Running DCS on an SSD? Thoughts? Lets discuss!

Is it worth it to run DCS on an SSD, or is the performance increase negligible? I am considering getting a SAMSUNG EVO 960 m.2 250gb to run DCS on.

If you have nothing constructive to say, Don't!!!!! I do not want any DCS flaming on this thread please.

Yes.

Flame!! Flame!! Hahahaha!!

Sorry, couldn't resist! While I don't have any hard data on DCS performance or loading times on SSD vs HDD, I would still heartily recommend getting an SSD for your OS and other games. My preferred method is a separate 250GB SSD for OS and some programs like Photoshop and then a separate SSD for games. Most games improve loading times on an SSD but again, no hard proof for DCS specifically but it should benefit as well. There have been a few threads/posts mentioning SSDs eliminate micro-stutters but that has been quite a while ago and ED may or may not have broken any such functionality in the meantime. Even if it does nothing for DCS compared to a traditional 7200rpm HDD, an SSD will improve your boot times and will improve loading times on your other games.

Also remember that SSD performance degrades a bit the fuller it gets; most advise not to fill an SSD past 50-60% capacity.

I think one thing to consider is the price difference between SATA/m.2/NVMe SSDs. While there is a measurable difference between a SATA SSD an a NVMe SSD in terms of performance, you'll probably only shave off a few milliseconds on loading time and are therefore not worth the extra cost in terms of bang-for-your-buck, but still, if you have the cash, why not?

SATA link in an M.2 form factor is a better buy. NVMe is better but a tiny, tiny bit and it's not worth the cost. It's 150-200% the price for a Samsung EVO NVMe over a SATA link. I'd much rather invest the money into capacity than the link speed. This would change if I was building a server or graphical workstation. It wouldn't hurt to buy a motherboard that can do both links over M.2 though.

I have a Samsung M.2 NVMe sata and a while back I decided to test various games for loading times vs a WD Black mechanical drive. I was disappointed to say the least. Of the games I tried only one was faster and one actually loaded quicker than the SSD.

I didn't try DCS but I guess you can draw your own conclusions from my results. Some games are quicker (not by much) but knowing which ones that's another thing altogether.

Fast SSD's are nice to have,especially for the O/S but all my games now sit on a RAID 0 (3 x WD Blacks).

yes

Am I reading this wrong? It seems like you're saying that the SSD was faster than the HDD?


Here's a few comparison videos



Clearly SSDs are faster than HDDs and NVMe is faster than SATA on the games shown. Other games may be different.

Dear Grumpy, the answer is absoeffin'lutely YES.

To show you how much "yes", I made an experiment especially for you, since I've got two DCS installs, both updated to today's OB spec, one on my good old 7200rpm SATA HDD, and one on budget-class SSD, with budget-level read&write times. The experiment was as follows:
a) system reboot;
b) launch the DCS from desktop shortcut;
c) when it loads navigate to Nevada Instant cold start mission for the Spitfire (I chose Nevada for its highest RAM demand) and load it;
d) measure the total time required between hitting the DCS shortcut and getting into the cockpit, ready to hit "fly" button, using stopwatch.

Result on HDD - 9 minutes 39 seconds;
Result on budget SSD - 1 minute 35 seconds.

Let that sink in .

Granted, both loadings required the game to rebuild terrain metashader files, which I purged before, so they were somewhat longer than usual, but even with metashaders ready the relative difference would be the same anyway.

Not to mention great reduction of disc-read-related stutters during the flight, as DCS is programmed to load scenery assets all the time. Purchasing this poor-man's brand SSD was the second most successful investment (after the gfx card) I made for this sim.

Sorry Ice,I didn't put that very well. The M.2 SSD was beaten by the mechanical drive with at least one of the games I tried. When you look at their transfer rates the SSD should have romped home but it didn't.

Now looking at Art_J's result then DCS does load faster and by some margin. I'll test it on mine as well to see if I can replicate the results.

Mechanical drive - To go from the login screen to the UI was 1 min 4 seconds. To select a mission and get to the 'fly' screen was 3 min 7 seconds. (total 4 min 11 seconds) - a lot quicker than Art_J managed with the same spec drive but I'm running a RAID 0 set-up.

M.2 SSD - To go from the login screen to the UI was 14 seconds. To select a mission and get to the 'fly' screen was 1 min 30 seconds. (total 1 min 44 seconds). Art_J's budget SSD beat my M.2. I know there are a lot of variables that can effect speed results but even so,I'm less and less impressed with M.2 for certain things.


I'll stick by what I said earlier though. Some games load faster,some marginally faster and the odd one that is slower.

