I have FSX on a 1 Tb WD Black, and use O&O defrag once in a while...Now I´ve stumbled upon something called "shortstroking" - anyone here have experience with this, and possibly see any benefits?http://www.techarp.c....aspx?artno=691

In essence I have short stroked my FSX drive by dedicating the drive to it.Using the outer disc is the fastest hence the reason it is recommended to dedicate FSX to its own drive (mechanical only).Defragging with a program like O&O also helps limit head movement.Partitions have their place i.e. large TB drives where you want to give FSX the outer partition and use the remaining for storage but I would never run an application from the second partition. Good benefits if properly done.

Thanks for the explanation...I´ve made a 300 Gb partition on the 1 Tb WDC, and ran two HD Tune Pro tests.I dunno how to upload images here, but I can tell you that the benchmark with "short stroke" has an access time of 6.62 ms, and burst rate at 190.2 MB/s.The regular 1 Tb benchmark shows access time at 12.1 ms and burst at 190.4 MB/s.CPU use 1.4 and 1.3%Does it show any performance difference in FSX?Hmmm... Not really noticeable!

Thanks for the explanation...I´ve made a 300 Gb partition on the 1 Tb WDC, and ran two HD Tune Pro tests.I dunno how to upload images here, but I can tell you that the benchmark with "short stroke" has an access time of 6.62 ms, and burst rate at 190.2 MB/s.The regular 1 Tb benchmark shows access time at 12.1 ms and burst at 190.4 MB/s.CPU use 1.4 and 1.3%Does it show any performance difference in FSX?Hmmm... Not really noticeable!

Access time is most criticle in small file reads, FSX uses large files. Once the head gets into a large FSX file it doesn't have to move so access time is moot (analogy). My access time on my Raid set is up there in the 12's as well but I can Random Read along with the good SSD's all day long and kick them out of the park on sequential. FSX is random read intensive.