Splitting data across two or more SSDs - any performance advantage?

martinlest · 18 Jun 2019

My main PC is dedicated to X-Plane 11 (flight simulator). The PC has no internal HDDs, just SDDs (2 x 500GB and 1 x 2TB).

My O/S is on its own 500GB SSD and X-Plane on one of the others. As X-Plane consumes huge amounts of resources when running - just watch the file reads fly in Process Monitor! - I sometimes ask myself whether I would get any increase in performance by putting some of the X-Plane installation on one SSD and some on another. (then creating symlinks to the main installation folder).

Well, with internal HDDs that would doubtless help. But with SSDs? Would there be any performance advantage at all in having X-Plane reading data from two SSDs instead of just one, does anyone know?

Thanks.

Martin

Snick · 18 Jun 2019

Hi martinlest,

In short Yes considerably, here's excellent explanations of the subject-matter!

SSD RAID (solid-state drive RAID)

SSD RAID: Boosting SSD Performance with RAID

samuria · 18 Jun 2019

SSD are so fast its unlikley it would make any difference what you could do if the board supports it is get a m2 ssd they are so much faster than standard ssd and now cheap

martinlest · 18 Jun 2019

Hi. I can't set up the drives as RAID as they are different sizes. I was just asking about moving part of the data that is frequently read from one SSD to another and using a symlink back to the original location. I note samurai thinks not (which was certainly my gut feeling about it... but at the rates at which data is read from the drive by X-Plane it might just make a difference).

I can always just test it out of course, but wanted some feedback from the experts here first.

Unfortunately I can't see me replacing the SSDs - a 2TB SSD is not, with respect samuria, 'cheap'.

samuria · 18 Jun 2019

In UK a 500 gig is £54 now prices have dropped