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Seperate Hard Drives?

PutPut

PutPut

Charter Member 2014
I have been following Paulb's thread on this subject with some interest as I find myself with a nice WD 320 gig hard drive very empty after my most recent computer mod. I have considered putting FSX on it, but am more interested in using it for scenery exclusively. My question is how do you tell FSX that the scenery addon folder is no longer within the program but elsewhere? How do you define the path and where does it go? I have never separated this stuff before so any in-sight is appreciated.

Thanks, Paul
 
its pretty easy to do for addon scenery (wouldnt recommend moveing the stock stuff):-

1, Create a new folder and put your scenery addon in it
2, Load up FSX and in the scenery libary click add (or add area, cant rember!)
3, Browse to your scenery package in the new folder you created and click ok
4, New scenery installed (may need to restart FSX for the scenery to show, sometimes you do sometimes you dont!)

:)
 
I tried that "Kind of" on my last install, and I was not really happy with the result, I noticed when I entered or left a scenery area that was seperated from the main FSX stock folders and scenery I got a noticable stutter. Now that was on my old machine and it was limited to the 32bit 4GB RAM limitation so that may have been a factor. In my experience the best configuration for FSX (from a had drive perspective) is to put the sim and all related files on a single drive seperate from the OS and normal apps such as web browser office suite etc. Your mileage may vary, but that is the way I found FSX works best on my new rig.

You might consider splitting that 320 into two partitions and using say 200 GB for FSX only and the remaining space for backup of the addon's etc. That will keep things nice and clean and if you ever have a primary drive failure your FSX will likely be safe, the other advantage to that idea is with a little "Tweaking" you can move FSX intact to a new system by doing a phantom install and then swapping the drive - it is a work a round trick I used a couple of times but quite useful.
 
My new system I'm building I will be putting FSX and all of the addons onto its own hard drive. A 600GB, 10K RPM 6GB Western Digital VelociRaptor. From what I been told and hear, its better to do this. I'll let you know when I complete in the next week or so.
 
PutPut said:
I have been following Paulb's thread on this subject with some interest as I find myself with a nice WD 320 gig hard drive very empty after my most recent computer mod. I have considered putting FSX on it, but am more interested in using it for scenery exclusively. My question is how do you tell FSX that the scenery addon folder is no longer within the program but elsewhere? How do you define the path and where does it go? I have never separated this stuff before so any in-sight is appreciated.

Thanks, Paul
Click to expand...

You could place your entire Addon Scenery folder on that drive and leave an EMPTY
Addon Scenery folder in your FSX directory.

Then right-click "My Computer", select "Manage", then "Storage" and "Disk Management".

Right-click on the drive that now holds your addon scenery and select "Change Drive Leter and Paths..."

Select "Add" and then "Mount in the following empty NTFS folder"

Browse to your FSX directory and the now empty Addon Scenery folder.

Hit OK and you are done.

From now on that drive will be mounted as "Addon Scenery" in FSX.

Now, assuming you are going to dedicate that entire 320GB drive to Addon Scenery,
just move ALL the folders from your existing FSX Addon Scenery folder into the
root directory of the 320GB drive.

If you only want to use a portion of that drive, then create a partition that will be used
for the scenery and mount it. Just be sure to move all the folders to the root directory.

I've done this so that I can share my scenery between my Win Xp x32 and Win7 x64
FSX installs on my dual-boot system. It works great.

Assuming that all your scenery was in the original Addon Scenery folder you won't even
have to touch your scenery.cfg file. If not, then you just need to use the FSX scenery menu
to add any areas that you now included in this new configuration.

Also, you can still have scenery located elsewhere. This just allows you to consolidate
all your scenery in one place outside of the FSX directory.

Paul
 
One other point to bear in mind is that the read (and write) time of your conventional HD decreases as you fill it up. This slows down your loading times in FSX. For example - roughly - comparing a nearly empty drive with a nearly full drive - read times are cut in half when it is nearly full. Therefore, for speed, its best to use no more than around 50% of your hard drive's capacity. So with a 320GB drive, ideally you would only fill 160GB.

BTW, this isn't true of SSD where you can go up to 90%.

Cheers

Paul
 
Here is how my current FSX is installed. Operating system (and all of my business and graphics apps) and Active Sky X are on a WD 320 GB SATA2 drive. For games and file storage, I use a 1TB WD SATA2 drive. The second drive has three partitions. The very first partition is 150 GB and solely for FSX and any program that must be installed in the FSX directory. The second partition is for all the other games, the third is a file storage area. Putting FSX on a separate drive is a good idea in my experience. Putting it on a fast drive is also important. The read and write times of the 1TB WD drives is pretty impressive, at least along the outer edge of the platter, that is why I partitioned such a large drive and made the first partition my FSX area. So far, I still have 111 GB free on my FSX partition.
 
I configured my sim pc as follows...

64gb ssd for OS
1tb hdd for FSX install
64gb ssd for photoscenery

Haven't had any hdd induced issues in 3 years using this setup. :)
 
Thanks for all the input. It would appear the results you get are pretty much system dependent. I have an "average" system; E8600 dual core processor, ATI 4670 card, 6 gigs of ram and Win7 64 bit. Last night I installed my addon scenery folder on the empty drive as described above. It worked but I think I had more stutters than before. It did appear load times were faster. This morning I erased it and installed all of FSX all by itself on the empty drive. So far, that looks like a winner. Seems everything is smoother. I'll stick with it.

Thanks again, Paul
 
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