Moving FS9 default scenery to another HDD?

[strider 0]

Is it possible to put the X:\Program Files\Microsoft Games\Flight Simulator 9\Scenery folder in a different location on a different hard drive and get FS9 to "find" and use it? I'm wondering if splitting this out would improve my micro-stutters which most seem to think are caused by HDD access time. I'm curious if something like this would split the "load" to 2 HDD's (FS9 already resides on a dedicated HDD) and help reduce these stutters.Vic

[strider 0]

Well. you moved your FS to a seperate HDD and you still have stutters. Perhaps its not a HDD issue? I run one SATA HDD 7200 with FS9 settings maxed with the highest resolutions available and multi monitors. I have no stutters. I also have an extremely high performance overclocked super cooled CPU! ?IMO all you would be accomplishing is burdening your CPU trying to locate files thus degrading performance even more..

Thanks for your reply, torkermax. Just to be sure we are talking of the same stutters...the one's I am experiencing are when turning an aircraft on the ground, thus loading new parts of the terrain/scenery and are very short. They basically result in a bit of "smoothness" loss and are not big hiccups. I have no drop in FPS reported during these events and if I'm not turning the aircraft...I have no stutters whatsoever. The way it was explained to me is that the bottleneck is getting the new textures required as I turn, from the HDD. Of course it was a "suggestion" given to me as not much else has helped, so far. I haven't really delved into manually OC'ing my RAM or CPU yet but have used the Rampage Extremes built in OC settings with no change. I'm no computer genius but it seems that FS9 is already having a bit of a delay locating files in it's present single disk configuration. Isn't the whole purpose of a RAID 0 array to "spread" the HDD access time between 2 HDD's and, theoretically, cut your access time in half? I'm just wondering if splitting the scenery/textures to another drive would allow 2 drives to divide the access time load.Windows XP sp2Asus Rampage Extreme (X48) MoBoIntel Core2 Quad Q9650, 3 ghznVidia GTX 260 OC'd (c:720, s:1480, m:1220)4 gb Crucial 3200 RAMASUS 26" LCD As we all know, FS9 doesn't use multiple CPU cores and pretty much maxes out the one it does, so CPU bottleneck could explain it. But I would think the stutters would happen all the time I was moving, whether on the ground or not...this is not the case. I can taxi straight, passing all sorts of detailed addon scenery, and not get any stuttering at all. Another symptom is AI aircraft loading...I try to use the most "friendly" models...but they are another thing that will show a small delay in loading if I haven't viewed them in a while (the textures having been removed from RAM and needing reloading from the HDD?). This is the last FS9 "hurdle" for me as everything else is working great. The ultimate solution offered is to update to Windows 7, add another 4 gb RAM (for a total of 8) and install FS9 on 2 of the highest access time HDD's available in a RAID 0 array. I'd hate to go through that expense only to find no improvement. In truth, as I said, this is the last little annoyance after many years of tweaking FS9, and my systems, to run perfectly...and I'm very close.Of course, the true ultimate solution would be to have a flight simulator program which used all your modern resources efficiently (including all CPU cores, RAM over 2 gb and your GPU's capabilities), was designed as a simulation first (with performance being Job #1), did not try to add new eye-candy to dated code with it's latest release and did not require me to buy all new addons to replace many hundreds of dollars of previous ones, as all are the case with FSX. S-I-G-H!

[N60JBravo 27]

I don't see any harm in moving that folder to wherever you want it.FS does not have to "hunt" for files, it knows exactly where to find them by reading the scenery.cfg.Which brings up an important point. If you do move that folder you will have to manually change the path to all the scenery areas before you start the sim. You will not be able to edit the paths in the Scenery Library. At least for the 5 areas that are Required=TRUE.If FS cannot find those five areas, I don't think it will start.I suppose you could copy that folder to the new drive, start the sim and then edit the paths (all 37 of them) to the new location.You can't hurt anything by trying, all you will lose is your time if you do it carefully.regards,Joe

[Debugger 0]

Hi Vic,if you run FS9 on Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can use NTFS soft links to achieve this.See Wikipedia and MSDN for instructions and technical details.I use it without any problems for some time now to distribute my FS9 installation on three disks.Hope this helps - Norman