We're gonna need a bigger hard drive

[M31 0]

Read on the Playsims forum that VFR Photo scenery Scotland South Vol 8 went to the printers for the DVD's a few days ago ... it will come on 7 dual layer DVD's and take up 55 GB hard disc space!

http://www.playhoriz...t=4717&start=10

This is just one third of mainland Scotland too.

I have all of England/Wales and the current two Island Volumes for Scotland and am contemplating the two South Ireland volumes this year too ... VFR is my thing

I just hope the remaing two mainland Scotland volumes dont take forever to get released now, will be fun flying around my neck of the woods in photo real scenery when its done.

This volume does look stunning though, 60cm resolution throughout and coupled with the inevitable Scotflight update will be stunning.

It should encompass former RAF Machrihanish now Campbeltown airport, our family lived on the base in the early 70's as part of my Dads RAF tour, the Mull of Kintyre (Inc Paul Mcartneys old farm) should be visible. I went back for a look at Campbeltown and Machrihanish a couple of years ago as a nostalgia trip, the town is well run down with the departure of the RAF and Americans that occupied the base, but the drive down the Argyll peninsula is breathtaking unspoilt scenery.

I'm looking forward to it

http://www.flightsto...ulation/PHOTO12

[mutley 4,495]

Even as a mere Sassenach I am looking forward to this.

I am hoping it will have loads of detail, luckily for "Needles" he will be doing our review for this so I will await his report!

[M31 0]

Even as a mere Sassenach I am looking forward to this.

I am hoping it will have loads of detail, luckily for "Needles" he will be doing our review for this so I will await his report!

I'll look forward to that

[needles 1,011]

Can't wait Joe. It's been a long wait eh!

[M31 0]

Do me a favour Needles. when you get your review copy ... please do a buzz around the bottom southern part of the Argyll peninsula ... I'm going to pre-order from Flightstore in the next week while its still a bit cheaper than release day (estimated 10th Feb) but I'd love to see what you think of an area I know quite well.

Cheers.

[M31 0]

Thought I'd share a few pics of my afore mentioned visit down to Campbletown and former RAF Machrihanish a couple of years back.

My Sister had always talked about wanting to see part of her history, old house, old school ETC and even though I'd taken a Motorcycle trip down a good few years ago ... I wanted to go see it all again too ... took a ton of pics, but this is the gist of them.

We hired a nice villa just south of Campbletown as a base and stayed a week with my nephews too, the weather is funny there ... really changeable ... an RAF Chinook crashed into the hillside of Kintyre with some really top brass a while back, the weather really caught the crew out apparently.

Anyway, starting from Campbeltown cross ... my god this town is run down now ... its a shame really.

Moving swiftly on ... took a taxi out to Campbeltown Airport ... I knew from flight sim and Scotflight it was near my old house and just down the old Moss Road and I thought we could walk to our old house from here quite easily.

Once we got dropped off I knew this was going to go pear shaped! The heavens opened up on what was a very nice sunny morning ... it's like that in Kintyre and i'd forgot that! I looked at my Sister and Nephews and grinned ... lets go see our old house then ... Oh boy, when I was 12 the civvie airport was not even there, but I knew the road from my childhood adventures, what was then just a jaunt down the road took us well over an hour to get back to near our old house ... I have very severe arthritis now and my hips were starting to grind on bone ... could have called a taxi on the mobile, but we had come this far from NE Scotland to near our old home on the West coast, we had to go on.

Here is a pic of me, proudly standing in a puddle as we approached the old RAF and American family housing on the perimeter of the base.

The odd thing about former RAF Machrihanish, is even when we lived there when i was a kid, it was always shrouded in secrecy ... we loved that as kids and always tried to guess what the secrets were.

To this day that base still has a ridiculously long runway and never had any aircraft based there the 3 years we lived there ... we'd often hear sonic booms though and I now know even though Concorde was active at the time its flight path was no where near up there. Popular lore thinks it was Aurora ... but I think it was the SR71 .... the USA had a big interest in the base at the time and had a division of US Navy Seals based there long after we moved to Germany.

There were lots of low loader trucks taking stuff into the base from time to time too, as well as lots of visiting RAF Hercules transport aircraft ... if you look near the beach perimeter of RAF Machrihanish you will see what looks suspiciously like missile silo's to me ... this shows on current Google Earth, hope it shows on the forthcoming scenery You can look at any ex de-comissioned nuclear missile silo sites on Google Earth nowadays BTW.

There is a lot of interesting stuff about EX RAF Machrihanish on more conspiracy theory related sites on the net ... but what I've wrote is how I remember it when I lived there as a kid.

Anyway

Horrible weather, here is a look at the old guard room and road into the camp and family officer building, at the time we visited they were building wind farm electricity generators there that might have provided a few jobs ... I've since learned that has now closed too.

The old guard house ... I was hauled up a few times there for pranks like knock a door and run and my Dad had to come collect me.

