Hello,

 

This seems a rather dumb question from somebody who's involved in flightsimming for more than 20 years.

But the question stands as it is.

Is there a penalty (smoothness, framerates, stutters....) for installing FSX on the same drive and partition as the operating system?

 

I did so the last time I reinstalled and with only a fraction of the aircraft and scenery installed, I still can't get a smooth ride (following the guidelines from Word Not Allowed).

The only two thing I have changed are the harddrive (smaller from 1Tb to 500GB but both with 32 Mb cache and 7200 RPM)

and a new graphics card (from a standard GTX-580 to a GTX-670 FTW, both from EVGA)

 

I don't mind to start all over again but only when it's useful.

(Win 7 64bit is the used operating system)

 

thanks

 

Luc Brusselmans

Belgium

When it comes to mechanical disks there's an advantage to have FSX on a separate drive from the OS. This is down to the slow response time on regular HDDs. This will mostly be noticed as faster load times, but if your HDD has a slow response time this can also cause stutters and slower texture loading.

I see that you have two 7200rpm drives. You are best off having the OS on one and FSX on the other.

Ok,

 

This seems like sound advice and a confirmation of my original thoughts.

Then comes the next question...

Two physical drives or two separate partitions on one drive?

Reason for asking this is simple. In the past one physical harddrive has always fine.

There is no harm done when I botch this up. I can always start from scratch with two drives when needed. So maybe I should return to my original disk configuration and go from there.

 

Luc Brusselmans

Belgium

Two physical drives, for sure.

 

Separate partitions on the same drive only slows things down..

2 separate drives are best. 2 separate partitions on the same drive is simpler for defragmentation reasons, but FSX would always have to wait when the OS requires the HDDs reading head to be at the OS partition. You get away with that with 2 separate disks.

I humbly submit a dedicated SSD for FSX alone (and add-ons) at a MINIMUM if you want to get your hair blown back!. FSX loading times are dramatically REDUCED and VC and outside view changes and panels 'snap' onto the screen..no waiting with white textures and/or missing gauges. Do the math..a typical 7200 rpm hdd has a seek time of about 30-50 milliseconds before it finds your data. A low budget SSD has a .1 - .2 ms seek time. Yes point one milliseconds. I have run FSX and Win 7 on the same SSD and no penalties I could discern. Get a large enough SSD for your use. I currently have a Crucial Sata 3 128G for FXS and another for my System drive. My Windows 7 PC boots up from a cold boot in 10 seconds..SSD all the way. To clarify --> 10 seconds elapses After POST and from "Starting Windows" to desktop music..10 secs. Similar mind-blowing load times are seen in FSX. See you in the skies...:)

 

 

-ps Lastly I use a ton of ORBX scenery and a couple dozen payware birds

and have used 73G of my 128G FSX SSD drive so far.