Not as crazy as it sounds! I run my FlightSimX installation with a load of scenery off a 200Gb partition on my HDD - the idea is that keeping it alone and away from all the other stuff keeps that portion of the disk less fragged up - trouble is, I've just run out of space. I could just increase the partition size, but I've been toying with the idea of using a separate HDD for FSX anyway, and started thinking whether a 10,000RPM 300GB Velociraptor would be worth it? However, if I'm spending upto ~£100, is there a reasonbly sized SSD that I should be considering? I'm still stuck with SATAII, I just wondered whether there might be some older SSDs around for a (relative) song? Failing that, what's the fastest 250GB-ish read speed for less than £100?
I'd just get a newish, Sata 3 drive crucial M4 64Gb (or the new corsair drives also look pretty good) for example, stick your OS, flight sim and a few other of your most commonly used programs on it, and then at least when you upgrade to to a board with sata 3 you'll be able to utilize it, until then you'll still get a noticeable speed increase over a stand alone mechanical drive even on sata 2
My FSX installation needs around 250GB, so 64GB ain't no good. Can you get anything on 64GB? Windows7 alone will fit, but while a lot of the applications you install can be shoved off to a large, cheap, storage drive, a lot can't. Isn't 64GB a bit limiting?
Yeah, a 60/64GB HDD might be fine for a pretend computer (laptop/netbook thing), but as you need to leave ~25% free space (& that's without considering increasing the OP) then it'd be really limiting. So it's a complete non-starter as SSDs just aren't that cheap - if you had ~£450 then you might be starting to get near to the kind of necessary budget. Now the big question is how are the FSX scenary files read? - simply that 'if' they're highly sequential then you're likely to get basically as good results from sticking a ~300GB partition at the beginning of a 1TB Samsung F3 for a fraction of the cost... if that's workable, you 'could' then look at getting a ~60/64/80GB SSD for your OS & a few apps with the rest of the money which will speed things up more generally, but that's another idea that's separate from your original question.
Ah crap, well that rules an SSD out of the equation, windows 7 fits easy peasy on a 64Gb SSD I have it on mine, plus a lot of programs for benchmarking etc and i still have 76 Gb free, but yeah I'm fresh out of idea's, I think the smaller capacity raptor drives aren't worth the money, only the 600Gb version is even remotely fast enough, but i think its about £160. Get a samsung f3 1tb perhaps? other than that I'm fresh out of idea's, although i'm sure there plenty of other people that can help you thats insane though 250Gb? I have FS 2004, and i don't think it needs anything like that much space (hence why assumed a 64Gb drive would be sufficient)
If you just get an SSD for windows and default program it'll speed things up. One thing that really will speed things up is having the page file on a SSD, as I was told in another thread, all software uses page file, even if you have 48GB of RAM, it'll still use page file (its restrictions built into the software, although if you have 48GB you can just make a RAM drive and whack the page file on that, but I digress). So basically, even if the software isn't on the SSD it'll still gain a boost from a SSD being in the system
my install of FSX is only 13GB. even with a ton of add on scenery and aircraft i cant imagine it going over 100GB. what the hell did you DO?
In the same league you mean? No, but if you're considering buying a premium 'performance' HDD you'd kick yourself if you didn't consider an SSD - as it is, even for SATAII it seems they're still too expensive. So, not in the same league, no!
I run 2 80GB SSD's, one for OS and one for games. Installing games takes seconds, as does loading times, but FPS, ect, isn't effected.