What is the present recommendation for a two SATA drive setup?Is it XP on drive c: with FSX on another drive with all the additional scenery?orFSX on the same drive as the operating system with addon scenery on a separate drive?Also what about the location of the pagefile?ThanksH

We've had this a few times now. Suggest you try searching on `two hard drives` and `RAID`.Separate FS from scenery. Allcott

Thanks for your reply Allcott.I had tried searching on "separate drive" without too much luck.Cheers H

Hmm, with just `hard drive` I found these:http://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchhttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchhttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchhttp://forums.avsim.net/dcboard.php?az=sho...ing_type=searchDid you try `RAID` as a search function? I'm sure if you searched on that you'd be kept busy reading for hours.Allcott

Allcott,Thanks for the pointers, I have looked at them after reading your post. I had already picked up that Raid was not an option and not just because it would have meant a complete re-install of everything I have.I have two sata drives and now intend to install FSX onto the newest drive on its own with scenery and leave the operating system and swap on drive c:Thanks for your help.H

He might have been, but it wouldn't have been much use to him seeing as he wasn't asking about a RAID set up.For HiltonI posed this kind of question in another forum and was told that installing FS on a separate drive would not have much benefit.I'd be interested to see the opinions here though.I just keep XP on a separate partition (20gb) and FS with the rest of my programs (300gb)Steve

Hello HiltonFor my part I feel that in a 2-drive, non-RAID situation assuming both drives are the same speed, I would probably do the following:Hard Disk 1:OSApps (C:Program Files)FSsmall swap for memdumpHard Disk 2:SceneryPics, mp3, etc.whatever elseregular full size swapThe swapfile thing has been discussed here a lot, and it seems that WinXP needs a small swap on the boot drive, else you have potential for OOM (out of memory) errors.Most times then, your XP will use the big swap that's on a separate physical drive. Someone here is a big swapfile king and knows a lot about this...This, of course, assumes that both hd's are equal in performance.Yes this has been discussed somewhat, before, but if I recall, not to this level of specificity: 2 drives, equal speeds, non-raid.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

I think installing FSX on a seperate drive is the way to go.If you think about it, if you install the OS and FSX on the same drive and the OS is asking for something off the hard drive at the same time as FSX, then physically the heads could well have to wait until the OS is finished doing its thing until it is free to retrieve the FSX info.

>I think installing FSX on a seperate drive is the way to go.>>If you think about it, if you install the OS and FSX on the>same drive and the OS is asking for something off the hard>drive at the same time as FSX, then physically the heads could>well have to wait until the OS is finished doing its thing>until it is free to retrieve the FSX info.Yes but the natuire of the question is: Does that benefit more than having different parts of FSX on different drives? If you think about it logically, the actual OS calls must remain at a pretty stable level, running effectively as a `background` process when the core application is FSX.exe. So might it not be better to have say, FSX on the same drive as the OS< but with as many of the scenery files as possible on another drive, to deeal with co-incident calls on the read/write head which are sirely large in size and frequency when calling from within the running app?That was certainly the case with FS9, where I tried both ways and found a clear advantage to having FS9 on a separate drive from as much of the scenery as possible, AND NO DIFFERENCE AT ALL when it was located away from the OS (my OS is held in a separate partition on one hard drive, with the other hard drive used for specific applications and files/folders). So for me, with FS9, there was no `logic` to what you propose. Do you have any justification for what you suggest?I received today, primarily to cater for the UK VFR Gen-X scenery for FSX which I plan on installing over Xmas, an external Western Digital 320gig USB 2.0 7,200rpm drive, and that will leave me with a total of three physical hard drives, and while I wait for the VFR scenery I have the scope to shuffle things around to see if what was true for FS9 still holds good for FSX. As the first step, I'm moving FS9 to the external drive as that is already split with the scenery on another hard drive, so should be a useful yardstick for what might be achieved with FSX. Frankly, FSX for me is nothing more than a bench-testing tool at the moment, so if I get any improvement from moving FS9 I'll be happy.Allcott

Great info shared. If a person does keep their FS on a separate drive, wouldn't they need to backup their config file to match their program and scenery files if they were to either have to reinstall, or a more realistic scenario, move their FS9 environment to their new FSX system in the not too distant future.I have read a folderfull of posts on this subject in many different forums, yet not once has the issue of having your config file (which I believe MUST reside on the OS drive in "app files", (and is usually hidden) matched (or backedup) to your app files on another drive.Many of us have config files that are highly tuned to the app and data files they support. Cheers

>I have read a folderfull of posts on this subject in many>different forums, yet not once has the issue of having your>config file (which I believe MUST reside on the OS drive in>"app files", (and is usually hidden) matched (or backedup) to>your app files on another drive.>That is why I personally do not like Microsoft's who idea of having a C:DOCUMENTS and SettingsApplication DataFS9 etc. etc.implementation. I feel like each application should have all of its files in its directory. In other words, the FS9.cfg file ought to be in the E:FS2004 dir.It seems counter-logical to have parts of an app spread all over creation.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2530 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8, WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian

>Great info shared. If a person does keep their FS on a>separate drive, wouldn't they need to backup their config file>to match their program and scenery files if they were to>either have to reinstall, or a more realistic scenario, move>their FS9 environment to their new FSX system in the not too>distant future.>>I have read a folderfull of posts on this subject in many>different forums, yet not once has the issue of having your>config file (which I believe MUST reside on the OS drive in>"app files", (and is usually hidden) matched (or backedup) to>your app files on another drive.>>Many of us have config files that are highly tuned to the app>and data files they support. >>CheersWhile it must reside there, the rest is so easily catered for its almost laughable - the physical address of FS and all the addons is inside the cfg files. What I did with the scenery.cfg file in FS9 (and also with a test run with FSX) is to simply copy the addon scenery to a new position for testing - to the separate hard drive, for example, then copy the scanery .cfg, rename the old scenery.cfg to scenery.orig so it wasn't being read by the sim, then open the scenery .cfg I'd copied, and just physcally changed the file address of any file or folder that I had moved, using block change (find and replace) in Wordpad. That way, I could make a direct comparison without risking the existing FS installation simply by swapping the scenery.cfgThere is no risk to any highly-tuned file or folder, and you can still use the original FS9 or FSX .cfg in exactly the same way by copying and making changes inside the .cfg file itself. ONce you've decided on the permanent file structure, you delete the files you don't need, and change the Registry entry for the sim, if you moved that, and you're good to go. Occasionally you might find an addon that needs to be pointed to the new location, but mostly its that straightforward. Allcott