Capacity concerns

[pphibbs]

I’ve purchased a great deal of your scenery add-ons and was excited to try out the new Dutch scenery but even though I have what I would normally consider plenty of space, I don’t have enough to support the new scenery. I fear many might be in my shoes and can’t take advantage of the new scenery. I’ve already had to upgrade from a 1TB system to a 2TB one, just to support all my Orbx scenery. I have FSX, P3DV4 and Xplane11. I will eventually move away from FSX but am still waiting on my favourite plane to be redeveloped for P3d. I’m so glad you are now supporting XPlane as I feel XPlane might represent the future of flight simulation. 

[Dadtom65]

Hi  pphibbs. What with all the new scenery coming I would invest in another 2tb hard drive. Then you would have one for P3D and the other for Xplane. I wouldn’t worry about SSd’s, they are faster and the normal hard drives can take awhile to load but once the sim is loaded it will be fine. Derek.

[styckx]

21 minutes ago, Dadtom65 said:

 I wouldn’t worry about SSd’s

 

Couldn't disagree more.  Mechanical HDD's are old hat.  They are prone to failure at any time and slow.  SSD's life span usually depends solely on the amount of writes written to it which is usually more than anyone could actually come close to achieving. SSD's are more expensive for a reason. They'll last well past the failure date of any mechanical drive.  No more guessing "Is my HDD failing or is it my install"..   The longevity + speed + the comfort of letting go of your anxiety of when your HDD decides to kill itself is well worth the price of admission.

[tigermothpilot]

I have to agree with styckx. When my PC required a rebuild, I installed a 1TB Samsung EVO M2 SSD. I also have a 3TB mechanical HDD. The difference in loading time is phenominal. Also, the reliability factor over mechanical HDDs cannot be ignored or dismissed. Anyone who has had a catastrophic HDD meltdown would agree, I'm sure.

[Triplane]

I just gotta say this just one more time and then I'll shut-up (honest). I agree that the SSD will load quite a bit faster but once loaded there is ABSOLUTELY NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE vs. a 7200 RPM HDD. When you can buy an 8TB HDD for less than USD$200 it makes no sense to me to even consider the SSD option. As far as HDD failures go, in the last 10 years I've  used over 50 HDD's in various boxes and have had ONE failure. The drives in my flight sim box are six years old and still going strong. End of rant..........Doug

[Dadtom65]

3 hours ago, Triplane said:

I just gotta say this just one more time and then I'll shut-up (honest). I agree that the SSD will load quite a bit faster but once loaded there is ABSOLUTELY NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE vs. a 7200 RPM HDD. When you can buy an 8TB HDD for less than USD$200 it makes no sense to me to even consider the SSD option. As far as HDD failures go, in the last 10 years I've  used over 50 HDD's in various boxes and have had ONE failure. The drives in my flight sim box are six years old and still going strong. End of rant..........Doug

Thank you Triplane that was exactly what I was trying to explain. Very nice if you can afford to buy all these nice expensive ssd’s and I have two but small ones and their Samsung, one for Windows and another 250gb one but as for going bigger, no way can I afford that. Plus I’ve never had a hard drive go on me. Derek.

[FalconAF]

4 hours ago, Triplane said:

I just gotta say this just one more time and then I'll shut-up (honest). I agree that the SSD will load quite a bit faster but once loaded there is ABSOLUTELY NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE vs. a 7200 RPM HDD. When you can buy an 8TB HDD for less than USD$200 it makes no sense to me to even consider the SSD option. As far as HDD failures go, in the last 10 years I've  used over 50 HDD's in various boxes and have had ONE failure. The drives in my flight sim box are six years old and still going strong. End of rant..........Doug

 

While you are right, you are also wrong.  The SSD will load your flight sim INITIALLY when you first start it faster, just like it will load your Operating System hugely faster than having it on a HDD.  But you are sadly mistaken about loading large files when using the flight simulator,  after the sim is originally loaded.  Especially when using things like very large photoscenery files (can you say the 76 GBs of the Netherlands scenery files?).

