People search for such minutia in speeding up their favorite flight sim, and totally overlook the obvious improvement - an SSD drive!!!!
And please, STOP worrying about which is the fastest, or best, or anything!
With a few special exceptions, just about every newer SSD in the last five years will be faster than your hard drive!
For those who worry about the life of an SSD being cut short due to heavy use - FORGET IT! YOU ARE LIVING IN THE PAST!
Tech Report beat some SSD drives to death by writing over, and over, and over for a year and a half. This is something that is supposed to shorten the life of an SSD.
The SSD Endurance Experiment: They're all dead
The SSD Endurance Experiment represents the longest test TR has ever conducted. It's been a lot of work, but the results have also been gratifying. Over the past 18 months, we've watched modern SSDs easily write far more data than most consumers will ever need.
Are you paranoid and want the one that will survive longer?
Samsung turned our SSD Endurance Experiment into something incredible
As long as I know how to write, I know I'll stay alive
TR's SSD Endurance Experiment started with a simple premise: how long can today's SSDs last under a grueling load of continuous writes? We put six drives under the gun to find out. Over a year and a half (and multiple petabytes of writes) later, we had our answer.
We weren't seeking to crown a winner as part of our experiment, but Samsung's 840 Pro 256GB drive was the one that took us all the way to that 2.4PB-written milestone.
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_73I5RuJCAk[/youtube]
GET THAT SSD!
SSD drives are getting so much cheaper that they can cost less than a couple of the better sim aircraft.
Really, all that most of you need (for a flight sim drive) is a 256GB SSD drive. Find prices from your favorite source, but here's a simple search on Amazon with 256GB SSD's going for less than $65.
Want/need one larger? Try a 500GB SSD for as little as $110! As I said before, it may not be the fastest, but it'll beat your hard drive.
Starting around $130, you can get a faster 500GB drive.
The speed and smoothness of your sim will prove well worth the $65 to $130 that you spend.
BTW - As far as I know, all SSD manufacturers have free cloning software that will work with their drives, although I think that reinstalling your sim is a better bet for a number of reasons.