Hi all,

 

First up I just want to say hi to everyone, this is my first post here but I've been "lurking" in the forums for a little while and this seems like a great community. I'm fairly to new to FSX having graduated here from several combat flight sims and have been a PC gamer all my life, already I'm hooked and I think I'll be around for some time. One thing I will say is, this is an expensive hobby! Already I've spent more money than I have done on any other "game", but I don't mind supporting developers who create products with such depth and realism. The Lancair Legacy I bought as my first add-on plane (and learnt about here) is just stunning.

 

Anyway, in the spirit of economy I noticed that the Horizon Gen X VFR scenery was on sale at Flightstore so being a Kent boy born and bred, I took the plunge and ordered the Southern England and South Wales set. I've noticed the installation will probably run to about 30gb, and while I could comfortably fit this onto my 256gb SSD which FSX (and other addons) are installed on, if I'm to expand my collection of scenery I'm going to run up against space issues at some point.

 

It occurs to me therefore that it might be an idea to install this and any subsequent photographic scenery to my seperate (internal) 1TB HDD, which I'm not using for much right now apart from a download repository. The drive runs at 7200rpm and is SATA 3gbps so shouldn't have much of a problem RE read speeds, however I don't this for sure and I don't know whether it's even possible to crete a seperate scenery library outside of the default FSX folders.

 

So my question is, is it possible to do this and still keep my main FSX files on the SSD, and if so how do I do it? Also, is doing this going to cause me a problem with texture loading? I'm guessing the texture files are quite large, so if I'm going to notice real slowdowns it might be worth considering another, larger SSD to run FSX + all addons/scenery from.

 

I'm sorry if this has been covered before, I had a look through forums but couldn't find a definitive answer. Can anyone help me out?

 

Many thanks all,

 

James

Hi james,

 

There is no problem in doing what you are intending. Infact, that's what I do. Nearly all of my scenery is on a second drive (in my case a partition rather than another drive). However, FSX will read and load scenery from anywhere you want it to.

 

The only problem can be that some sceneries seem to insist that you install them onthe same drive as FSX. However, when faced with this probnlem, I have simply transferred the to another drive after installation and repointed the FSX scenery library (or somtimes the scenery.cfg file) to them.

 

You need to ensure that thesecond drive is as fast (or faster) than the C drive as you will notice slower loading from a slower drive.

 

IAN

Hi James,

Please see the post at this link - the drive you mention will have no problem loading the scenery and in fact you probably won't notice the difference.

http://forum.avsim.n...ge-outside-fsx/

Have fun,

Dolph

Just wanted to thank you both for your replies, they were really helpful. It turns out that Gen X gives you an option to install to any location, and isn't picky about being in the FSX folder on the main drive. After seeing how great this scenery looks, this is good news! Plenty of space to fill up.... B)

Symbolic links will also work for pretty much any folder you want to move, but it is not recommended for the faint of heart. I am crazy so I don't mind doing it.

I'm moving so much from the SSD to a mechanical drive, it really isn't worth having FSX folder on the SSD at all. Crazy may not be the word for it. I just do NOT want to reinstall. It's flying nicely. But first crash and it's back to 100% mechanical drive until I can afford a BIG SSD.

This time I moved the entire MyTraffic to a mechanical drive successfully using a symbolic link. Why didn't I do this before is the big question. Instructions are here if you want to try it.

http://forum.simflight.com/topic/72094-moving-mtx-aircraft-folder/page__pid__444554#entry444554

I will say here and now that anybody who is considering installing FSX on a SSD you should consider buying the largest SSD you can. I have a 120GB shared by FSX and Windows 7 64bit. Take it from me, it ain't worth it. The OP of another post has a 128GB dedicated to FSX and already he's looking to move stuff to a mechanical drive. So take it from him, it ain't worth it. So I suggest you beg, borrow and steal to purchase a 256GB minimum before you go this route. Just sayin'. And good luck.