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jfri

Removing FSX from my raptor, good idea?

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I now have a WD 150 Gb SATAI 10000 rpm harddrive. I have put Windows XP and both FS9 and FSX (with addons) on it. It is filled to slightly more than 50% and I have read that is when the HD slows down. FS9 is my main sim due to my system. My question is what gain could it be to remove FSX from the raptor? Will that significantly speed up FS9 harddrive access? With ultimate defrag I have put FS9 on the outer tracks and then FSX.What if I moved FSX+UTX+GEX+FSGenesis mesh+a few addonplanes to the outer track of my secondary harddrive, a IDE 7200 rpm 250 Gb drive where I have other games and stuff. It's now filled to about 20%. Would FSX slow down regarding hd access? As it is now I don't feel the raptor being a very fast drive.My systemAMD 64 4000+ (OC 2.6 GHz)2 Gb PC3200 RAMNVIDIA 7950GT 512M DDR3 AGPWD Raptor 150 Gb SATAI 10000 rpm and Seagate 250 Gb IDE 7200 rpmWin XP Home

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You shouldn't move it outside Your fastest HDD. Do a defrag and put FS9 as close to the first sectors as possible, together with the Windows. FSX will load much longer on 7200rpm HDD. Since You are using it not as often as FS9, it could be at further part of drive. You can fill it up to 90% - not defragmented HDD will behave exacly as almost empty one.The begining of disk is faster then the last sectors. It is opposite to CD/DVD and other 'optic' stuff

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Guest simjunkie
You shouldn't move it outside Your fastest HDD. Do a defrag and put FS9 as close to the first sectors as possible, together with the Windows. FSX will load much longer on 7200rpm HDD. Since You are using it not as often as FS9, it could be at further part of drive. You can fill it up to 90% - not defragmented HDD will behave exacly as almost empty one.The begining of disk is faster then the last sectors. It is opposite to CD/DVD and other 'optic' stuff
I must disagree. It's never a good idea to fill a HDD up past 55-65% because the performance will drop significantly. Yes the 10,000rpm raptor is the best drive for either FSX or FS9, but regardless the drive keep it under 65% full absolute max or drive performance will suffer.A complete/name defrag that puts the app (FSX or FS9) on the outer edges of the disk or in alphabetical order is what you want. But Windows, FSX, and FS9 plus the addons is a LOT to put on that one 150Gb raptor. -jk

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I must disagree. It's never a good idea to fill a HDD up past 55-65% because the performance will drop significantly. Yes the 10,000rpm raptor is the best drive for either FSX or FS9, but regardless the drive keep it under 65% full absolute max or drive performance will suffer.A complete/name defrag that puts the app (FSX or FS9) on the outer edges of the disk or in alphabetical order is what you want. But Windows, FSX, and FS9 plus the addons is a LOT to put on that one 150Gb raptor. -jk
Then I'm at the limit since I see my raptor is filled to 57% so yet there should be no greater loss in GD performence or? But of course I might add further addons. And Yes that one 150 Gb raptor feels a little small and FS takes up a lot of space.

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Guest simjunkie
Then I'm at the limit since I see my raptor is filled to 57% so yet there should be no greater loss in GD performence or? But of course I might add further addons. And Yes that one 150 Gb raptor feels a little small and FS takes up a lot of space.
Yeah, it's just the nature of the beast. All that space and we can only use half of it, LOL! Pure storage it doesn't matter, fill that sucker up. I have three 300Gb Vraptors. OS and Xplane on 1, FSX/UTX/Traffic/aircraft/mesh on another, and photoscenery on the third. Each drive is less than 50% full. The photoscenery drive is at "capacity" at close to 140Gb, the FSX drive has another 75Gb of "capacity" left (1/4 full), and the OS drive only has 45Gb of stuff on it. And I format the 2 FSX drives to 64kb clusters so I'm giving up even more space. Then there's a 1Tb drive for backup/storage. All that space that can't really be put to use, sigh! I'm not even sure that SDDs will be able to be filled up without slowing down. -jk

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It's never a good idea to fill a HDD up past 55-65% because the performance will drop significantly
So I have some special disks in my rig. Or my Everest test are not reliable. There is no drop in performance regardless of fill-up. Yes, there is a significant, when the drive is highly defragmented. My 1/3 free raptor right after filling it up with FSX and all the add-ons wouldn't let me to get rid of the blurries in fast flights. Defrag - and HDD has the performance exactly as a new, empty one. No blurries anymore.You can find the perf. decrease when You have 98% or above - there is no place for a new files in one piece, so they're spread across the entire drive.

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I must disagree. It's never a good idea to fill a HDD up past 55-65% because the performance will drop significantly.
On what do you base this hypothesis? What is the performance drop at 80% full?

