Hard Drive Cache important? If so SSD's should work well

[drumsonly2002]

Viewing the specs of SSD and certain units are endowed with large amounts of cache. The P256 Corsair SSD has a 128MB cache size! I was informed the larger the cache on a hard drive, the better the textures work. Is this correct? What role does hard drive cache play in the workings of FSX?  Does this feature make SSD's more worthy for FSX? Thank you.

[Maurice_King]

I was informed the larger the cache on a hard drive, the better the textures work. Is this correct?

Not necessarily, a larger cache size on a conventional spinning platter HDD may be benificial but your the texture loading is as much limited by how fast the data can get from the HDD Cache through the HDD I/O bus as it is by the cache size.

Irrespective of the cache size an SSD will be benificial to the overall performance of FSX and if you put your pagefile.sys and temp directory's ( edit Windows to only have ONE Temp Dir will help here too) on an SSD your performance will be higher than a regular PC because everything is essentially working in RAM because that's how an SSD behaves.

[drumsonly2002]

Very nice, great advise. Where do and how do you learn that stuff? In bet you can configure a computer to run like a son of a gun. All these tips are real gems in performance enhancements. Some night I am going to  grab some beers, and my word processor and go through all the performance tips. Make myself a nice FSX / Win 7 performance improvement then go for a tweek a thon. The learning never ends on the orbx forums.

[Maurice_King]

As a additional note:-

I was thinking about the common "Disable Preload" tweak in the fsx.cfg file and while this may work for conventional HDD's it would be detrimental I think if you use an SSD.

First we need to understand HOW scenery etc loads.

Your flying along and by design FSX "Knows what textures it will likely need based on the Level of detail radius and it's actual location in the virtual world so after this is known next it wants to preload these textures, BUT in doing so it has to put them somewhere for rapid retrieval and so drops them into either the pagefile.sys (Ideally this should be a FIXED size) or a "Temp" ie XXXX.tmp file that it can pull back quickly.

In this regard actually disabling the preload will cut down the time taken to present the texture on screen simply because the textures aren't loaded and stored then retrieved but used directly and hence this is why disabling the preload is advisable since the texture has to be loaded and then is written back to the HDD in the Pagefile.sys or a *.TMP file in your Temp directory.

This is why the 10000RPM Velociraptor HDD work well for FSX (due to the very small seek and load times ).

It follows then if you are using an SSD for your Pagefile.sys and "TEMP" Directory that this loading storage and application times for textures will be significantly faster and even more so if your FSX is also installed to an SSD. Remember that an SSD is in essence behaving like RAM. 

Now in the interests of spending $$ where they will give the biggest bang then IMHO buying a single SSD and using this as your TEMP and Pagefile area will give you the best performance boost / dollar spent behind buying a high end video card.

As simmers we need balance the cost of spending BIG on Processor and MoBo (although this is an important key) it does not necessarily mean you will improve your FSX performance, in this regard I have read in these forums where some have spent better than $3K on MoBo, PSU, RAM, Video Card etc and still have sub 30 FPS performance.