I decided to add a dedicated Hard Drive for MSFS to my system and will be installing this weekend. I have heard that if I partition it, I will get better performance. Any thoughts on this?

You heard wrong. No performance difference. It is simply much better practice to have a seperate partition for mSFS for 2 reasons: defragging is much easier (your C usually changes daily beacise of internet, etc) and in case you ever have to reformat and reinstall your OS your MSFS is protected since it is totally isolated from your OS.Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

Yup and if you partition and have the MSFS on the second partition it get moved further in to the disc that gives slower read and write times. Harddrives is the fastest the further to their edge the data is :)Partitioning do help from defragmenting. Me when I only had one harddrive I used to have the second partition for junk and storage and the first partition for OP system and flight sim. Then I just backed it up with Norton Ghost.Now I have OP and MSFS on my Raptor and my second harddrive I have a partiton of 4 gig where I have the partition file, internet files and ev trashbin files. And then have all junk on the second partition on my slower harddrive.

I won't say yes or no, BUT!!! :-lolVisit http://www.xmission.com/~comphope/jargon/hdd.htm and review FAT32 and NTFS. These two formats can be used FAT32 (Win98/ME/XP) and NTFS (NT/2000/XP).The problem with FAT32 is the larger the disk partition size, the larger the clusters http://www.xmission.com/~comphope/fat32.htm ,Features. The larger the clusters size, the more waste of disk space. A small 1KB file might take up the same disk space as a 31.9KB file if the cluster size is 32KB. If you have a bunch of small files and large cluster size, you can see that you will waste space.NTFS has a linear cluster size no matter what the partition size. I believe there are several cluster sizes to choose.All in all it depends on the size of the disk drive, the Operating System to be used, and personal preference. I like having partitions, expecially when I want to reformat but don't want to lose some files. I can transfer the files to a different partition until the original partition is reformatted. I also think it keeps things in some order, such as, Office Applications on one partition, Gaming on another partition, Software Design Tools on a third, and so forth.W. Sieffert

What Mr. Sieffert said.Greg

Also if you want the bigger cluster size you can have that with ntfs as well so FAT32 is really no good. If you couldn