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Guest Nick_N
On what do you base this hypothesis? What is the performance drop at 80% full?
Basic geometry and the fact that Windows starts compacting and reducing the size of the MFT at 75% fullEven partition software can be dangerous to use once a drive hits 80-90% full. Regardless.. its not a hypothesis, its a fact. Although I place my personal max at 65%.. once a drive hits 75% full its all downhill on perf, very fast

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Basic geometry and the fact that Windows starts compacting and reducing the size of the MFT at 75% fullEven partition software can be dangerous to use once a drive hits 80-90% full. Regardless.. its not a hypothesis, its a fact. Although I place my personal max at 65%.. once a drive hits 75% full its all downhill on perf, very fast
I don't see any facts, just an hypothesis :(

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Guest Nick_N

Its easy enough to use Google, check places like MSDN, Western Digital, Seagate or even do some browsing at the electronic engineering sites on storage design and performance.... but its much, much easier to come into a forum, post "prove it" several times and let someone else do the homework for us.I really do not have the time to give lessons however in this case I will demo the issue, something anyone could do if they understood what they were looking at.HDTach/HDTune as I have mentioned are not a good benchmark for judging storage performance in their Sequential Read tests in relation to MSFS and how it accesses storage for data, however, those tests will clearly demonstrate what happens as the drive reads the full data capacity of the drive and anyone who wishes more information about how performance drops as the data capacity of a drive increases may look it up.Here is the 'crayon' method of demonstrating what happens without getting into how the disk controller maps LCNs to the PCN and how much WORSE this perf issue becomes once the MFT and other areas Windows reserves begins to be diminished especially in random access as the drive fills past the 75% mark.Now.. for the sake of simplicity and in the true sprit of the: "I don't see any facts, just an hypothesis" inquiry.. let

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According to all this it seems that I have lost very little performence so far and removing FSX would give very little increase in HD performence. Question is if I would notice any difference? But of course there is the issue about adding more addons

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Guest Nick_N
According to all this it seems that I have lost very little performence so far and removing FSX would give very little increase in HD performence. Question is if I would notice any difference? But of course there is the issue about adding more addons
As you said... "It is filled to slightly more than 50%"You are fine until you pass the 65-75% mark so as long as you do not exceed 75% with your addons and as the disk must access further and further into the data zone to read from the drive, you will see fairly equal perf. Once you hit that 75% mark storage perf falls, fast.. and the benchmarks above do not show what happens as those are generic tests. They do not demonstrate the Windows influence on file calls the drive must deal with in real world use which compounds the issue. If the benchmarks above included that real world influence, you would see the end of those graphs tumble much further, fasterThis is what SSD will eliminate. Eventually and as they evolve what they will do it deliver a 100% equal access/read result (up to about 90% full) and will not be influenced by the mechanical issues as cleary demonstrated above. In fact with current SSD design defragmenting data (which there is really no need with SSD) can actually reduce their life. They are 'write' sensitive to degeneration so the more access and writing going on the faster they degenerate... although that is getting better and better as they evolve.

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Guest Nick_N

Although I did not post the above demo images for the OP inquiry, everyone can see quite clearly why I prefer to remain at the 65% mark. Look at the HDTune graphs for MB/s and access time, which increases as the drive seeks further into the platter.The first 1/3 of the disk is where best access/read performance is seen and that is why large platter drives are much better than small ones baring the WD VelociRaptor due to its real world I/O and access performance (see the 500 compared to the 80), and, why moving the data to the edge of the platter works..With the 2nd 1/3 of the disk (or up to about 66% full) perf drops as access time increases however the loss can be overcome (somewhat) by the right defrag solution and strategy. It would not be economical to purchase a drive and only use 1/3rd of it.HoweverThe last 1/3 of the platter there is nothing one can do to overcome what happens from this point on. In combination with the access going sky high due to basic geometry and physics as you can see by the graphs, and, by Windows forcing the MFT to compact and locate at the end of the drive along with any paging operations that will force performance into the ditch very fast. Every time you call a file EVEN IF THAT FILE IS AT THE BEGINNING OF THE PLATTER, the MFT is accessed for Windows use and that means that head is seeking to the END of the disk no matter where the data being called is located.

and this is why I use and suggest the WD VelociRaptor over all other drives... Note the much 'flatter' curve and the fact that the access time is 1/2 that of the large platter drive and the 80GB small platter is totally out of its league

The perf still drops as there is no way to overcome that however the influence of the mechanical loss curve is no where near as high with a WD Vrap I really hope this helps people see what it is they are doing when they fill drives, buy slower 7200 drives even with larger plattersThats just the mechanical access aspecs of performance.. file performance is the other side and that is directly influenced by everything from the defrag to the controller the drive is plugged into as I clearly showed here: WD VRap on motherboard SATA http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?s=&...t&p=1558965WD VRap on PCIe hardware SATA http://forums1.avsim.net/index.php?s=&...t&p=1559031Note the file benchmarks go through the roof on the right controller solution. You add all this up and that is why I only use Vraps and a PCIe hardware controller card and do not let them grow past 65%. Also.. because a SATA drive spends less time on the buss when plugged into a PCIe controller card, the CPU is not busy playing with it, meaning, the faster the drive on that controller card the more CPU the application has to work with. Motherboard SATA in random access as a drive fills eats 10-15% of the CPU during file reads into physical memory. With a controller card and a fast drive that is diminished to about 4% or less. With the better VRap its not a requirement to place the drive on a controller card as that solution will feed data to the system faster than it will process that data to the screen, however, the advantage in such solutions is in recovered CPU cycles to the application. Class Dismissed .. and there will be a test on Monday! :(

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Guest Alphahawk3

Nick, LMAO.....I did not want to waste space by putting what you said in quotes but a nice course anyway...although I am not a developer I have been in the technical field for 30 plus years and a demo is always good. But who among us that has used a computer for more than a few months and not noticed how slow it gets when you fill a hard drive up to say 80 percent.....hard to believe someone would question that. No demo was really needed. You have a better temperament than me. Regards

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