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