Hybrid drives.

[phil white 274]

I have decided to get a hybrid storage drive for my pc for my flight sims.

 

This one.

 

http://www.ebuyer.com/321969-seagate-750gb-momentus-xt-ssd-st750lx003

 

 

[needles 1,013]

Hi Phil,

I've got no experience of one of these but at the price stated, it's a good deal.

You will have to let us know what you think and experience with it.

Cheers

[Kevin Firth 114]

I have one of these Phil, and installed it as my FSX drive. I'm not sure it has improved my in sim experience much, as I still get blurries sometimes with photoscenery, but I never have to wait more than a minute or so for a flight to load. It works best I think when you need to use your drive to repeatedly load the same data, as it caches it, so that would make sense with it accessing FSX continuously. For the same price though you could get a sata III 2tb drive, so may be worth thinking about how much additional storage space you need for scenery as opposed to how much extra benefit you'd gain from the hybrid?

Cheers

K

[phil white 274]

Thanks guys, i have ordered it anyway so will get it installed on Monday night.

[M31 0]

Let us know how you get on with it Phil.

 

I cant see anyone needing more than 1TB for a pure FSX and not filling it to the brim for an add on HD with the OS on a second performance HD, ideally a good SSD would be best but the prices for them are still outrageous at that size and half the size, next best option would be a Western Digital 1 TB 10'000 RPM Velociraptor (<--- I use this for FSX and all its add-ons now) You really cant go wrong with a modern mechanical HD though, the prices are finally falling again, just go for best warranty and exchange policy I guess, Western Digital are great here in my experience.

[phil white 274]

Just fitted the Hybrid drive and I am currently installing Windows 7 64bit which is nearly complete, next job will be to install the mobo and Nvidia drivers then install FSX with no add ons initially and see what happens as I load them on individually.

[brett 2,316]

Hope everything goes smoothly, good luck. Wait till you see how fast FSX is on a fresh install.

[phil white 274]

OK i have now installed FSX and Acceleration but not had chance to try it. Windows and FSX all did the online activation with no problem as well. I did notice on this hybrid drive then the installations were much quicker too.

 

This drive is purely for FSX and might put X-Plane10 on it too as this is on a different drive at the moment.

 

Will be testing FSX tomorrow with no overclock just to compare the performance to my old hardware.

[flybytes 34]

Prices of ssd's may seem outrageous, but the price of them is around half what they were a year ago.

 

Doesn't seem long ago that I paid £50 for a 1GB sd card and I thought that I'd got a bargain.

 

My first PC purchased in the late 1990's contained a 1 GB hard drive which cost the princely sum of £100 (the whole pc cost £1000 - a pricing structure that clung on for years) - we would't even fit a recent MS operating system on that!

 

Oh & I also recall people commenting why would anyone need a hard drive greater than 1GB.

 

Ray.

 

 

[Kevin Firth 114]

Ah, I remember my first proper pc was an old 386 SX something or other with a 20Mb hard drive I replaced it with a 386 DX20 which had a 170Mb hard disk and I remember thinking I'd never need anything bigger ever again *fond memories* k

[M31 0]

Prices of ssd's may seem outrageous, but the price of them is around half what they were a year ago.

 

True Ray, SSD's are dropping in price rapidly now, when I bought my third gen 240 GB SSD less than two years back it was over £400, its about £120 ish now, but getting on for 1TB SSD's are still very very expensive though, its the way of the future though and in a few years we will laugh at what we paid for older tech HD's and SSD's today.

[M31 0]

Ah, I remember my first proper pc was an old 386 SX something or other with a 20Mb hard drive I replaced it with a 386 DX20 which had a 170Mb hard disk and I remember thinking I'd never need anything bigger ever again *fond memories* k

 

Kevin my first PC was a 386 DX 33 MHz with a massive 4MB of ram back in 1991 I think it was, before that I was using an Amiga 500 with 512kb of ram that I upgraded to 1MB and that just ran off floppies! it was the computer that got me into Flight Sims though, it came as a bundle that I bought for just a data base for all my music LP's and CD's but part of the bundle included the Bob Dinnerman FA/18 Interceptor and to get sound I had to buy that expensive 512kb ram upgrade, but oh wow I was hooked, after buying a joystick too I was all of a sudden flying under the San Francisco bridge inverted , defending the US from multiple Mig's and doing aircraft carrier landings, I was running an Amiga version of Flight Sim 2 on this as well.

 

Then I got to hear about Falcon 3 and saw what were then stunning screen shots in magazines (no internet back then) and sold the Amiga to get my first PC the afore mentioned 386DX 33 ... I pulled it to bits and saw how it worked and shortly afterwards built my first PC that was the state of the art of the time 486 DX2 66 MHz ... and I've been building my own PC's for Flight Sim ever since.

 

Sorry for hi-jacking your thread Phil, hope you have everything running sweet now with your hybrid drive.

 

Cheers.

[phil white 274]

Thanks M31,

 

The Hybrid drive is working well indeed. (Glad i got this when i did as the price increased by about £30 two days later). FSX loads very quickly compared to my last pc (about 20 seconds compared to 2 minutes with my old hardware) which can only be a good point.

As for running FSX and all the add ons it's much better all round, smooth frame rates and visually better too. I like using Aerosoft Airbus X and just downloaded the upgrade to Airbus X Extended this afternoon which allows me to run both versions. I also downloaded a sound set for the Extended version from Aerosoft and this is free so i am well chuffed.

 

I fancy getting PMDG 737NGX next.

[M31 0]

WTG Phil, looks like you are totality focused in FSX

[flybytes 34]

Have been wanting to upgrade my laptop's 320GB hard drive, but all the larger capacity drives exceeded the 7mm thickness imposed by the mounting chassis.

Recently, 500GB drives are available which are 7mm thick, but by now was considering a hybrid drive and have discovered the Seagate Momentus XT 500GB - 7mm thick which is now fitted into the laptop. This hybrid drive can be found on ebay for as low as £55.

I used the Acronis True Image HD software to copy all the data from the old drive to the Momentus which it did without a hitch, saving me the agony of reloading Win 7 and FSX and provides a complete backup of data.

As far as FSX goes there does not appear to be any discernible difference, pretty much as Kevin Firth found, but Win 7 seems much snappier & Paintshop Pro loads in less than half the time it did with the non-hybrid drive.

I think that for maximum speed gain the hybrid should be used for your operating system as it consists of many small files which are repeatedly used, rather than for FSX where slow loading times are usually found in the large photo-scenery files, which,as Kevin points out are too large to benefit from the relatively small ssd cache.

Ray.

[J G 927]

Interesting topic... It looks like a great thing for the O/S with perhaps an SSD for FSX.

 

Being a Hybrid, I assume you get more bytes per gallon?

[phil white 274]

I am considering getting another. The 2tb is now available for £93.00 so will be getting one. FSX boots in about 10 seconds and runs well on these drives. I have no plans at the moment to buy an SSD due to the high cost, stupidly high if you ask me.