fusion drive for Xp11

Question

Hi all,

Is it a good idea to use a fusion drive in a iMac 2017 to aim 30 - 50 FPS for heli sim in xp11? other iMac specs i will all buy at the top end. if i can, i want to avoid to buy a very expensive 1 TB full SSD. MANY THANKS

Answer 1

Hi, if a fusion drive works, it will only shorten the loading time. Don't expect any fluidity improvement.

One more thing, if you have a choice, spend the money in a computer instead of an iMac. You will have much better performance. Also note that currently, Nvidia GPUs handle X-plane way better than AMD GPUs.

There have been many threads about it, on this forum.

Reverting to the SSD, I personnaly have X-plane on a 240Gb SSD.The orthophoto I use often are on the SSD too, and the orthophoto I rarely use are on a 1Tb HD, I place shortcuts for them in X-plane 11\Custom scenery folder. This way I have best loading time almost every time I use X-plane.

Comments

I would suggest maybe to wait for the new iMac Pro...

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Many thanks for your answer. I am binded to Apple :-)

Re your last paragraph. I assume that you are working with a PC having installed a SSD partition and a HD partition and therefore you have control what data is on wich partition.

As I understand, i wont have this manual control as with a Fusion Drive the software will decide what is on the SSD and what is on the HD based on hiw much a user is pulling certain data. However, if the software handels it well, it will do the same as you are manually doing, right?

how much Gigabytes is Orthophoto for Switzerland approximately, and how much do i use for the xp11 installation?

many thanks, rene

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If you want, like me, to have orthos of Europe, South East Asia, Eastern Asia, two US coasts,... I would suggest that your SDD is 500 GB. My X-Plane folder contains a lot and is 280 GB, for the moment ;-)

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Re your last paragraph. I assume that you are working with a PC having installed a SSD partition and a HD partition and therefore you have control what data is on wich partition. 

Yes

As I understand, i wont have this manual control as with a Fusion Drive the software will decide what is on the SSD and what is on the HD based on hiw much a user is pulling certain data. However, if the software handels it well, it will do the same as you are manually doing, right?

I have never tried such a solution, but from what I could read, it's done pretty well. So yes, we can guess it will automatically place your heavy often loaded files on the SSD part.

how much Gigabytes is Orthophoto for Switzerland approximately, and how much do i use for the xp11 installation?

XP11 takes 70Gb for the whole world, but you can decide to install only 20Gb if you want to stick to Europe.

One tile covers an area of 1X1 degree of latitudeXlongitude. In europe, with land everywhere, an orthophoto tile in ZL16 takes approximately 2Gb. If you increase the resolution to ZL17, it takes 4 times as much as disk space. For Switzerland, you can check the following website :
http://zonephoto.x-plane.fr/Cartes.php

14 tiles to cover Switzerland, 28Gb in ZL16. So as branislavmilic says, 1Tb is probably oversized. At least for X-plane+ortho only.

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Many thanks Amelingu

I think I will go with highest end iMac with a Fusion drive. fi the fusion will not work proberly I could also connect a external ssd 0.5 TB, connected with usb3 and run xp11 from there incl add sceneries etc. agree?

regards, rene

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Yes, the external drive will work, you will be limited by the USB3 speed transfer.

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many thanks Amelingu