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which one is better SSD or HDD?

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which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby Johnmash » Tue Mar 16, 2021 10:26 am

Hi me John

I have just set up FG on a new laptop and loaded and installed whole world scenery from DVD, as I did on the old computer My old one is a basic HP pavilion g6 with an integrated graphics card, and I got only about 6 fps if I used max settings. I therefore set everything to minimum which gave about 10 to 20 fps flying the Cessna 172P or Piper Comanche.
The new laptop is MSI GE62VR with Intel i7, Nvidia GTX 1060 and 16 Gb of RAM. It has 126Gb SSD (C: drive) and 1Tb HHD. (D: drive named Data)
I now get 60 fps.
However, I get a message that the SSD if virtually full, and that this is a problem.
I checked the storage and see that the scenery is all on the SSD, while the HDD is virtually empty.
Never had SSD before so didn't stipulate which drive to load the scenery data to.
Can I - should I- move the scenery files to the HDD ? would that cause any problems, and will it effect the FPS, or does it not really matter anyway?
Presumably the data files should be on the data drive?
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Re: which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby Johnmash » Tue Mar 16, 2021 10:28 am

i think SSD is better because its copy speed is 500mb pr second.
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Re: which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby erik » Tue Mar 16, 2021 10:58 am

That's one of the disadvantages of FlightGear loading the scenery data into ~/.fgfs, it might end up in an undesired place.

SSD vs HDD is probably noticeable as short pauses during flight which would be less noticeable in an SDD.
Also SSD wears of quicker when configured wrong and accessed very often.

So it's probably a good idea to move ~/.fgfs to de data disk and ad a symbolic link.

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Re: which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby tom_nl » Tue Mar 16, 2021 1:03 pm

If you're tight on space, I'd move it from the SSD to the HD - modern hard disks read at 10's of MB per second anyway so I don't expect you'd see much of a performance hit. Personally, on my Mac, I've got the scenery on the internal SSD because i've got space, but I keep the custom scenery on an external USB disk.

Generally, it's the writing to SSDs that wear them, not the reading, but saying that, I saw an online test where consumer SSDs were life tested, and they only started to fail after more than a 200TB had been written to them, which in real life consumer usage translates to over 100 years!

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Re: which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby erik » Tue Mar 16, 2021 1:42 pm

The problem is that Unix updates the 'access time' parameter each time the file is being read. You explicitly have to turn that option off when mounting.

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Re: which one is better SSD or HDD?

Postby wkitty42 » Tue Mar 16, 2021 3:21 pm

IIRC and AIUI that's done automatically these days... at least my ubuntu installs seem to... but yes, if you are manually defining a mount, be sure to include the noatime option where needed...
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