Storage Options for you Flight Simulator
Storage options for your flight simulator is crucial to your loading times. It is becoming especially important as our simulators grow in size and complexity. With massive ortho files and scenery packages available for all flight simulators its important to have the most space we can.
It is important to understand fast storage, which helps us with loading times does not help in game performance at all. The pain of waiting for a simulator or any game to load and having to go get a drink while we wait is infuriating for us all.
Lets make the options really clear. The old hard drives with their spinning platters are cheep and effective for storage for sure. The newer SSD’s are much much faster than the old HDD but their cost although getting less expensive is more than the old version. The load times you will be delighted by I have to say.
The newest options have been M.2 drives which look like a RAM stick. They are installed directly to the motherboard and make SSD’s look archaic.
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SSD Drives are really great and now a good price to performance option but still get left behind with the new M.2 Drives.
The M.2 Drives come in SATA and PCI Express-bus M.2 SSDs. My experience with the drives is best shown with DCS World. It took literally minutes to load to the main menu and similarly long to get into the game.
When I installed it to my Samsung SSD it dropped to about 50 seconds. I was over the moon, then I put it on my SATA M.2 Drive. The SATA variant is slower than the MVME but it took 20 seconds. Its about 20% faster with the MVME. This flight simmer was over the moon.
I would just like to reiterate one more time that the performance of the loading of the game/simulator is not impacted in the performance department at all. It simply loads faster. Also the NVME drives are about 20% faster but their current cost at writing still didn’t make them appealing at the time of writing this article.
Tests carried out by www.photographylife.com
Hard Drives – HDD
Hard Drives are very cheap these days for sure. If performance isn’t the main purpose then these can be very big and quite inexpensive per gig to purchase. Still the best value for money for mass storage and when loading speed isn’t crucial.
These are the best place to hold your most important files for a long period. Doing your system backups to an external hard drive HDD is a great way to keep piece of mind on all those dear family photographs we all love to take.
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SSD – Solid State Drives
Solid state drives are the middle ground for your flight simulator as they are becoming enormousness in size. If you use Ortho4xp in X Plane 11 then you know how quickly your valued hard rive space is taken up. Getting a good SSD is still pretty good value for money.
It will give you much faster load times than a HDD so worth the dollars for them. I would like once again to remind you these storage solutions wont help in game performance generally. They just take the pain away from waiting long periods for the new flight simulators to load. Loading a program like DCS World from a HDD takes minutes and is very frustrating. On a SSD its 40 seconds or so but an M.2 will have you ready in half that again approximately.
I really think this is the sweet spot currently but as prices reduce and or the next best thing in technology becomes available we will have to re write this page again.
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M.2 Solid Drives – SATA & NVME
If you really want speed at any cost then the M.2 solution is the way to go! If your concerned just with speed the NVME is the d\fastest option then the SATA varient which is only a little slower but much cheaper.
With cheaper but great performance version in M.2 SATA SSDs or M.2 NVMe SSDs versions about 20 percent faster but are twice the price currently. The option is yours. Loading times are lightening fast so if time is of the essence then these are the current answer for you. If you need one then check the options below.
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