Hard drives configuration, need advice please.

[Spencerdog 0]

Hello to all. I have read hundreds, if not thousands of posts. Thank you all for your help. I am in the final stages of building my first computer solely for fsx. I am a real world pilot. I need help configuring my hard drives. I have 3. A Seagate 2tb hdd, a 500gb velociraptor, and a 750 gb samsung evo. For the best performance, loading times, where do I put fsx, the os, scenery, and aircraft. I plan on having a lot of payware ad ons. Thanks for all your help. Your advice has been invaluable to me. Any other advice would be greatly appreciated.

Steve

[MyPC8MyBrain 273]

this is a little article i wrote on AVSIM a while back; might help you on your build venture

 

http://forum.avsim.net/tutorials/article/83-movingallocating-individual-folders-from-within-fsx/

[brett 2,316]

Hi Steve, welcome to Mutley's Hangar,   make yourself at home.

 

I'll let the tech folks give you the fine details, am an old dog that just dumps everything in my laptop on the same drive, aircraft in simobjects, most scenery in there own folders stored in the main addon folder. I even put FSX in the Program Files (x86) folder but was lucky to never have a problem....yet, knock on wood plastic.

 

There's no hope for me but I'm sure the fine folks here will fix you right up. 

[mutley 4,498]

Hi Steve, welcome to Mutley's.

 

To cut through the cr*p I don't think you will really notice that much difference in various setups. However, if it was me, I would put the OS on the Samsung Evo, FSX on the veloceraptor and use the 2TB for storage.

 

Only my 2 

 

Cheers,

 

Joe

[Spencerdog 0]

Thank you so much for your responses. Everyone here is so nice. It will be another week until I am up and running, but will let you know how it works out. Thanks again.

[allardjd 1,853]

Welcome, Steve.  I'm of the same mind as Brett - I install to the defaults, tweak a little if it needs it and I'm fairly happy with what I get.  I don't have a lot of add-on scenery but love traffic and have a cubic boatload of that.  Performance is OK.  I'm also of the opinion that if the folks who make motion pictures believe 30 fps is about all the quality the human eye can perceive, that's good enough for me.  

 

The tech mavens here will give you good advice and if you're looking for the optimal, heed what they say.  Be warned, however, that those who claim to have the formula for optimizing FSX, if laid end to end, will all point in different directions.  Trying to do everything all of them say will most likely cause your head to explode.

 

John

[Bruce (a.k.a. brian747) 142]

Hi Steve, and welcome!   

 

Just to underline John's wise words (above) here's another opinion.....   

 

Whilst it seems sensible to put your fsx on the velociraptor, since you "plan on having a lot of payware ad ons" then you need to be aware that there is a possibility that you could overflow 500 Gb in due time — especially if you go for photorealistic scenery. I have Windows and fsx on a 250Gb SSD, so I certainly have to store all my scenery, mesh, Orbx etc, on another disk (which also happens to be an SSD, drive S:, but the same principle applies). I move them by cutting and pasting the directories to their new home and then using mklink from the command line, e.g. —

 

 [Cut and paste the Orbx directory to the LinkedFSXfiles directory on drive S:]

     C:\fsx>mklink /j "Orbx" "S:\!LinkedFSXfiles\Orbx"
 [Junction created for Orbx <<===>> S:\!LinkedFSXfiles\Orbx]

 

(Be sure to get the mklink command's syntax absolutely right, though!).

 

So perhaps you might therefore consider going with the velociraptor initially and then monitor how much space fsx takes up. If and when you start to get past 450Gb used, be prepared to start thinking about moving some stuff as I described. Or if that might constitute a challenge for you, how about plan B — put Windows on the velociraptor for faster boot-up times, then install fsx and all its add-ons on the Seagate 2Tb from day one and forget about potential space problems.   

 

Just my 2ȼ.....

 

All the best,

 

Bruce

 

(a.k.a. brian747)