Upgrading to SSDs. Advice plz.

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

On PC Aviator's advice (and numerous mentions around the forum in various posts) I am upgrading from one 500GB HDD to 2 256GB SSDs + the original HDD.

I am wondering if I can/should clone my existing HDD to one of the SSD's and if that will avoid hours of uninstalling and reinstalling Aircraft addons and recovering modified aircraft.cfg files. My Sceneries are all installed on a separate drive, (external...doh) and will need to be reinstalled on the other SSD for sure.

 

I'm thinking C:=SSD1 (OS+FSX+Addon aircraft), D:=SSD2 (MSE/Sceneries), E:=Internal 500GB HDD (Photo/Crap storage), F:=External 2TB HDD (Backups/Cold and Dark Storage).

 

Or is there a better way that might involve more work but result in a better FSX system?

 

Thanks in advance.

Matt.

 

 

[UKJim 502]

I know everyone raves about SSD's and yes they are great for a fast boot-up; but for any kind of performance increase in FSX, an SSD is not the answer IMO.

 

You will have to keep us posted on your progress and let us know if the change has had any impact on your FSX experience. 

 

Good luck mate

[flybytes 34]

Captain Coffee,

 

see the postings here on MH,

 

http://forum.mutleyshangar.com/index.php/topic/9733-hybrid-drives/

 

Like yourself I am considering adding an extra ssd drive to my PC (a Samsung 1TB EVO would be nice), in my case  to improve loading times of my library of UK photo-real scenery, but hoping for further price reductions before taking the plunge.

 

As UKJim states, fsx performance will not be enhanced, but the trade off of loading times against ssd price are very much a consideration.

 

Ray.

[needles 1,010]

If you are unsure about SSDs and have the funds, I would go for one of WD Velociraptor drives. Super speed transfer and very reliable also.

I would keep your SSD solely for the OS and put FSX on the Velociraptor.

My opinion only.

[MyPC8MyBrain 273]

you can clone you system without reinstalling or activating a new windows copy

my favorite backup and restore is Acronis true image

they run anywhere from home user level to enterprise level

ive been working professionally with their software for over 12 years now;

very reliable works smooth and very little needs to be done on your end

 

 

a while ago ive made a tutorial about hard disk performance (its not about SSD's specifically)

its about the lower level architecture and how to fully take advantage of your board

its a nice read for general knowledge and can be used as a nice reference for performance consideration

http://forum.avsim.net/tutorials/article/83-movingallocating-individual-folders-from-within-fsx/

 

here's alittle read about moving fsx from conventioonal hard disk to SSD

http://forum.avsim.net/tutorials/article/8-moving-fsx-over-to-an-ssd/

 

AVSIM toturial library

http://forum.avsim.net/tutorials/category/6-fsx-configuration-tutorials-hints-and-tips/

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

Downloading the Acronis, hoping it can resolve a problem that cropped immediately. My Computer doesn't show the new drives in the list of drives on My Computer. I can see them in "Computer Management" screen, and they show up in the device manager. But I can't access them like a normal harddrive, nor do they have any drive "letter*:" appended to their names like the HDD "C:" does...they are simply refered to drive1 and drive2.

 

I am not geek enough I think for this kind of stuff

 

Additionally the drives come with cloning software..supposedly on the drives already, but since I cant "see" the SSD's I downloaded the software from the manufacturer's site, but it won't start Cloning because it believes my OS partition is larger than the new SSD drives. My old HDD doesn't have any partitions, it is a single C: drive of 500GB...do I need to make a less than 256 GB partition on my C: drive that "encloses" the 186GBs that I want to clone over (Currently the entire contents of my C: drive) to one of the 256GB SSDs before I can actually start the cloning process?

[MyPC8MyBrain 273]

you need a drive that is larger than your current data usage

as long as your data is less than the drive size

there is no problem moving the data from 500GB to 250GB drive with acronis

as for fixing other issues; don’t count on acronis for that as its simply a cloning software

you probably need an update or something from microsoft

[Captain Coffee 2,030]

I Googled my way though it.

Acronis unfortunately didn't have cloning available in the free demo, so I found several forums mentioning EaseUS Partition to deal with the partition size problem..worked like a charm. Plus made it easy to assign drive letter changes after all the installing and cloning was done. To do the cloning process, I used the Software downloaded from the SSD manufacturer site, just in case there were problems at least "I used your software" would be claimable...which also worked like a charm once the partition was at an approved size thanks to EaseUS.

I have a few aircraft to reload thanks to panic uninstalling that rapidly proved futile, prompting the Google solution search.

But the SSDs are installed, assigned, the box is buttoned up, FSX is working, and I have sceneries to install yet on the second SSD.

Reload/boot times thus far are not significantly faster than the original HDD...maybe a few seconds or so...but there is no delay after I hit the desktop wheras before there were still "sand timer" icons poping on the mouse icon for at least 20 seconds prior to the SSDs.

 

I'm optimistic.

 

 

update. Tested FSX with MSE California installed. It is definitely an improvement. Fuzzy landscapes load and clear much faster. A 4 leg flight around Red Bluff area went very smoothly with fair weather set.

So far so good.

 

Update2:

All my MSE sceneries (California, Oregon, Washington, Nevada, Idaho, Hawaii) filled that second SSD up. It has 9 GBs room left. Which means I will have to install any new states (I have 2-3 more I'd like to get) on the internal HDD.../shrug...might have to reorganize which states are on which drives depending on which I use most often. (Idaho starts packing it's bags just in case)

I'm pretty happy with the upgrade. FSX frame rates/performance as suggested, have Not improved much, except as it collides with scenery reloading, framerates used to lag a bit while MSE was catching up, which it doesn't anymore. The MSE keeps up with my flights with only a slight lag for the high res textures near and to the side of me while I'm flying, not noticeable while in the VC, but I do still have to pause at times for up to 30 seconds if I want the best screen shot quality of an external shot...damn that stuff is data-huge.

I was surprised and a bit dissapointed that loading FSX still takes quite a long time, same as before roughly (I didn't ever actually time it)...most of that time is of course loading the scenery textures...sigh.

 

I'm quite happy to have a squeeky clean 500GB internal drive (reformated it) to install other games and any new programs onto, instead of the boot drive which is reserved for FSX and Windows stuff/Browsers/Etc.

 

Anyhoo...alls well that ended up well.

Thanks for all helps offered and suggested, ended up mostly googling through it ..so very glad I have the old laptop available to google past problems, but I did very much appreciate the suggestions.

 

cheers

 

 

 

 

[PCAviator 30]

Nice work Captain Coffee. It is true that SSDs don't actually improve frame rate in FSX. With MSE, it is slightly different. There is still no difference in frame rate (aside from the fact that MSE does actually improve frame rate itself via elimination of autogen) but the biggest difference with an SSD and MSE is that the cycle-through of progressively higher LOD texture display is much faster than with a standard hard drive. As this process relies on drive read speed mostly, a SSD will allow the highest LOD texture to display faster in FSX when those files are read from a SSD.

 

Capacity vs price is still the biggest issue with SSDs and MSE, but larger SSDs are slowly dropping in price, which is good