The road down into the camp ... its not closed off any more, obviously ... and I wanted to go down and explore, but my hips were killing me, it was still peeing down rain and my Sister had seen enough of her history of old house ETC.

The old Families office across from the guard house ...

Finally ,,, and just a few yards away from our old house, a nice contribution and acknowledgment to what Paul and Linda McCartney did for the area ... this used to be called Knockmoy Gardens when we lived there ... if you ever visit Campbletown, there are lots of little touches to Linda McCartney in particular, everywhere ... that I think are nice.

Most of the houses had for sale signs up, and this was before the current big recession, the houses here were all former RAF and US family accomodation, when the RAF and US left ... it obviously became a ghost village, retirement folk bought the houses cheap i guess, there are no shops until Campbletown ... its so peaecful there I can see some attraction, and while I've tried to live in big citys like Aberdeen and even London ... I now know when i'm well off ... I guess

Crikey ... I sound like the Scottish tourist board now, but this thread would not be complete without Bagpipes and the song itself

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VDoO5vmBnsE

[mutley 4,495]

Hey thanks for sharing your memories Colin, it makes me want to find out more about RAF Machrihanish and what went on there. I am sure I would have been hauled up to the guard house too!

I liked the fact that flight sim and Scotflight confirmed the your location. It will be a good judge of the upcoming software to see if those silos are there

Cheers.. Joe

[needles 1,011]

Do me a favour Needles. when you get your review copy ... please do a buzz around the bottom southern part of the Argyll peninsula ... I'm going to pre-order from Flightstore in the next week while its still a bit cheaper than release day (estimated 10th Feb) but I'd love to see what you think of an area I know quite well.

Cheers.

It will be a pleasure! I'm really looking forward to doing the review as I too took a couple of holidays down in the Argyll area. It will be also interesting to see how Glasgow and Edinburgh look from the air.

Cheers

[M31 0]

Do me a favour Needles. when you get your review copy ... please do a buzz around the bottom southern part of the Argyll peninsula ... I'm going to pre-order from Flightstore in the next week while its still a bit cheaper than release day (estimated 10th Feb) but I'd love to see what you think of an area I know quite well.

Cheers.

It will be a pleasure! I'm really looking forward to doing the review as I too took a couple of holidays down in the Argyll area. It will be also interesting to see how Glasgow and Edinburgh look from the air.

Cheers

Thanks.

Yep, I'm really looking forward to seeing Glasgow, Edinburgh as well as soon to be former RAF Leuchars in good detail too (I might omit installing the RAF Scotflight scenery for the base since it will be closing soon?) ... Dundee should make it into this package too I think? Once did a night flight from RAF Kinloss down to RAF Leuchars beside a pilot in a Piper Warrior III from the old Kinloss flying club, even though I don't have a PPL I was allowed to make part of that flight myself and even a bit of the descent ... Dundee looked wonderful lit up at as we flew over it ... I'll always remember and cherish that night flight ... I've re-created it many times in versions of FS over the years.

[M31 0]

Flightstore got this scenery in today apparently so I'm really looking forward to flying with this scenery early next week and reading Brian's forthcoming review

Now I wonder how long for the remaining two volumes for Scotland?

[needles 1,011]

Hi Mate,

I have submitted my request for the review copy and as soon as I get it I will begin flying over the Southern parts of Scotland.

I really can't wait to see how they have done and get it installed.

Hopefully we won't have to wait an age for the next part to be released.

We'll see eh.

[britfrog 180]

Just had a look at my hard drive and i only have 83gb avail, jeez the thought of buying a larger 2tb drive then going through all the palaver of reinstalling windows followed by 4 days of reinstalling fsx and all its add ons just gives me the hump , why cant we just copy and paste the whole caboodle from one drive to another???????????????

[M31 0]

Just had a look at my hard drive and i only have 83gb avail, jeez the thought of buying a larger 2tb drive then going through all the palaver of reinstalling windows followed by 4 days of reinstalling fsx and all its add ons just gives me the hump , why cant we just copy and paste the whole caboodle from one drive to another???????????????

There is a way of doing what you suggest for FSX stuff mate, was reading about it the other night.

But yeah, these new VFR photo scenery add-ons take up a lot of space and managing, I should be receiving the VFR Scottiish South vol 8 scenery tomorrow if our Postie does his job, so I'm on my FSX PC doing some maintenance and looking at available HD space for its 55 GB needed space and where I will install it.

As an example, this is what I do ... I have Win 7 64 OS on one SSD (60GB OCz Agility 3) my main FSX drive I treated myself to a pretty expensive OCz Vertex 3 240 GB, looking at my current FSX install that is pretty lean just now ... I can install my new 55 GB scenery tomorrow to the same SSD as FSX and still have a lot of space free, but at the end of the day its still a small drive, just amazingly quick at loading flights in FSX.

