Installed SSD for P3D V4 - Wow factor!

[Mikenor]

After living through forever loading times for my sim, finally decided to install a dedicated ssd for my p3d v4, activesky, trackir, and am blown away by not only the loading speed, but the increased performance and fps in my sim. I am now getting over 60 fps in the Spit with mirror activated at the KEGE airport gate and all other Orbx sceneries - was getting very jerky performance with mirror activated and inferior frames before the upgrade. Bonanza is also smooth as silk and that is A2A's heaviest aircraft in my opinion. I wasn't expecting any performance boost in my sim, only faster loading times, so that was a huge bonus for me. Just thought I'd share just in case anyone else was thinking about changing. The best part - picked up the 512GB drive on sale for $119 Canadian!

Mike

[Hobart Escin]

Oh heck ya, a new SSD makes all the difference in the world for the overall P3D experience. I too just recently upgraded both my operating system and P3D to a new SSD installation after having used a mechanical tilt-o-whirl since the dawn of personal computing. Solid state storage changed my life, lol, and P3D went from taking about 4.5 minutes to load (Orbx heavy scenery installed) to taking about 15 seconds now to come up to the load scenario screen. And the whole sim experience is SO much smoother all around. I initially tried installing P3D by itself to my SSD whilst leaving my OS on my mechanical drive, but loading performance was still sluggish. After installing Windows 10 and P3D together on my new SSD, the difference was like night and day, woof. Why didn't I make the jump sooner!

Honestly, mechanical hard drives are still good for cheap storage though (a 1tb unit here in the USA can generally be had for $50 or cheaper). But for the operating system and apps, an SSD is just so worth it on every conceivable level. I paid $95 U.S. for a 512gb Sandisk SSD from B & H Photo, and can't recommend these folks enough.

I believe that Western Digital now owns Sandisk and is going to completely phase-out all of their mechanical hard drive production within the next couple of years. Times are a changin', lol, but for the better.

[pilotman767]

Just reading both of your posts, a bunch of light bulbs went on in my head. For over a year, I've been trying to figure out why my P3DV4 performance seems bottle-necked, even though CPU and GPU usage is nowhere near 100%. I originally thought it was a game engine limitation (thought "I guess this game is really suited for 30FPS"). I have a resource monitor on-screen at all times. The bottleneck was caused by the one thing I wasn't able to actively monitor...disk access. (My P3D install is on a RAID_0 hard drive array. Great sequential performance, terrible random performance.) This explains every problem I've been having!

[Gabe777]

Well if an SSD blows your mind, stay away from the M.2 PCie nvme drives.

They should come with a health warning...

[AlexRed]

SSD makes that much difference eh? Now I'm kicking myself even more for not getting one when I was upgrading my PC... Does anyone have an SSD that doesn't have the OS installed on it? Do the other apps installed still run fast even if the OS isn't on it?

[WB_FlashOver]

I went from RAID0 on HDD's to a single SSD then to RAID0 SSD. For grins n giggles I did some benchmarks on each upgrade.

Times are a mostly stock FSX. 1st sim launch after reboot to main menu.
--Drive-------Main Menu
RAID0 HDD - 85 sec
Single SSD - 17.46 sec
RAID0 SSD - 16.0 sec

I did not have P3Dv4 when I did the earlier tests. My load time for it on RAID0 SSD is 49 seconds with lots of Orbx and FreeMeshX. I cannot imagine what it would be on an HDD. I know a faster system would improve time a bunch as well.

SSD makes that much difference eh? Now I'm kicking myself even more for not getting one when I was upgrading my PC... Does anyone have an SSD that doesn't have the OS installed on it? Do the other apps installed still run fast even if the OS isn't on it?

Most often one puts the OS on the SSD so that everyday operations are faster. I'm running my OS on an NVMe SSD and most all operations are much faster due to the OS being able to function without restriction.

If you do upgrade, take the time to benchmark before and after. Pick your favorite airport with consistent weather and plane and log the FPS. Clock load times including spawning in. It is important to check each load time after a fresh reboot. My sim always loads slowest on the first launch after a reboot. Consecutive sim launches are quicker. Check FPS during flights over specific areas. I'm a firm believer that without recording data you will not know for sure just what the improvement is. It's also fun to see the numbers and be able to tell percentage of improvement. And most of all.... it is critically important to be able to "justify" the expense to the wife

Cheers
Roger

[Hobart Escin]

SSD makes that much difference eh? Now I'm kicking myself even more for not getting one when I was upgrading my PC... Does anyone have an SSD that doesn't have the OS installed on it? Do the other apps installed still run fast even if the OS isn't on it?

I initially had my OS on my mechanical HDD and installed P3Dv4 separately on my new SSD. Performance of P3D was not that great as the computer still had to access files on the mech HDD during a simming session. Putting both the OS AND P3D on the same SSD did the trick though, and I would personally recommend this setup. Remember, keeping your old mech HDD in the loop at all is going to cost you performance, even if P3D is on a SSD by itself. The only scenario in which you could install P3D on a separate drive that wouldn't hinder performance would be two SSDs configured in a RAID array as mentioned above, with the OS on one SSD and P3D on the other.

[AerialShorts]

Well if an SSD blows your mind, stay away from the M.2 PCie nvme drives.

This right here! SSDs are fantastic, but if your motherboard has a M.2 connector, it is wicked for performance.

I have Windows and P3D on an M.2 drive and no longer get discernible pauses when loading scenery. It is nice.

One other thing I found when I was troubleshooting single-pass rendering for VR is deleting the shader cache and letting P3D regenerate it. That’s recommended after GPU upgrades and even driver upgrades. I can’t say for certain that is what really sped up my system because I also ran a P3D utility in the main P3D directory called DeleteGeneratedFiles (on recommendation from L-M tech support). A heads-up though - that disconnected all of the A2A aircraft and I had to reinstall them. It also deleted my P3D configuration settings and would have deleted all my control assignments had I not been using FSUIPC. As was, I still had to run the FSUIPC installer but it remembered my configuration. Oddly, I didn’t need to reinstall AccuFeel. But running that utility did lead to a bit of reinstall and reconfigure.

But it totally transformed load times. I would wait for a good couple of minutes or longer to get P3D to load up to the flight configuration menu. Now it’s 10-20 seconds. I also used to get occasional crashes to desk but so far, not a one. It made a huge difference but if anyone does it, there is some work ahead to get things back the way you like it. What it does is restores P3D to a fresh installed state.