Thanks for all your help. Until I can get a 1tb NVMe my new setup is as follows:
120gb SSD - For the OS
2tb HDD - For my regular files and other games
256gb NVMe - For flight sim and add ons
This works for me and means i’ve moved my OS from the NVMe to the SSD so I can free up space for flight sim. Performance all round seems to be alot better now!
I recommend to not have the OS on an HDD.
Best is to have both MSFS and OS on NVME or SSD.
Also the virtual memory should absolutely reside on a fast drive.
If you are on a budget you can get a cheapo 128gb SATA SSD for 20$ and have OS on SATA SSD and MSFS on NVME.
FYI I have OS/MSFS on a budget Adata 500GB PCIE3 NVME with fairly good performance thanks to ZFS caching up to 2GB.
Loading times:
MSFS takes a good minute to go pass the check update screen, I dont think it is purely disk related.
During load time, OSD shows the disk operations are very fast, but the decryption time does not depend on disk speed and takes its toll.
Before SU5 I saw 1mn30 loading times with 1 logical core at 100 per cent and the rest lower.
After SU5 MSFS starts in about 2mn20 with or without addons and lower individual core usage.
Makes sense if decrypting is the main factor.
Loading a flight on the French Riviera with TBM930 improvement mod and custom livery is around 35s in SU5.
It was faster before SU5, but I did not time it then.
EDIT: Oops: I’ve just seen the new setup. Congrats!
At first I had the following:
~ Windows 10 OS on the NVMe SSD (of course);
~ Windows pagefile / swapfile (ie. the virtual memory) on the HDD;
~ FS2020 (all content) on the HDD;
Result: (a) Slow loading; (b) stuttering whenever scenery is loading;
Next configuration change:
~ Move FS2020 to SSD
Result: some speed increase, but still stuttering when complex scenery is loading (eg. at a large airport)
Final (fastest) configuration:
~ Move the Windows pagefile (virtual memory) to SSD.
Result: Fast loading and no stuttering during scenery loading & flight.
Summary: Fastest for me is to have:
~ Windows 10 OS on the NVMe SSD;
~ Windows pagefile / swapfile (virtual memory) on same SSD;
~ FS2020 (all content) on the same SSD;
So for me having everything on the same SSD is fastest.
(system: i7; 16GB RAM; RTX 2060 GPU)
well, you didn’t have to make an experiment to deduce this trivial fact, IMHO.
I’ve been having CTD issues since January while using an SSD for MSFS. I have since moved it over to a HDD and the CTDs have disappeared. Admittedly the SSD wasn’t an M.2 but I’m seeing no performance degradation at all after moving back to an HDD. My OS is on a separate SSD again.
One thing about SSD that is worth mentioning:
The rule of thumb to keep SSDs at top speeds is to never completely fill them up.
Personally I always try to keep at least 30 per cent free, or else the performance drops and it causes issues. Also it is important to make sure trimming is enabled, should be done automatically under windows with the proper drivers, but worth looking into.
More here:
Not enough of the variables are known to answer this. But I want to mansplain it for other people that come to this thread who may not know as much as you…
IF your system is properly spec’d and IF you’re using the correct slots for the correct things, you will net a pretty significant increase in IOPS (load times, cut scenes, etc.) by having your Game AND collateral running from an NVME drive. (the SSD drives that look like a Borg stick of gum)
The variables are.
1.) How many PCI Express Lanes do you have on your CPU.
*determine this by google fu. eg. An intel i7 10700k has 16 total lanes. A Ryzen 7 3700x has 20. (16 reserved for GPU slots, and 4 for storage devices)
These are “literally traffic lanes” like on a highway, between the bus, where things connect, and the CPU. So, More lanes = greater bandwidth.
The remaining PCIe capacity is managed by the Chipset itself. (like the x490, etc. in the case of intel)
2.) How many PCI Express lanes is your GPU Using ?
*it’s almost certainly x16, but it is important to note that if you decide to pop another PCIe card like a WLAN adapter or something in one of those slots, you can potentially starve your Storage devices for bandwidth, and even potentially halve the 16x for GPU, to 8x. (see your motherboard documentation)
3.) Insure your GPU is in an x16 and not an x8 slot. (yes, some boards still have different slots.)
Some board autodetect and some boards require the GPU to be in a specific x16 slot (even if there are 2 x16 PCIe slots, for instance.) again, That Motherboard manual we never read, is handy for this.
4.) If you have a pure SSD SATA disk (not an NVME drive, which is PCI express, not SATA) but the little credit card sized drives, these are ALL SATA connected, just like your typical Spinny Disk.
So, insure that you have the SSD SATA cable plugged into the correct port on the Mobo so that it has full bandwidth. (some motherboards have the Sata ports mapped to different controllers. Some even have Sata 3.0 and Sata 6.0 slots separate.
// For instance, if the board has hardware RAID capability, the ports that have RAID ability, are sometimes mapped to that chip and not to a Sata 6GB controller. The rest of them usually do RAID in software, and thus, map ALL ports to the same Chipset controller. It’s important to know tho.
5.) if you have an NVME drive, make sure you have the drive in a REAL NVME PCIexpress port, not just a regular M.2 slot. Some board took the guess work out for the end user and just made the m.2 slots keyed such that a standard M.2 drive (non NVME disk) would pop right in.
NOTE: M.2 is a physical standard, not a Drive Type. It’s just the name for the connector. So you can have 2 drives side by side, where one is a Sata M.2 and one is an NVME M.2. Yes They SHOULD be keyed slightly differently, but they aren’t always easy to tell the difference.
Last but not least, it NEVER hurts to download a free copy of Crystal Disk Info and run a performance check with your drive plugged into different ports JUST to see if there is a difference. It will also give you information about errors stored in the drives controller, and provide info such as temperatures, etc.
We don’t tend to worry about temps on Hard Drives, because the modern Flash drives don’t have moving parts, however, smaller mass means less heat dissipation so they are facing greater extremes and temp swings. You may even find that by moving airflow around you gain performance by keeping your SSD / NVME drives cooler.
Hope this info helps you optimize your PC to get the best performance out of your Sim Experience!
Thank you for this and yes the new setup is working well however I want to remove the third drive and I will have the OS and MSFS on the same larger NVMe drive. I’ve actually noticed an FPS increase aswell from running on the NVMe. I’m guessing that the HDD was holding me back a bit from my other components.
One thing you could look into in the interim is virtual memory.
By default Windows manages it automatically, and is fairly conservative with it.
It will create a rather small page file on the OS drive.
It will grow it later if needed but such operations may cause stutter if they happen the middle of a flight.
You can customize your virtual memory settings under advanced system options on each drive and set it to a generous fixed size.
It is often advisable to have the page file on the fastest drive.
When you open advanced system settings, it looks like this:
You could set the page file it to 0 on the SATA SSD and create a new one on the NVME, since it’s faster.
Mine is set at 32GB but it’s probably overkill.
The rule of thumb is 1.5xRAM.
Ah yes I forgot to do this!
I have no page file on any drive except i’ve now set a 24gb page file on my NVMe.
This topic was automatically closed 30 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