What I've done before with a massive install of FSX and same drives is use both SSD's the way I did before, but there is nothing stopping you putting scenery such as this on yet another HD and folder, so long as you point to the scenery on its install, FSX will find it ... in my case this was a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor, its the next best thing to an SSD IMHO, but even modern fast 1, 2 or even 3TB drives would be fine ... you can install lots of FSX scenery especially to a different drive to your native FSX drive and not see any real performance deficit over SSD's over more loading time before a flight ... once a flight is loaded in FSX, it does not matter the speed of drive in my findings.

With modern PC's, installing FSX and its add ons over two or three drives does not hurt it, initial loading times might take longer, but we don't get the flight stutter we used to see on older versions of MS FS using older PC hardware and limited data transfer bandwith like IDE and suchlike.

[britfrog 180]

Just had a look at my hard drive and i only have 83gb avail, jeez the thought of buying a larger 2tb drive then going through all the palaver of reinstalling windows followed by 4 days of reinstalling fsx and all its add ons just gives me the hump , why cant we just copy and paste the whole caboodle from one drive to another???????????????

There is a way of doing what you suggest for FSX stuff mate, was reading about it the other night.

But yeah, these new VFR photo scenery add-ons take up a lot of space and managing, I should be receiving the VFR Scottiish South vol 8 scenery tomorrow if our Postie does his job, so I'm on my FSX PC doing some maintenance and looking at available HD space for its 55 GB needed space and where I will install it.

As an example, this is what I do ... I have Win 7 64 OS on one SSD (60GB OCz Agility 3) my main FSX drive I treated myself to a pretty expensive OCz Vertex 3 240 GB, looking at my current FSX install that is pretty lean just now ... I can install my new 55 GB scenery tomorrow to the same SSD as FSX and still have a lot of space free, but at the end of the day its still a small drive, just amazingly quick at loading flights in FSX.

What I've done before with a massive install of FSX and same drives is use both SSD's the way I did before, but there is nothing stopping you putting scenery such as this on yet another HD and folder, so long as you point to the scenery on its install, FSX will find it ... in my case this was a 300GB Western Digital Velociraptor, its the next best thing to an SSD IMHO, but even modern fast 1, 2 or even 3TB drives would be fine ... you can install lots of FSX scenery especially to a different drive to your native FSX drive and not see any real performance deficit over SSD's over more loading time before a flight ... once a flight is loaded in FSX, it does not matter the speed of drive in my findings.

With modern PC's, installing FSX and its add ons over two or three drives does not hurt it, initial loading times might take longer, but we don't get the flight stutter we used to see on older versions of MS FS using older PC hardware and limited data transfer bandwith like IDE and suchlike.

very interesting! i thought it all had to be on the same drive, i take on everything that you say , i have 4 hard drives 1 specifically for fsx and i really want to avoid a reinstallation, the only reservation i have about your setup are the ssd's they have such a huge failure rate, i wonder if the preformance gain is worth it?

thanks for the thoughts

[M31 0]

and i really want to avoid a reinstallation, the only reservation i have about your setup are the ssd's they have such a huge failure rate, i wonder if the preformance gain is worth it?

thanks for the thoughts

This might be better off on the hardware forum ...

Good questions ... sometimes, especially after a format and a new PC build especially its best to just install everything afresh IMHO.

I really don't think there is any evidence to support theroys that SSD's have a failure rate more than mechanical HD's, if anything its the other way about, SSD's have no moving parts, don't wear out the same as mechanical parts ... and there is a lot more to it than that ... I posted this here on my research on SSD's.

...http://forum.mutleys...sd-hard-drives/

And I still stand by them.

They are PC hardware enthusiast drive's just now for sure, but the prices are rapidly coming down all the time ... I was seeing less than £1 per GB for some drives last week, its less than that now for some SSD drives, for sure and especially after Thailand recovers from the current traditional HD price slump, and the HD market gets back to level again, SSD's will gain in volume, lower in price and so on

I'm well over two years in to my first second gen SSD ... its never missed a beat ... my new SB 2600K rig with two 3rd gen SSD's, apart from flashing them for peace of minds sake to latest firmware ... no problems.

Trust me, in a few years time we'll be looking back at mechanical HD's in the same way we looked at the old 5.25 and 3.5 Floppy drives.

Obsolete

[M31 0]

Anyway, just finished installing Playsims VFR Scotland south, in the end I installed it on my Velociraptor along with my other Scotland VFR scenery and leaving FSX on the SSD it works fine, wont spoil Brian's forthcoming review by saying too much apart from I feel it was well worth the wait I'll just point out one aspect of the install that caught me out though, right at the end it asks if I have VFR England adjoining scenery installed (Yes/No) as it was looking for it and could not find it ... I actually do have the England volumes but had not got round to installing them again, I'll probably need to uninstall Scotland South, Install The England volumes again and then install Scotland south to make sure it all runs as well as possible, the only other thing I did was move my Scotflight scenery entry's to the top again and this seems to work fine (mostly) Edinburgh castle needs a little more work from Scotflight and I know they are working on an update for the scenery.

I hope its not too long for the remaining two Scotland volumes