Okay, just to make sure I understand it correctly, you tried a bunch of games on M.2 SSD vs HDD and in one or two games, the HDD won. Is that correct? If so, then how many games have you tried? If you tried three and the SSD failed in 2 out of 3, then I can see the disappointment. If you tried 20 and the SSD failed in 2 out of 20, then I don't see the reason for being disappointed. Maybe the two that favored the HDD had other things going for it? Just as some games are CPU-intensive and others are GPU-intensive.

A NVMe drive of 500GB capacity costs roughly the same as your 3x WD Black 500GB HDD on RAID 0, so on a cost perspective, wouldn't that be a win for the NVMe anyway?



No argument there! Seems like different games benefit differently from faster storage solutions so the best answer is always "it depends!" However, for the system as a whole, SSDs bring a lot of benefits over HDDs and with a 250GB SATA SSD around the £50-£70 price range, it's a very effective upgrade even for just OS and some select programs and games.

Yes,you have that correct Ice. I tested 4 or 5 games,plus DCS today so not a great number. The results are buried here on Sim HQ somewhere.

So you tested 6 games total, with 2 of them favoring the HDD and 4, including DCS, favoring the SSD. Maybe I read/interpreted this line wrong?


Did you mean you were disappointed by the SSD performance? Or were you disappointed with the games that ended up favoring HDDs? Sorry to be nitpicky but just wanting to be sure I understand what you were trying to say

I was disappointed that the M.2 didn't load quicker with ALL my games. That was why I went with it in the first place. It makes the O/S super quick to use,I just assumed that games would take advantage of the performance too.

It's fast when benchmarked,in the real world it's a different matter but that's the same with a lot of things I guess.

DCS loves an SSD,that's one to add to the list.

Ok,I'm done here

Same thing I tell the missus when she is bugging me to use the sh*tter

Thanks for that clarification Chucky! Sorry I was too slow to get it but just wanted to make sure I understood what you were saying

When I upgraded from SATA to NVMe, I did not bother doing benchmarks because I expected the same results -- some games will benefit, some won't, and even those that do benefit will do so at different degrees. I just contented myself with the thought that I'm giving my games the best hardware to work with and then I just sit back and enjoy playing

my $0.02: I've been running SSDs in my rig for ~7 years now, and not once have I thought "well this was a waste of money." Everything just runs smoother and loads faster. Inclusive of DCS.

That said, moving data around your PC is like moving cars across a road system. A 10 lane highway is ultimately worthless if all those cars need to cram down a single lane road before getting to their destination. Likewise, if your CPU or GPU can't 'crunch' the data it's being handed fast enough, or you don't have enough RAM and your machine is having to fall back to the page file*, an SSDs impact will be minimal, as all it's doing is sending more 'cars into the traffic jam.'

*Arguably, if you are working off of the page file, you will see a decent boost from an SSD, as it's a lot faster at writing data than an HDD. For gaming though, it's still likely not fast enough.

Yep, it's all about eliminating bottlenecks and short of testing every permutation, buying the better hardware just makes more sense. By going from HDD to SSD to NVMe, I've ensured that accessing data from my storage device would be as easy as possible. Note that I still have a HDD and an SSD in my PC even though I have two NVMe drives as well. The OS and programs are on a NVMe, most of my flight sims and priority games are on a NVMe, secondary games are on a SSD, and downloads, documents, movies, pictures, etc. are on a couple of HDDs, so each storage solution has it's own place/function

Moved to SSDs about 5-6 years ago and never really looked back

The only thing I use HDDs for is data storage. I have a 2TB drive in each of my desktop machines and use pairs of them (RAID 1) in my NAS boxes for backup and media servers. Using them 3 of them in a RAID 0 array might be fast but you have tripled the chance of losing all of it since there is no fault tolerance in that arrangement.

True,but all I have on there are games and I back up the drive once a month. The RAID 0 was just an experiment,it's lasted longer than I'd originally intended. I was going to add another drive and add some redundancy but the spare drive I had was 'lent' to my brother who appears to have lost it.

OK, that makes sense. I won't ask how someone loses a disk drive.

Oh I think he knows where it is, he just doesn't want to give it back. He won't be getting any more.

Might need some time to move his "homework" to a new drive

I'm glad this conversation showed up. I was about to comein here an ask about this. I have a four year old Asus laptop. Republic of Gamers model. Nice. But I'd thought I'd give it a little kick in the butt with slightly upgraded video card. Not the integrated one, the the 2GB Nvidea card. The guys who I go to, told me he didn't think it could be done. He said, though, that he could get me a SSD harddrive to replace mine. He thought it was a better use of my money, anyway.
But I wondered if it would help with my gaming. It's really the only reason I want to do the upgrade. Not that it's running badly...just need a little ooomph, you know?
So maybe that and some more RAMM and I can use this thing for a few more years. That's what I was thinking. I'm wondering , now, if it's worth it. He thinks that he can pick up a new 1TB SSD for my unit for about 200 dollars. It's better than paying over 1,000 for a new one. I'm still going back and forth about it.