 

And it will just keep getting worse as more photoscenery products are developed and used.  It's sad that many people don't understand the REQUIREMENTS to use state-of-the-art photoscenery in their flight sims.  For instance.....

 

People complain about the size of the ORBX Netherlands scenery being approximately 76 GB installed. And at the same time talk about hoping ORBX will cover the entire U.S. in the same photoscenery quality.  Hmmmm.....let's do some math.

 

http://www.nationmaster.com/country-info/compare/Netherlands/United-States/Geography

 

The land mass of the Netherlands is 16,164 square miles.  The U.S. is 3.8 MILLION square miles....235 times the Netherlands.  235 times 76 GB equals 17,860 GB.  Or 1,786 Terabytes.  Go ahead...put all of that on I Don't Care How Many HDD's you have, and you'd be able to take a vacation before your next flight simulator session would load.

 

And if you think it won't be a problem because nobody will be using 1,786 TB's of photoscenery for the U.S. to begin with, you are probably right...for NOW.  But when ORBX releases JUST the Pacific Northwest in photoscenery, it will be just the BEGINNING of it all.  The Netherlands is no bigger than about TWICE the size of NEW JERSEY.  How big do you think the Pacific Northwest scenery is going to be?  Or Germany?

 

If using HDD's works for you, that's fine.  But recommending that someone buy HDD's instead of SSD's today because (your quote),  "once loaded there is ABSOLUTELY NO NOTICEABLE DIFFERENCE IN PERFORMANCE vs. a 7200 RPM HDD" is totally incorrect. Your own personal opinions are not the same as facts. You are entitled to your own opinions, but you are not entitled to your own facts.  Show me VERIFIABLE TESTED RESULTS of your opinions, if you can find them.  You won't be able to if they come from reputable sources. 

 

  

[Scott Harmes]

Whether it's a HDD or SSD, I would also suggest the OP invests in a second drive.

 

Paul, you may even consider an external drive,  which are now very fast, and you could use that purely for storage to free up some room on your current drive for more scenery.  I would suggest an internal drive though, and probably a decent size one, around 2TB or more.  They are really easy to install, pretty much plug and play.

 

Personally I have 1 x 2TB SSD for my OS, P3DV4, and many photos and documents etc, 1 x 1TB HDD for P3DV3, FSX and AeroflyFS2, 1 x 2TB HDD for files storage, and 1 x 4TB HDD which I use for file storage and for scenery files.  I also have a number of external HDDs, mostly for file storage and backups.

 

Cheers,

[pphibbs]

Thanks for your feedback guys. My system currently has a 256GB SSD and a 2TB HDD. I initially placed FSX on the SSD - just to experience the speed of the SSD drive. It was OK but I quickly realized I couldn’t restrict my sim to this size drive. So I created partitions for my three sims, I.e., FSX, P3D and XPlane, along with a backup partition then reinstalled FSX on a partition on the 2TB drive and left the SSD for the OS and working files. I found that anything installed on the HDD wasn’t subject to fragmentation unless new content was written, so these drives seldom became fragmented and the performance was high. All work files created by the sims were written to the User areas on the SSD drive, which didn’t become inefficient due to fragmentation. I found this combination to be quite satisfactory and wasn’t to dissimilar to the performance I noticed with all of FSX on my SSD. 

 

It stands to reason that SSD drives are more efficient but quite expensive, particularly at the capacities that are of any use to flight simulation application (these days). I will probably buy another high speed HDD with the best capacity I can afford and see if I can use virtual folders to point to the new drive to support the additional capacity and still maintain the folder structure on the original drive.

 

Flight simulation is getting more complex but the benefits for those willing to go the distance is worthwhile.

 

Regards, Paul

[Nick Cooper]

Thanks Paul.

Now that you have your answer as well as both sides of the HDD vs SSD discussion,

perhaps it is time to close.