I just added a second hard drive to my system (actually it's a third, because my primary is two HDDs in Raid-0).Anyway, I'm wondering if it would benefit FS2004 performance to move some or all of the Addon Scenery to the second hard drive? I have quite a bit, both payware and freeware.If this would benefit performance significantly, how would you go about doing it without removing each one individually then adding it again. Is there a simple way to use "replace" in notepad to make things easier?Just a thought.Thanks

Hi, yes there is. You can simply copy the scenery over to the new drive, then add the path to the scenery.cfg entry in notepad.Don

There is another way to do it, but it's really only useful if all you are using the second hard drive for is scenery. I'll tell you about it anyway-In Windows 2000 or XP (any versions) you can mount a drive to a folder. What this would accomplish is transparently access/write anything in the scenery folder to the new hard drive. It may be a good idea to do this with the entire FS folder. If you're interested-Rename your FS folder to something else (Remember what is was called though!)Create a new folder, with the REAL name (what the other one used to be called). Leave the folder empty-Go into administrative tools/computer management and open the disk management tool.If the hard drive you added is brand new/unformatted, you can right click it and select "new volume" (I'm going off memory- so bear with me). If it won't let you, you need to right click and make it a dynamic disk. A wizard will open and ask what type of volume you want to create. Select the option to mount to a folder. Select the empty FS9 folder you just created. Finish the wizard.You can now copy all the contents of the FS folder into the empty one, and what it actually does is copy everything to the new hard drive.This will definately improve performance as long as you are using an ultra DMA drive.

You can easily open scenery.cfg in notepad and use the Find and Replace feature to replace the path.Your sceneries would currently show:Local=Addon ScenerySuppose you want to replace this with the path for your new harddrive, e.g.:Local=E:FS SceneryTo do this for all sceneries, you would enter "Addon Scenery" in the Find box, and "E:FS Scenery" in the Replace box.I found that having big sceneries like Megascenery, VFR Photographic Scenery etc. on their own harddrive, reduces loading times slightly and if you want to do a search for a file in Windows, it doesn't have to search through the hundreds of thousands of little texture files that make up these sceneries which speeds things up.For the advanced users - Did you know that it's possible to "mount" an NTFS partition inside a folder, just like you would in Linux? I have sucessfully mounted a partition on my second harddrive to the FS9Aircraft folder, allowing me to keep FS and all the aircraft on separate partitions for increased loading speed of aircraft textures, VC etc:http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/75022.gifIt would also be possible to use this method for sceneries, but because you can specify the path using scenery.cfg it's probably easier to do it that way. This "trick" might come in handy if certain payware sceneries refuse to live anywhere other than in the Addon Scenery folder however.

Thanks for all the replies.I've just decided to take the "easy" way out and do a find and replace... using the addon scenery folder on the extra drive.I do have a complete backup of FS9 on this extra drive, so if there are any other tips as ways to use it similar to this, I'd love to hear them.Thanks again.

I've got all my addons on a separate drive along with a Backup copy of FS9( I renew the backup whenever I've made signigficant changes).I have found that since moving the addon scenery to the separate drve ( D in this case) that ,as said above somewhere, it does help speed things up a little.Not only that , but ,in saving the backup ,it means the addon stuff doesnt have to be copied- cut's down the copy time as some of tghe mesh (US etc )is in gigabyte sizes) .Dave