than the harddrive too for all purposes. But I was too hastey in my thoughts!
 
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