I'm planning a new system and am curious how you all are using your hard drives. I am planning on Vist ultimate 64. I use PMDG almost exclusively (waiting for NG737).Do you put FSX in it's own partition or own hard drive?eg..OS in c: drive /programs in c: drive /data in d: drive /FSX in e: drive.Is there an advantage to having FSX in own drive as opposed to just a subdirectory?I'm thinking there might be in terms of doing defrags.Thanks for any help.Don

Hi Don,Although I'm new to PMDG and relatively new to FSX, I've found that having FSX and all scenery files on a separate drive does help.I have two Seagate 500GB drives raided together for OS, prog files and other stuff. This givs ~1TB of space. Then I have two Western Digital Raptor drives (~140GB each IIRC) raided together to give ~240GB of space. I currently have around 180GB used on the raptors for FSX, which leaves some space for other addons/sims/games. I think the raptors are one of the fastest drives on the market. at least they were when I bought them.It's worth buying a decent defragmenting tool too. The Vista one if poor compared to the commercially available ones. Not only do they make the data contiguous, it groups associated data together in the same place to reduce seek times. I use Ultimate Defrag 2008 (~$20), but ther are others (see PMDG Ops page). Well worth the investment.HTH.Ed

If you put FSX on its own drive as the only thing there, you will see an improvement if you use something like O&O Defrag or the free jkdefrag, which can position files in name order at the start of the disk. That outside edge of the disc is much faster due to the physics of angular motion - a point on the surface near the outer edge moves a larger distance in the same amount of time as a point further in toward the center of the disc does, which by definition makes it faster.I don't do this myself however, I just make sure I keep the disk well defraged - I'm using a combination of Perfect Disk 2008 (for it's superior offline system file mode) and O&O 8.6 for its Complete/NAME mode that sorts the files. I tried Ultimate Defrag 2008 and it seemed very buggy to me and failed to move some large files I have. (music recording related stuff)If you were going to get the absolute best thing for this though, it's hard to get any better than the new Western Digital VelociRaptor drive:http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...pk=VelociRaptorPricey, but you can bet that thing is fast and it's gotta be cool to actually watch the read head in motion through the enclosure window.

Thanks guys,That is exactly the kind of info I was hoping to get.Don