Buying a solid state drive will be a massive improvement over mechanical drives. You would be better off buying a single larger drive instead of two smaller ones, the adapter to change from 2.5 to 3.5 costs $15.

Based on your price the best one would be a intel x25-m g2, make sure it is the g2 because the g1 does not keep its performance like the g2 does. It comes in 80 and 160 GB, you would be best putting your OS, applications, and flight sim on it. If there isn't enough space then just put some applications on a different drive.

It is true that the drive will degrade in performance the more you put on it but this will be minimal.

I said that the intel drive would be the best but I am unsure if flight simulator would be reading sequential data and if the difference in read speeds would make a big enough difference. If it would then you should look at the OCZ vertex. But that would be a question to ask someone else because I am unsure.

I got all of this information from anandtech's articles and if you want to know a large amount of what you need to know about solid state drives you should read all of these articles in order from top to bottom (oldest to newest).

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3403

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3535

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3607

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3608

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3631

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I have the OCZ Vertex with W7 but use Garbage Collector in lieu of TRIM because Raid is not supported by trim (yet).

I have never used the Intel SSD so can not say anything about them but I have OCZ, Corsair and Patriot SSDs and prefer the OCZ because of the available support provided.

If you want any info on the Vertex before you make a purchase check out the OCZ forum.

In fact I would recommend browsing all of the SSD forums, is great reading if you want to upgrade

The intel x25-m g2 has trim enabled, personally I wouldn't bother with raid. The thing that makes a solid state drive so good is that it can load things VERY fast compared to normal drives, having your OS on it will make your computer start up very quick in comparison. The idea of having your programs, games and OS on your SSD is that they will be able to load so fast. When I buy my computer with a solid state drive I will be putting all of my programs and OS on it, (not games because I have too many) with the games and storage on different hard disks.

With these drives the random read/write speeds are probably more important than sequential, that's why the intel drives are so good, all of the enthusiasts still get the intel when they buy a top of the range pc. Because FSX isn't all in sequence on the disk for what it needs to read I don't think it is the most important thing you should be looking at.

To answer your question the reason why in the past you would put FSX on a different drive is because the more you put on it, the slower it gets, with these SSD's this is no longer true (there is at maximum still a 5% slow down but with TRIM now here it is minimal). Also the OS will use the ssd to an extent while you are playing FSX and that will detract from the performance that FSX needs, because I am not really all that familiar with how FSX works I can not say for sure but, IMO there will be no advantage to having them on another SSD because the SSD's are so fast anyway.

Also AFAIK there is no system that can play FSX on full settings but I have been out of the loop for a while about that but your system is quite good and it will get as close as you can get.

Just a side note, you no longer have to defragment your drive in case you didn't realise that yourself.

Fozzer wrote on Jan 4^th, 2010 at 1:47pm:


I don't know about that...you might be right;  But I ran Memtest and was actually astounded at the gazillions of files that are constantly being read from disk by FSX.  And in general, the processor is constantly swapping things in and out of memory from disk, or utilizing virtual memory.  Basically, I'm looking to just ease the overall burden on the system in general.  I admit, I'm ignorant enough of the inner workings that this might not speed me up, or smooth me out at all.  I get a lot of stutters, and am not sure whether this is hard drive related or not....so I'll just throw money at the problem   My hopes are that I will see a small increase in my minimum frame rate...planes that hover at an average of 30fps are dipping back and forth to 10 occasionally, especially over mountainous terrain,  and ruining the experience.  Even if it went from 30 to low-end-stuttering at 15, it would be much improved.

I have a gigantic installation ahead of me, and will report back my experience (if I ever get it to work right again)!

Ok, then, I guess your computer must be bigger than my computer   I hope you are wrong...the credit card has already been un-sheathed!  No seriously, my expectations are not too high for this, and if it doesn't ease the load on the computer, well, then it doesn't.  My HDD light blinks all the time even when the computer is sitting at idle, but I admit I haven't paid much attention to what it is doing while I'm playing fs.

I'm not exactly sure how my video mem is being utilized, or how that works.  I am running 3 x 24 inch screens in VC, so there is a lot of data that needs to be pushed through.

Concerning performance increases during actual run time.  I re read all those tuning guides from that Nick fellow, and in one of them he points out that the one of the best investments you can make for FSX performance is a WD Velociraptor...by clearing up any latency issues related to large scenery reads.  Given that SSDs are much faster than a Velociraptor, I have my fingers crossed that I will see at least some performance increase over and above what I have now...(a Hitachi Deskstar)

Finally back in the saddle again!

Thanks for all the advice guys!  I'm back up and running fully with the new Vertex drive.  It isn't some massive performance boost, nor did I ever expect it to be.  However, everything is crystal clear now, no blurries to be found, and no lag time when transitioning between views.  Framerates are the same, maybe a bit better, but  smoothness seems to have been enhanced (no 900 fps for me!)  It was pricey, but I'm happy.  T1M, those links helped a bunch when trying to determine what was right for me.  Thanks!

Was that ever a pain in the ass to install all the fsx stuff from scratch and then tweak it, though!

Don't forget that the page file has to be read and written to on the hard disk.  Don't think I didn't consider what you have said before and I don't have the knowledge to say otherwise.  However, there must be some reason why people are using Velociraptor drives in RAID and I doubt it is just for initial loading times. 
Anyway, everything else about the computer is a lot faster including boot times and everything else, so I'm happy.  If it helps FSX than that is good too.
I've just done a complete rebuild of everything and have only run my first reinstalled plane last night (the Stratocruiser).  It seeeemed to be smoother and the UTX/GEX terrain didn't "block" up when turning my head with the track ir.  Keep in mind I'm running 3 widescreen monitors, so to provide on-demand, clear scenery, the SSD might actually help. I think this is more than just a placebo effect. I also might not know what I'm talking about