Railworks America

Are these any good? Can you boot off one since they aren't hooked up to any SATA port where the BIOS looks for boot devices?

Anybody having any experience with this kind of storage?

http://www.goplextor.com/Product/Detail/M6e(A)_Black_Edition#/Features

There are not that much faster and the speeds given are still "up to" but they are considerably more expensive.

Also, given the closeness of the PCI-e slots on most SLI capable motherboards, one probably wouldn't want to mount this SSD right above a high spec video card that dissipates like 200 Watts thermal under full gaming load.

Expensive.

Yes, they are!

But what is the justification? If they are like 3 times faster in sustained random access than SATA 600 SSD's one should notice less stutter in games like Railworks.

They do allow you to have less clutter inside your computer case, no power and SATA cables, etc.

Somebody far more literate than me should jump in here but I don't think the speed off the SSD has much if anything to do with any stuttering in TS.

I have been researching these, and i'll probably spend some money on one this year. They're touted as breaking through the saturation barrier of SATA and giving ultra-fast performance. Some have said as little as 3 seconds cold boot into Windows. There are only two things that I can personally think this would be useful for, and that would be gaming and game content creation. That being said though, the regular SATA III SSD I have is plenty fast enough, and all of my programs including TS run as smooth as butter. Anything faster would just be for bragging rights.

JerryC wrote:I have been researching these, and i'll probably spend some money on one this year. They're touted as breaking through the saturation barrier of SATA and giving ultra-fast performance. Some have said as little as 3 seconds cold boot into Windows. There are only two things that I can personally think this would be useful for, and that would be gaming and game content creation. That being said though, the regular SATA III SSD I have is plenty fast enough, and all of my programs including TS run as smooth as butter. Anything faster would just be for bragging rights.

And the PICe bus or Northbridge cannot be saturated in gaming rigs with 2,3 or 4 nvidia 980 based GPU's?

Cold booting into the desktop is not of real importance, sustained random access is.

Given that Intel is a major player in these "drives", I think they were meant for data server use and other professional applications, with the appropriate price.
They cannot be meant for 24/7 operation, as they are not hot swappable, a must in data servers.

However, that Plextor one looks ready made for the gaming market. Only flashing lights fail it.
I agree about those "bragging rights", in practice ordinary SATA 600 SSD are fast enough.

I now have my main USA Railworks install on one 256 GB, and at first really noticed the difference in loading and less stutter. Now, after a couple of weeks I am already drumming my fingers, thinking "why can't it go faster"?

Just a aside worth near nothing, This computer which is all SSD everything rated 7.8 or 7.9 takes 22 seconds for a cold boot. Good enough for the girls I go with. Running win7pro.

My new laptop (Asus ROG 751) has one of those as its system disk. Cold boot to Win10 in 3 seconds is about right (not counting the POST time).

stresstool wrote:My new laptop (Asus ROG 751) has one of those as its system disk. Cold boot to Win10 in 3 seconds is about right (not counting the POST time).

Are you sure? AFAIK, those PCIe drives are desktop only.

Perhaps you are confused with mSATA or M2 SSD's, really small devices ideally suited for laptop use. These still use the SATA600 protocol AFAIK,

I don't think a person notes the differences in speed with his own eyes, the results differ only in measurements.

Our SATA SSDS are plenty fast enough.
After that and the GPU, what slows down Railworks is the number of draws in some areas of routes. The problem with draw numbers is single core CPU performance.
That's why your high end GPU might only work at 30 - 40% with high FPS, out in the wilds of Donner, but high draw areas like filled yards will choke the GPU down to a snails pace while the CPU's main core is at 100% trying to feed the GPU with high draw, pre rendered frames.

Next up is Peter, who will come out of nowhere to counter me.

Eric et al
It is tempting , but I have no experience with PCIe or m2 SSD's!
I find just a plain old SATA II SSD ( I have one that is nearly 3 years old) is fine for both the OS and a separate SSD for TS2016 works for me.
My next builds will feature both m2 and PCIe SSD's (mainly for Photoshop) but for now TS2016 runs fine.
The OS (win 7) boots in around 30 seconds after post because I have task scheduling to check my network, wifi and Bluetooth drives.
I also use a little app called Process lasso which optimizes core usage better than Windows, ie it optimizes the "Set Affinity" option in Task manager.
I also use a GSYNC monitor which means stuttering and lag are a thing of the past even at low indicated fps by FRAPS or Bandicam.
All I know is that a balanced system is much better than having one or two faster components installed.

pH

Are you running the free version Peter or the so called pro version of Process lasso?

Buzz
I ran the free version for 3 years, but I felt that I should support the developer, so I purchased a license in December 2015.
To be honest, I can't see a difference between the 2 versions!!
It just works for me and it is great for FSX too!
I use only the default settings + the inbuilt power options.
Regards
pH

There are really noticeably faster SSD using a new NVMe interface attached to 4 PCIe 3 lanes: Samsung SSD 950 Pro.
http://www.samsung.com/global/business/semiconductor/minisite/SSD/global/html/ssd950pro/overview.html

HI

My M.2 960 Pro on a Z97 motherboard benchmarks with a sequential read speed of 830MB per second and a sequental write speed of 787MB per second.

This motherboards M.2 connector uses just two PCI-E lanes (the card supports four) which is why the read speed isn't close to the potential 2.2GB per second but the write speed isn't too far from the potential maximum 900MB per second write speed.

To compare using the same test, a SATA3 Corsair Neutron GTX SSD gives 543 read and 470 write and a Kingston SATA3 SSD gives 487 read and 515 write.

GaryG