OK first off FSX is not on the SSD it's on a regular SATA 1TB slave drive. My OS is on the SSD and it's a 60GB Nova 2.

The difference is simply stunning. I did a total fresh install of Vista 64bit on the SSD and the only tuning I have done is to diable indexing, defrag and all the fancy aero effects.

The 1TB slave has all my stuff on it. Installed FSX, ran it, installed SP1, ran it, installed SP2 ran it etc then defragged the drive and then maxed everything in the FSX control panel just to see what happened. So it's running on 1920x1080 with everything set the Ultra then I turned the mesh rez even higher and set the frames to unlimited. I have not run any FSX tuning software it's just stock. I was amazed to find it running totally smoothly. No stuttering at all. You can see from my specs below it's nothing uber special either.

I then installed UTX Europe and TrafficX and FS Water Configurator and still as smooth as silk and it looks superb. I am really enjoying playing this now. Before it was a balancing act between middle detail and smooth frames but now it just flies at max detail. OK so low over Heathrow I get stutters but that's to be expected but just normal flying it's superb.

With the price of SSDs now so cheap you should do it. A 60GB is ideal for just the OS then stick everything else on a secondary drive. I still can't believe what a difference it's made.

Yeah i bought a second drive just for my FSX install...SATA 1TB 6Gb/s. I don't have my OS on an SSD yet though.

Recently got a new rig: O/S on a 120Gb SSD and my flight sims on a 240 SSD - loving the load up times!

An SSD is bliss for every PC or laptop, whether you are a MSFS user or not.

With Linux from a SSD, I'd probably have a five sencond bootup time...

Yes load times are amazing. From sleep my pc is up and running in seconds. Definitely worth the money.

I use a small SSD for the OS (Win7Pro-64) and a slightly larger one (128gb) dedicated to FSX.

What I've found though is that I needed more storage, but I didn't want to compromise fast load times by reverting back to large capacity HDD. At least not wholly...

Instead I've come across a neat option that allows me to load up all the custom skins I care to without sacrificing game play. Aircraft selection screens can be slow to load, but overall system and sim performance seems unaffected by the option as I have implemented it. It's a compromise, but works well enough for me.

Here's how it works: I've simply created a new "simobjects\airplanes" folder on a normal HDD, and moved every folder from the original FSX "simobjects\airplanes" to the new one.

I then added the following line to the [Main] section of the fsx.cfg file :


Notice the quotes around the path statement. They are not strictly necessary if your path has absolutely no space characters in it. (you may have other similar lines, just adjust the number of the line above to be one more than the last existing line)

This tells FSX where to find my airplane files.

In order to ensure things run as expected, I install any new aircraft directly into FSX as the directions usually inform me. Once I test the aircraft's functionality within FSX, I move the new aircraft's folders (only the "simobjects\airplanes\<airplane>" entries) to my standard HDD's "\simobjects\airplanes" folder.

So now I have the operating system on SSD; FSX's core files and scenery on SSD, and my wide range of add-on aircraft installed into FSX but the aircraft folders themselves are stored on a large capacity HDD. It works very well indeed.

* Note: I did not come up with this idea, I found it via Google while looking for storage options for FSX.

Excellent idea. I can see how that works.

In fact I guess you could have 1 SSD for the OS, a 2nd SSD for the FSX core files and then a normal SATA for the main FSX folder.

Vista doesn't maintain SSD performance as well as 7 which is why I only keep the basic OS on there as I wish to minimise the add/delete of data but I may well try your suggestion with a cheap second SSD some time.

That's the same trick used for Steam games so that you can have some games on SSD and others on HDD. Didn't think of breaking up ONE game (FSX) though!

Is it possible to get the benefits of greater speed in game, simply by installing FSX to an SSD but leaving the OS where it is on a monster 1.5 TB HD? I don't want to start from scratch with OS, etc. I was thinking of simply uninstalling all of my FSX files, adding an SSD, and reinstalling FSX, ORBX, REX, etc. etc. to the SSD. Will I get a faster game even if PC boot up time is not faster than before?

That's exactly the setup I opted for with my new Crucial. However, it was an easy move for me because I had my HDD partitioned into three: one for the OS only, one for programs only, and one for data only. I moved the entire programs partition (containing all my games including FSX) onto the SSD.

I immediately noticed faster program start-ups in general, and the elimination of stutters in FSX in particular. Scratch the requirement to defrag (ever), and you've got a great combo of reasons to get a SSD.

I plan on getting a smaller SSD for my OS only (Win 7) sometime in the future. I'm in no great hurry, though, since my optimized boot-up times are very reasonable. It's the gaming where my need for speed is greatest.