Need Hard Drive Knowledge Please

[Guest WindBeneathMyWings]

Fellow Simmers, Hi all once again needing some help before I make a step here please. I have Amd Athlon 3200+ 64bit with 2 gigs of ram and a Raptor 10,000rpm 80gig. Well My OS and FlightSim are all on this drive. I am max capacity with lot's and lot's of money tied into this drive with add-on's etc. What I was thinking about doing is just purchasing another 80 gig raptor to fill my other open SATA slot. Well one concern is if I do this and continue to buy add-on's later such as terrain mesh or move my Ground Enviroment Pro over to the other drive and make more ground terrain textures etc. Will it operate ok or should all of it be on one drive? My next thought was to buy a bigger 7200rpm drive 300-500 gig's. Keep my OS on the 10,000 rpm raptor and somehow try to image all my flight sim stuff over to the 300-500 gig drive. BUT I AM SCARED!! (LOL)... Would either one work ok and would somehow trying to image all my stuff over onto another drive me to dangerous and maybe cause alot of error's? And if it can be done what would be the BEST program to use to Image things over? Thanks, Josh

[scott967 62]

Those raptors are good but I'm not sure spending max bux on HD really shows up in FS performance.I would consider getting a second SATA 7200 rpmer. I recently picked up the WD caviar 16SE with a 250 size and they are reasonably priced IMHO. You can move some or all scenery to the new drive, just drag it across after installing and formating the new drive. Then just edit the scenery.cfg and do a "find and replace" to change the path to your new drive.Or move some non-flight sim stuff. You can for instance move your "my documents" folder including my pictures, videos, etc to the new drive and mayube that will free up enough space so your FS install is not affected.(open up windows explorer, right click on "my documents" folder and click on "properties" to change the location of this folder).scott s..

[Guest neslesman]

This is a timely topic for me as I'm setting my new system up from the get go, for the first time. I'm planning on putting FS9 on it's own 7200 SATA drive with just inert prescheduled backups from the main OS drive making up the balance of that drive (in a seperate partition???). The main drive will have the XP operating system and everything else including FS backups. Both are 320 GB.I think I know the answer but am not sure. Should I have an XP operating system on that FS9 (eventually FSX too) drive too or will the main HD operating system be fine with FS9 on the other drive.FS9 would back also back up to the main SATA drive on a schedule. An external HD and DVDs will also back up older ultra safe backups, off site.Call me anal, it won't be the first time. LOL Between my friend having just lost 10 years of his work to a computer thief and myself recently losing 5 years to a bug I'm going backup crazy this time and want to get this system set up proper right from the get go, with the future in mind as well.I hope this doesn't sound like a hijack as I felt it was on topic as far as an FS install and hard drives go.

[Guest kittie]

Right now I'm running 2 Raptors 36 gigs in raid (giving me one 74gig drive). I have FS9 on the 'c' drive along with all your other normal programs. I also have a SATA 200gig drive (WD I think) as a partitioned drive for everything else.I run my add-on scenery folder on the 200g and I run FSGlobal also on the 200gig but in a different partition than the add-on scenery.Everything runs great.I do notice the difference with the raptors raided. I hear this come up now and then, I say if you can afford to raid 2 raptors together, it's a BIG difference in loading and even when flightsim has to load textures while flying (If you don

[scott967 62]

I have a system sort of like yours, except I have my raptor array partitioned with a 10g primary for Win XP and the rest as a logical partition, where I have all my apps (including FS) and page file installed. I've been doing the partition thing since way back when I backfit a 20mb drive into my original IBM PC-1 (Made FS2 run great -- no blurries:) ). I have a 2nd WD caviar 16mb cache 250g for data (and I also partitioned off 20g to run Vista in dual-boot for testing). I bought a cheap Sammy IDE ATA-100 drive that I stuck in a dual USB/firewire external box for backups.scott s..

[oqvist 11]

There is no problems running different drives. I have run the os on one drive. The Swap file on another. FS 9 on one and the scenery on a fourth harddrive works fine lol.If you are worried don

[Guest allcott]

On a related note, a question for you FSX beta players.I currently have FS9 on its own F: hard drive, but with Addon scenery and all `stored` addons like GE Pro on a physically separate drive, which is also used for backups.I recently re-partitioned the F: drive to cater for the arrival of FSX (I somehow doubt I'll ever have both sims running at the same time!) but I need to know whether to keep this pseudo-RAID approach for FSX?Clearly, the number and size of textures in FSX is going to be substantially larger than FS9, but my experience with my FS9 configuration, now at 22 gigs, leads me to believe there is a definite speed advantage to texture loading at startup, when two read/write heads can be used instead of one.Does this advice hold good for FSX?Allcott

[oqvist 11]

[Guest allcott]

It's not so much a question of defragmentation, I use O & O Defragmenter on a regular basis as I work a lot with large sound files and have to :), its more a question of making the decision now, or throw FSX in, then possibly change everything later on. And I know I'll get confused as long as FS9 is still installed! Using Partition Magic I re-size, re-partition and reallocate free space at will, but if there is the opportunity in the file structure of the new sim to do something else as well - like for example offload the aircraft folder, or if someone has already tested the loading times with scenery `outsourced` from another physical drive, I'd be grateful for any reports. It's just that I've got a few days off, so I thought I'd reinstall Windows XP, clean out the Registry and consider the partitions before I start the nasty job of cutting back on FS9. Done the first two, time to do the next!Allcott