I am a bit of a computer moron ,so please excuse a dumb question

I have 2 drives,the primary C 111GBs only 5.22 GPs free,,I now have a second drive E 1.81 TBs almost empty

my question does FSX,Active Sky,Ultimate Terrain,(US,Canada & Europe)have to be on the primary drive C to run properly?

I would have liked to put all the Flight sim stuff on the new drive,leaving all the other household emails stuff on C

sorry if this has been answered a thousand times,but I would like to do it right,every thing runs great now but am having issues with other non sim stuff probably because C is over full, Thanks your advice much appreciated

BobG

 

No need to be in C

Also its recommended to avoid installing FSX and the addons on C:\Program Files

Putting everything FSX-related on the 2TB E drive sounds like a good plan. There are ways to move everything from one drive to the other but if you're not really familiar with handling files, folders, and registry entries I'd recommend uninstalling everything from the C drive and do a complete reinstall on the other drive. I know that will take some time but you'll be assured that it will all work as there's no possibility of missing something while moving files around.

 

One caveat however...if the E drive is an external drive you'll probably experience some degradation of texture load times. Whether or not it's significant enough to worry about varies greatly by system. FSX on external drives works fine on some systems but not so fine on others. The only way to know for sure is try it and see what happens.

 

Doug

Thanks Doug,the E drive is not an external one,I added it during a recent upgrade with Canada Computers,,(processor & Vid card) was just afraid to move anything because its working so well,so will put all Flight Sim stuff on E,will do it as you suggested remove from C & reinstall on E

Thanks BobG

Instead of reinstalling everything you could also simply copy paste the whole FS folder and make a symbolic link. How this works, you find here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194.aspx

Like this, you basically "tell" your OS that FSX is still on C while it is actually moved to another location. Like this, you do not need to reinstall anything.

Instead of reinstalling everything you could also simply copy paste the whole FS folder and make a symbolic link. How this works, you find here: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc753194.aspx

Like this, you basically "tell" your OS that FSX is still on C while it is actually moved to another location. Like this, you do not need to reinstall anything.

 

Doesn't the sim run a bit slower when you do this? Instead of one disk access to read something for FSX, the OS now has to do two of them. First, access the old disk, read the symlink, figure out the new place, then access that one to finally read the data.

 

You can just move the folder, but I would not use a symlink but instead change the registry entries for FSX and/or any scenery entries in scenery.cfg that contain drive info.

Doesn't the sim run a bit slower when you do this? Instead of one disk access to read something for FSX, the OS now has to do two of them. First, access the old disk, read the symlink, figure out the new place, then access that one to finally read the data.

 

You can just move the folder, but I would not use a symlink but instead change the registry entries for FSX and/or any scenery entries in scenery.cfg that contain drive info.

 

No, this redirecting is so fast, you will never realize this. Of course you can also modify the registry entries, the result is the same. But modifying registry entries might be more cumbersome and you have to do this for each and every addon installed...

Also, changing registry entries will not be enough...

 

You also need to modify every line in every parameter files used by FSX or add-ons where the drive letter is written.

 

Exemple : inside fsx.cfg (for modules path), inside planes config files, etc... Could be a very time-consuming, trial and error work in order to not forget anything...

There we go... the mklink command is done in some seconds without any issue at all. Give it a try.

No, this redirecting is so fast, you will never realize this. Of course you can also modify the registry entries, the result is the same. But modifying registry entries might be more cumbersome and you have to do this for each and every addon installed...

 

Err. No back. Every single drive access is slower. Make enough of them in a short period of time and you will notice.

 

You see, I actually measured this programmatically a few weeks back. My FSX installation relies heavily on symlinks because I use a dedicated SSD for scenery and a RAMdrive for the most wanted internal folders. Moving a large amount of data (10 GByte) consisting of thousands of single files was between 20-30% slower via symlink than copying it directly from drive to drive.

 

Of course, the question always is if the "standard user" will notice and if every system will show the same behaviour. But if you run an extensive simulator setup and have a couple of symlinks in there, I wouldn't be surprised if you experience some micro (and macro) stutters now and then. I know I have, so I moved some folders back into the FSX main directory (also SSD on a different controller) and the stutters were gone.

Forgive me if I am hijacking this tread but there seems to be some tech savy people here. I have an external SSD I use for my photo scenery and payware airports with all else on C drive which works well but like the topic starter my C is getting full. I have considered geting FSX STEAM or FS9 as a secoundary sim and puting that on my external E drive. Could Steam share the add ons on the E drive with the box fsx on C drive or would having the same program on the same computer though on seperate drives interfere with each other?

Hey thanks Guys remember I aint as computer savvy as all that?rather than get into stuff that might be beyond me?,I will just re download on E the  FSX Active Sky & UTs, Thanks anyway BobG