I have a 1 TB RAID 0 SSD and a 2 TB RAID 0 SSHD - I keep my OS in the SSD and my games in the SSHD, loads very fast P3D and Il-2 , it is better IMO to keep your OS in one drive and games in another.

So I can save some money by getting an external SSHD, instead. Do that and double the memory from 8GB to 16 and I should be really good to go. I think I know what I'm going to go out and buy, today.

Your ROG laptop does not already come with an SSD? Might be useful to check; you may be buying the same item twice. Also look at external GPU setups. Basically, you can buy a full-sized GPU, buy some hardware, merge the two together, and use that to power your pixel-pushing without upgrading your entire laptop. I've only known about this in passing so not sure how viable it is, but might be worth a good research for your case. IMHO, all games will benefit from a good GPU whereas only DCS really insists on 16GB RAM or more.

16 GB RAM is a good thing to have - SSD are really great but too expensive to use for storage and for games that need hundreds of GB of space specially as Windows has a bad habit of using more and more space as the install ages.

"Your ROG laptop does not already come with an SSD?"
You got me thinking! I didn't even know. It's a 1tb Toshiba MQ01ABD100. I googled that and it doesn't seem to be solid state. I'm still researching.

My ROG G75 did not come with an SSD. I replaced the HDD within the first week that I owned it. I would not run a PC without an SSD as the boot drive no matter what I was using it for.

The ROG 75 is what I'm running, too. G750. My hard drive does not appear to be solid state. Just a regular mechanical hard drive, and according to reviews, not a very fast one. Rather than replace the drive, I've gone out and purchased a 500GB, Samsung, portable ssd drive. I'm thinking of moving the flight sims off of my internal hard drive and moving them all over to the ssd. Does this sound like something that's a good idea?

How so? A 16GB kit for desktop runs around £150, a 250GB Samsung 860 EVO is around £70, a 500GB Samsung 850 EVO is around £110. I'd say if you already have 8GB RAM, an SSD is better value for money in terms of performance improvement.


I could be wrong about this, but unless you connect via a USB 3.0 interface, it won't be very fast. Might as well just buy a SSD to install inside your laptop then buy an external drive that has USB 3.0? Not very much experience with laptops, sorry!

you can have an ultra fast SSD but without adequate RAM you will end up with slow performance - 8 GB is what Windows needs to run well and if you have only that, having a browser open while running a game will leave you with 4 GB to play with, 16 GB is what you need.

I have no idea how DCS runs with extra RAM, but I suppose it is the same as Il-2 and P3D, this is me right now making a skin



I can run P3D or Il-2 with the free RAM I have - with 8 GB you slow down your PC.

I'm no expert, Tom, but shouldn't the system make-do with what you have? I agree that 16GB RAM is sweet to have, but with current RAM prices and assuming the user already has 8GB RAM to start with, my point is that buying an SSD would probably give you better results than buying a 16GB RAM kit.

if what you want is better performance - better with more RAM , unless you have a Notebook that can't have more RAM added, then swapping the HD for an SSD and using the old one as an external is the way to go.

everything now is more expensive as we need not 4 GB to run a 32 bit flight sim but 32 GB RAM to run a 64 bit one.

"could be wrong about this, but unless you connect via a USB 3.0 interface, it won't be very fast."
No, you're not wrong. Without a 3.0 USB it would be kind of pointless. I do have them. I was told to look inside the usb port and if they are blue, then its 3.0. They are all blue. And I'm putting 8 GB more of RAMM in there, too. Hopefully, I'll have added a couple of years more of life to the old girl. And that's sad, isn't it. 4 years is old in computer life.
And the drive wasn't all that expensive. I picked it up on sale at Best Buys for 145 dollars. A whole lot less than it would have cost me to put a new internal drive, in there.

Indeed, I'm not saying more RAM is not better, all I'm saying is that for the cost, an SSD is a better buy assuming the user has 8GB RAM to start with, at least IMHO.

I wonder if how many games or flight sims out there have significantly better performance with 16GB/32GB/64GB RAM compared to 8GB? How much of that is due to better resources/hardware available and how much of that is due to better software coding? Basically, I expect most software to benefit from better resources/hardware such as more RAM or an SSD but good software should still work acceptably with 4-8GB RAMand an HDD and bad software would *NEED* more resources/hardware due to poor coding.

