FSX on SSD drive - preliminary results

Well, my preliminary, not-very-scientific, eye-witness results are back and the story is good, so far. While I am seeing lots of fragmentation on the new SSD drive that I now use for FSX, loading times have improved anywhere from 30 to 40 percent at least (and that's with some added gigabytes of terrain installed).

The more important non-scientific observation, though, is the significant reduction of "the stutters" which I attribute to the much lower read access times on the SSD (~ 0.2 ms) compared to the traditional hard drives which are anywhere from 5 to 12 ms (for some older disks).

I'll report more results as I see them. One other consideration to be made here, though, is that this generation of SDDs is still "the slow one" - there's a new one coming out (at higher price tags, though, so it might be directed to enthusiast-simmer levels and above, for the moment), with double the existing read and write abilities. The future's interesting, to say the least!

PS. I am waiting on Diskeeper corporation - they have promised me a license of their new Hyperfast product which integrates with the main Diskeeper 2009 application and allows SSDs extended lifespan and faster performance. Testing of Hyperfast will commence shortly!

New experiment: FSX on SSD drive

I had to place an order to an online computer store a couple days ago as a request from my not-so-computer-literate godmother for (here it comes!) - a VCR player (she still has lots of old video tapes that she likes to record on and watch).

Since I couldn't find any model worth mentioning around the local stores (they wanted to charge >100 Euros for crappy models because they could!), I decided to shop around, so I found one on PixMania that seemed half-way decent.

Obviously, being a consumer-nut, I couldn't stop from noticing the first-page "fire-sale" (uh huh!?) of OCZ's latest SSD (solid state drive) - namely, a hard disk without mechanical components. 30GB for E 59.95 - not a bad deal, I thought, so I ordered one.

It arrived today, so I am copying my FSX installation (all 25GB of it) over and renaming the new drive back to G: so the registry will think FSX is in its proper location. From various tests I've read around the net, it's supposed to be a great improvement on loading times (and possibly, on performance, if one flies around in supersonic speeds which require scenery to be loading faster than normal).

I'll report back...