SSD vs Hard Drive

[Jerrymc3]

I purchase the P3D Developer License and installed it on a 500GB SSD rather than the standard Hard Drive I have FSX installed on hoping to improve load times. I also moved most of my MegaScenery to a 1TB SSD. I honestly can't see much improvement, if any, in load times. Is there some secret I'm missing? I read where this would significantly improve load times in FSX. Should it not be the same in P3D?

Jerry

[spiliot]

Your comparison is an apple (FSX on HDD) versus an orange (P3D on SSD) :) A better comparison would be the same sim on different drives or different sims on the same drive.

In general P3D is much more optimized and you'll see the benefit of the SSD the more aircraft and airport sceneries you load on the sim. For example, an AI package with hundreds of planes will take half a minute for the SSD to parse and several minutes for an HDD. The sim will need to traverse each folder, load a small file from each one that requires many seek and read operations.

Mesh, global and photoreal sceneries don't affect load time that much because only one scenery description file is parsed per huge area and the individual tiles don't need to be loaded until used, something both hard drives can manage easily during flight.

[Jerrymc3]

When I load a flight in P3D it stays at 6% for about 4 minutes, then it starts to crawl up and after reaching about 45% loads very quickly. Its about the same on FSX. I just thought the SSD would be faster.

Jerry

[snoopy6129]

A late reply, but might be helpful to you.

That load time does not seem right. I don't have the developer's edition of P3D, but I would presume it should not take that long. What I would check is to make sure you have sufficient memory on your computer (I would recommend 8GB as a minimum recommendation). Also, I would want to make sure the operating system is installed on the SSD as well.

Hope this helps.