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.

Might have better returns if you put your OS into the SSD rather than the sim. Your game may be slightly faster, but don't they go through the OS anyway, so having it on a HDD might still be a bottleneck? Do people RAID their games drives or their OS drives? Same principle, I think. Then again I just got an SSD recently so I may be totally off.

NineLives, looking at your spec made me really sure that it's this lousy GeForce 210 card that slows down the FSX so much; my setting is on the low region, but it still stutters here and there. Anywhere in the USA is a no fly zone for me. You got me interested in SSD. Maybe it can help a little. Any suggestion on what brand to buy (with estimated price)? I'm totally illiterate about this SSD thingy. Thanks.

I just bought a 60GB SSD that'll be here on Tuesday. My plan of attack is to put FSX, and only FSX on the SSD and leave my w7-64bit OS on my 1TB HDD.

Need to upgrade my video card at some point, but I'm hoping I'll see better performance from the SSD.

System specs in my sig.

@magicalflyer Everything on the secondary drive still has to go through the OS so the faster you can make the OS work the more efficiently the cpu can deal with the game data.

In an ideal world we would have everything on SSD but prices don't allow many people to buy large SSD drives so for now the best option is to do what I did and stick the OS on the SSD and then get a large second drive for the games etc.

Of course there is nothing to stop you getting one SSD for the OS, a second SSD for your fav game then everything else on a standard drive. As prices come down we will move over totally to SSD as we did from ATA to SATA.

As for types of SSD I went for a 60GB Nova 2 as my motherboard doesn't support the faster 3 series so check your mobo rating first. In the real world there isn't a heap of difference anyway. Stick to a known make. Corsair make very decent drives for example.

SSD is a bit like your USB memory stick. It's solid state, very energy efficient and totally silent. It's also light and takes up little room and gives off no heat so you can stack them in a small space and this makes them ideal for laptops.

SSDs degrade with time and Vista lacks the ability to read/write the data efficiently unlike Windows 7 and 8 so in theory performance will start to drop off with Vista after a while depending on how it's used. But it shouldn't be a problem with later versions of Windows. (Google SSD TRIM to read about this)

Yes, but -and correct me if wrong- The parts of the OS that a given program must go 'through' aren't on the HDD;they're in RAM aren't they? That's what the boot-up sequence is, yes? It's loading the OS into RAM.

You guys got me into buying two SSDs

Just a small question: Is it possible to copy the FSX files to the new SSD and to somehow fix the maybe broken reg files?
My plan is to copy the whole FSX folder to the new SSD and also change the device letter to the same as it was on the FSX/HDD.

Is this possible or do I have to install FSX + addon again?

Thanks in advance

Yes, but not all of it (unless you force it to), and then there's the swap file (unless you disable it (highly not recommended) or create a RAM disk for it - which, if I had 8 gigs, I would do using 2 or 3 of those gigs). Plus it still has to be loaded into RAM from your HDD. Loading it from a SSD would be much faster.

The primary rationale for my decision to put FSX, instead of my OS, on a SSD was this: unless you optimize the scenery files with a 'name defrag' on your HDD, you're going to get stutters every time FSX has to seek, read, and load a new set of scenery files as you're going along in the sim. When I put FSX on my SSD, those stutters were eliminated.

SSDs are ideal for 'read' operations as opposed to 'write' operations, because a lot of 'write' operations will reduce their lifetime (which wouldn't be a big concern if they were priced like HDDs). The OS does a lot of 'write' operations (especially thru the swap file, although the swap file can easily be moved to your HDD).

The SSD I plan on eventually getting for my OS only, will be about 60 gigs. 60 gigs is under a hundred dollars over here. I can live with that price in return for the extra speed.



That's what I did. I changed the drive letter on my FSX HDD partition, to free it up, and then assigned it to my SSD after the transfer. Not a single hiccup, and I never touched the registry. (I'm assuming you gave FSX its own HDD or partition, and didn't install it with all your other programs.)

After nearly 10 attempts of migrating my win7 installation to my new ssd I gave up this weekend and installed everything from scratch.
It cost me a whole day to install FSX and all addons I own but WOW!
My first thought after my first take off was something the like: How on earth could this be FSX?!
It's so damn smooth now its nearly unbelievable Everyone who is really playing FSX a lot just HAS to put it on a SSD. One of my best hardware purchases the last couple of years!

Glad you found the same. You will be surprised how far you can turn the sliders up now. Putting the frame rate to unlimited helps on many systems too.

I set my slider to 30fps in FSX and via Nvidia Inspector I set the VSync refresh rate at "1/2 from my monitor" (60Hz).
I read this at avsim at for me this works also really great. But I will test your advice this evening to look whats better / smoother

It doesn't always work but it does on a lot of systems. Instead of forcing a frame rate it lets the sim decide.

There is one other thing you should try. I have used it for ages and it works for me. You only do it once and that's it.

http://www.venetubo.com/fsx.html

This inspects the CFG file and sends you a revised one based upon your hardware. It also includes a link on the results page to their own excellent FSX frame limiter (independent of the FSX one) program which you simply use to run FSX in place of the normal shortcut. (Please note that the location you extract the frame limiter to is where you must keep it so I suggest you extract to the place you would normallt run FSX from.)

The tweaker plus the frame limiter produce impressive results. Read the instructions very carefully! Your original CFG file is not within FSX but is found in (<main computer drive>/users/<yourname>/appdata/roaming/microsoft/fsx) There may be 2 cfg files one in lower case and one in upper case. It's the one in lower case you replace. (hover your mouse over it and it's a CFG file not a text document).

Worth a try

I also installed FSX on my SSD and this is the best thing happened to this sim in years.