SSD Drives?

[tonymadge]

Well I am happy with my set up and realise the only way of moving things along is an SSD drive for the op system and FS9 etc, read that some are better than others and some even cause stuttering!!
I thought that a nice new SSD C drive and Windows 7 might be the way to go, until I saw how bloody expensive SSD drives are
Anyone use them and any pitfalls, besides price

[TSR2]

Hi Tony, I've been looking into them too... well, until the car went TU last weekend. A friend of mine has one as a C drive, but recently swapped it over to be his FS drive. So boot times are now back to normal, but FS is bloody quick. His thinking behind this is that the FS drive doesn't change that often, in terms of the files on it... it only gets added to, rarely rebuilt. The C drive is constantly being written to by the OS, Web browser, AV, etc etc and this is where SSD's can fall down. Constant writing and re writing on the disk can cause the memory cells to fail over time, although modern SSD's are much better than early ones. The Corsair stuff gets good reviews and comes with a 2 year warranty. The one I was looking at buying was this.. http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/128GB-Co ... (SSD)-S128

the Samsung drives also get a good name and now also have a 2 year warranty. If your going to spend stupid money on one of the super fast ones, i.e. over 300MB/s rememberyou'll be limited by SATA II (3.0Gb/s) interface. TBH if your getting the mid 200MB/s read, thats more than double the best you'll get from a standard spinning disk and should be more than adequate.

Optimum solution is to have 2 SSD's, one for OS and one for FS, but the OS one may burn out more quickly than the FS one... but they would bothe be warrantied for 2 years, so probably not a problem.

If you want stupid performance, stripe 3 of them in a RAID 0 set

[TSR2]

oh... and never ever do anything other than a "Quick format" on an SSD and NEVER defragment them

[tonymadge]

Cheers Ben, I had heard that defrag is a no no. I will think about this and when prices drop a bit I fancy one or two of them as you suggest
Tony

[Sl4yer]

I read a review somewhere. Launching FSX to menu, about 20 seconds. Hitting Go to ready to fly (with VFR scenery) about 22 seconds! Could do with some of these, but they're prohibitively expensive at the moment.

I'd avoid the first generation ones (better safe than sorry, although Crucial's were relatively cheap), and I wouldn't bother with the extra expense for FS9 - it's tiny compared to FSX.

James