No, it isn't! But then I'm a desktop guy and can upgrade parts individually, improve airflow, etc. A laptop is under more stress if nothing but because all those parts are in close proximity to each other and are subject to more heat. I hope your new upgrades gives you the performance you want! Good luck!

Tell that to adobe...

what you are asking is if needing 32 GB RAM to run well is indicative that DCS is poorly optimized ?

I have no idea if it is.

the only reason why I have 32 GB is for skin making and that because of my 8-12 GB templates - but for 1-3 GB templates 8 GB (on top of 8 GB for Win10) is enough.

Dealing with pictures and videos is different from playing video games, no? Nice try.



Indeed, it is just a theory I am putting forward and speaking broadly; I don't really care to test it just for DCS.

the requirements to run DCS well are steep - if it because of the amount of detail that was added or because of poor optimization is a moot point, the fact is that you need 32 GB RAM and an SSD and a 1080 to run it.

I'm not sure if it's the amount of detail. I just took the F-4 Phantom for a few passes of NYC at 1,000-1,500ft AGL, 35-40fps over the busy areas and high 40s to mid-50s once passed most of the buildings and this was on a 5896x1080 resolution. RAM usage never went past 50% on my 16GB setup, 980Ti. Whether or not we can do anything about it is not the point of the discussion.

"I just took the F-4 Phantom for a few passes of NYC at 1,000-1,500ft AGL"

Hooold on there, one dargone minute, Bobaluuie! (That was Quickdraw McDraw). F4 Phantom...New York City? Not DCS, I'm assuming. What sim?

LOL, sorry about that Pooch. This was in XP11, whatever version is latest at this point. I just took it up for a spin to see how it taxes my computer and I figured I'd get good building density flying over NYC and right over Central Park

When the system runs out of RAM, it starts using the hard drive. Problem is, even with SSDs, on-load/off load of data from the hard drive is still slower than RAM.

I've seen this play out where I work; I work with and analyse large data-sets, and my machine was upgraded to 16GB when I noted 8GB was too slow (and saw windows consistently using 100% of it, while the CPU was at less than a quarter usage).

A few months later, some new folks joined my team and got laptops with 8GB. IT had since taken the stance that they weren't shelling out for upgrades because "if they run out of RAM, the SSDs will kick in and act as more RAM."

In practice, their machines are a LOT slower than mine once we get into the thick of a busy work day, and lots of items are open and in active use. Some folks now even have newer machines with nicer CPUs; they still have the same problem.

Oh yeah! SSD, baby! I moved DCS over to the new hard drive last night. I just ran it. I'm more impressed than I expected to be. Holy smokes. I'm still a bit shocked at how quickly it started. I'm not exaggerating when I tell you that I could have gotten up while it was loading, made my self a sandwich, gotten a drink, come back...and still have it loading! Because I've done it. The only thing that took any time at all, with the new ssd, was when it was loading terrain data. And even that was a fraction of what it used to take.
I'm really surprised that it made that much of a noticeable difference. But not just starting faster. I ran a mission that always froze the screen. The F-15, intercept quick mission. It would actually start frozen. Then I'd get mini-freezes through the mission. Not this time. Started immediately. Ran flawlessly. Was firing missles and there were explosions and it didn't even burp. I wasn't expecting the diference to be this dramatic.
And I'm still only using 8GB's. Haven't added more memory, yet. Doesn't even look like I have to, now, but I'm doing it anyway.
I'm looking forward to putting all of my flight sims on the ssd.

Is this the first time you've used an SSD, Pooch? Well, welcome to the club and it's nice to see you getting stoked about it

AgressorBLUE, I agree with you re:RAM and IIRC, it is the pagefile that will be used once RAM is used up? But then you are talking about some productivity or video work where the large files do take up a lot of (RAM) space. Games are or should be a different matter entirely, with one article even citing that games that demanded more RAM were due to poor coding more than anything, such as one of the Batman games. Productivity requirements are different because you can demand for more resources as it directly translates to better workflow and possibly more income from time/resources being utilized more efficiently. Gaming requirements are different because it's a hobby, a pastime for the customer so asking for 32GB RAM in a business setting won't really work with asking for 32GB RAM for a hobby.

SSD on my entire rig now and its smooth as silk....

I have Release on SSD and OB on HDD because I'm not made of solid state non-volatile memory (or am I?). HDD is not that bad. It does crunch noticably slower on the HDD but it's just a feel and few seconds thing.

You do realise that not only did you just resurrect a 4 year old thread but that your answer(s) have nothing to do with the thread at all?

That is a bot advertising malware.

Yeah, I guessed as much and I was a little hostile in my original reply, hence the self edit. Admin were notified.

I will remove it...thanks for the heads up