See most or many of you guys run with two hard drives, one dedicated to the operating system and the other FSX. Just returned from a friends place who has an IT business. The subject of my planned new system came up and the installation of two hard drives. He could not understand why you would have the FSX alone on its own drive, it should be on the same drive as the OS if you are after performance.What he suggested was not to dump your old system, (mine is intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz (2 CPU's) with Win XP Home (32)) but network it with the new i5 2500K, Win7 Ultimate and use the old system for the usual every say applications, MS Office, emails etc. Dedicate the new system solely to FSX and PMDG 737NGX with weather and scenery addons. Agrees with the idea of two hard drives but both to be 1TB, then have the OS and FSX on one, call it the master C:\drive and the second drive say E:\ to have a back up copy (ghost)of FSX.I guess the difference here is solely having the new system dedicated to FSX and nothing else and a back-up copy.How do you guys find running with two hard drives, one dedicated to OS and everyday programs(say 300GB) and the other solely to FSX plus weather and scenery addons(1TB)?

See most or many of you guys run with two hard drives, one dedicated to the operating system and the other FSX. Just returned from a friends place who has an IT business. The subject of my planned new system came up and the installation of two hard drives. He could not understand why you would have the FSX alone on its own drive, it should be on the same drive as the OS if you are after performance.What he suggested was not to dump your old system, (mine is intel Core 2 Duo CPU E8500 @ 3.16GHz (2 CPU's) with Win XP Home (32)) but network it with the new i5 2500K, Win7 Ultimate and use the old system for the usual every say applications, MS Office, emails etc. Dedicate the new system solely to FSX and PMDG 737NGX with weather and scenery addons. Agrees with the idea of two hard drives but both to be 1TB, then have the OS and FSX on one, call it the master C:\drive and the second drive say E:\ to have a back up copy (ghost)of FSX.I guess the difference here is solely having the new system dedicated to FSX and nothing else and a back-up copy.How do you guys find running with two hard drives, one dedicated to OS and everyday programs(say 300GB) and the other solely to FSX plus weather and scenery addons(1TB)?

Hi i got 2 hard drives one dedicated to fsx and the other for o/s systems and games etc and having no troubles at all runs great

This is really weird. I really hope the IT business of your friend is holding water if he is giving such advices...I've been running 3 HDDs (1 system, 2 in RAID for storage) for over 4 or 5 years so here goes:theory 1 - separate drive for system (windows + program files) = TRUE. This way you keep your system files from your data. Easier to maintain, nothing more. And when you are waiting the scenery to load you don't want your windows to get swapping for exampletheory 2 - system drive has superior performance than the storage drive = FALSE. HDDs have rather different set of tech specs upon which you can determine their performance. RPM for example is the most important. In most cases the system drive has less performance than the other disks because it has to complete much more disk operations related to the OS. So unless you use something much faster (as SSD for example) there is no way putting FSX or any other game on the system drive that will benefit you speed wise.theory 3 - keep your old pc for "everyday" tasks = LOL. This one made me laugh so hard. Let me see if I understood correctly: you just bought a new shiny rig, containing more or less 2 more CPU cores, twice the RAM, twice the disk space, twice god knows what else. And you will keep it just for FSX? I thought the more powerful the PC, the more things you can use it for... but maybe I'm wrong. But feel free and keep the old one. You will do the same tasks not on 1 but on 2 PCs, using more electricity and taking more space in your home. I won't even mention the noise.theory 4 - both have to be 1TB = FALSE. It's all a matter of budget really (and personal preference) If you run Windows 7, it has built-in backup utility so you can backup your FSX installation to DVD disks for example. The media can be anything from USB flash drive, CD, DVD, HDD, tape drive, you name it.cheersIgnat Ignatov

The idea of having FSX in a separate drive is to avoid other processes accesing the drive hence moving the header away from where FSX needs it, which increases access timeI have both FSX and the OS in the same VRap because I don't see that having any kind of impact neither in performance nor in visuals, but the idea of "keeping both FSX & the OS in the same drive for better performance"... I don't get that. Doesn't make sense to me

This is really weird. I really hope the IT business of your friend is holding water if he is giving such advices...I've been running 3 HDDs (1 system, 2 in RAID for storage) for over 4 or 5 years so here goes:

Your comment made me think... Would you guys recommend using a RAID0 for speeding up access to FSX disks, as an alternative to using SSDs?cheers,Jakub

Your comment made me think... Would you guys recommend using a RAID0 for speeding up access to FSX disks, as an alternative to using SSDs?cheers,Jakub

Hi Jakub,from my experience, sadly RAID0 is nowhere near the performance of SSDs when it comes to FSX alone. The thing is that FSX is comprised of many thousand small files. For example my current FSX folder is 19.6 GB / 93660 files / 3833 folders with only iFly 737, LSH Maddog and Wilco A319/320/321 in it. RAID configurations are way more effective when working with bigger files and in reality it is even slower (not sure how much though) to run FSX from a RAID array than from a single drive. On the other hand two normal HDDs are much cheaper than a SSD. So it's a matter of how you use your PC (if not only for FSX), because a RAID will give you double the speed of one HDD for many other things. If you are not on a tight budget, just put FSX on a SSD and it'll fly :) If you want fast and responsive storage for general use, go for RAID. And if money are not an issue, combine them both! :POther than that, I think if you have enough RAM, FSX is not so HDD dependent. RAM/VGA/CPU are more important in general if you are not parked on Aerosoft mega airport Heathrow T5 on a crowded IAVO/VATSIM evening where TONS of textures and liveries have to be read from the HDD.I am waiting the delivery of my first SSD in a week or two, so I will be able to run tests :)Nevertheless, I am really curious what Ryan would say on that matter, he has to have more expertise.cheersIgnat

Your comment made me think... Would you guys recommend using a RAID0 for speeding up access to FSX disks, as an alternative to using SSDs?cheers,Jakub

RAID0 improves transfer rates, but access time remains almost unchanged, while SSD's main asset is precisely access time (100 times faster)Transfer rate is beneficial when reading/writing large files, which is not the case in FSX.You can always install FSX in a short stroke partition at the beginning on the drive if you want to optimize performance, but it's really not worth it to go with RAIDS or complicated solutions IMHOA Spinpoint F3 1TB is dirt cheap and quite fastEDIT: Twice Ninja'd, damn c'mon Ignat! :(

Edited July 27, 201114 yr by dazz

Your comment made me think... Would you guys recommend using a RAID0 for speeding up access to FSX disks, as an alternative to using SSDs?cheers,Jakub

Just remember in a Raid 0 configuration, if 1 HD crashes, you lose data contained on both of them... but yes, they are reliable so it's a pretty small risk.Talking about performance, i'm not sure you would gain anything significant going Raid 0. Sure, textures will load a bit faster but that's about it.I have and SSD at home, on a day to day basis it's really great, but i must say there's only a really marginal effect on FSX (it loads a lot faster which is nice but after that, pretty much nothing).

Hi,I have bought 2 500 GB HDDs. Not because of the speed, it was because they were a little bit cheaper than one 1TB HDD. (Don't ask me why, the shopkeeper ment because of some copyrights). Until now I like them very much. I have made 3 partions. 100 GB C:/ , 400 GB E:/ and 500 GB F:/ So the OS can work with his own HDD.FSX and some other games are on F:/, the most of my programms are on E:/ and C:/ for the OS and some nasty drivers which only worked on C:/Worked very well, wasn't a bad thing.

EDIT: Twice Ninja'd, damn c'mon Ignat! :(

:( :(