Monday, January 19, 2009

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!

Friday, January 09, 2009

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...