Hello guys, I am new to the forum. I just ordered a new PC (only had a laptop), I want to play FSX and I want to install it on a separate partition. So I wonder how big a partition I should make for FSX? How much space does FSX occupy on your drives inlcuding all add-ons such as UTX, GEX, REX, GSGenesis, Active Sky etc..? I also plan to go ahead and install Windows 7, instead of Vista 64, as I will sooner or later move to W7.

My FSX partition is 225 GB, and I have 122 GB free.I am happy to have that space, and think, over time, at least 70 GB of the 125 could be used without too much problem.

Hey Rick, thanks for the detailed information. I feel a bit stupid really as, i should have said that I also have 2 other drives, a 1TB for storage and an 80gb for my OS. I did not mention this as I was considering purely the positioning of the photoscenery in relation to my FSX installation, not my complete set up. I should also add, I am planning to run the cards from an Areca 1210 raid controller card, to maximise performance. I have worked out that my FSX install should be approx 100Gb on the 150GB drive, the sceneries should take up about 400gb max on the 600GB raid array. Everything else will go on the 1TB drive. If you think it would be the most ideal scenario, I could install FSX and the photoscenery on the RAID array, and strip down the install so everything else that did not need to be installed into FSX goes on the 1TB drive, and probably get the whole install to about 400GB. Do you think this would be better than throughputting the date from one set of drives to another via the controller card? Cheers, Mark

Mark,Sorry it took so long for me to reply. Saw your reply just before I had to go to work, and just got home.You should be OK with FSX on the 150 (will leave you 33% free space) and the photoscenry on the RAID (will leave you 33% free space there also). Your overall systems specs shown in your signature are basically the same as mine. Your transfer speeds for the photoscenery should be good with the V-Raps and the RAID card. I'd try that configuration for now.Plan for the future, though. If you start acquiring any new large photosceneries, it won't take much to lower that free space on the 600 GB RAID drives when you start adding them. Just make sure you put only the things FSX really needs to run "real time" on the 150. Anything like GEX, FEX, flight planners like Flight Sim Commander or FSBuild...put those on the 1-Terabyte. You will run those outside of FSX and they don't need to be on the FSX drive. That includes something like FS Commander, even though it "connects" to FSX to display the moving map if you want to use it during your FSX session. There is no loss of performance in FSX if you do that.Rick