Hello All, Just curious, have heard many topics of having FS on a seperate HD -- what are the 'real' advantages of this, and what could someone expect in the way of added performance.Thanks in advance,Clayhttp://www.dreamfleet2000.com/gfx/images/F...ers/Dopke01.jpgClayton T. Dopke (Clay)Major, USAF (retired)"Drac"

Hi Drac!I obtained a second hard drive and put FS9 on it about half a year ago. After that time I don't remember the exact improvement in framerates and texture loading, but I certainly remember my joyful shouts when both turned out to be, although not literally spectacular, definitely considerable!Be well!Jaap Verduijn.

ClaytonAs far as I remember it wasnt just the seperate drive but two versions of windows installed.One on a drive for your internet access and one on a separate drive chopped down with all the unwanted slowdown rubbish removed for your fast games.Peter

Well, after having my brand spanking new harddrive crash on me I

Thanks guys, well, I for one am tempted to do it if someone has an detailed, step by step way to do it....any answers?BestClayhttp://www.dreamfleet2000.com/gfx/images/F...ers/Dopke01.jpgClayton T. Dopke (Clay)Major, USAF (retired)"Drac"

>Thanks guys, >>well, I for one am tempted to do it if someone has an>detailed, step by step way to do it....any answers?>>Best>Clay>http://www.dreamfleet2000.com/gfx/images/F...ers/Dopke01.jpg>>Clayton T. Dopke (Clay)>Major, USAF (retired)>"Drac"HelloI have set up FS9 on its own drive I have Windows XP on each drive and use Bootit Ng bootmanager to select which drive to boot fromhttp://www.terabyteunlimited.com/The FS9 XP installation has a lot of services disabled and is very much stripped down this makes XP a lot faster.The other XP installation is the one that i use for web and email plus Music recording ect also my wife has her account on this installationI also have installed FS9 on this but have no addons installed, it is there only to provide the original files should i need to replace them on the other drive.I have found that FS9 runs much better with this setup as most computers used in a family setting have way to many services and background tasks running which makes for a slower system.

Clayton,to my experience to use a separate HDD for FS will not help you that much over the time. One of the most important performance killers is the file fragmentation that grows over the time regardless if wou have installed FS on a separate drive or not. This causes the HDD to make random reads instead of sequential and a random read can be take 10 times more time than a sequential read (roughly said).So you can format c: and install everything from the scratch (joke :-)) or defragment your HDD on a regular base. Unfortunately most of the defragmenter are more or less useless, especially the MS Windows built in. To my experience the only program that produces noticalble improvements is O&O Defrag (http://oo-software.com). Using the option 'COMPLETE/Name' reorders the files on harddisk by path name, meaning files of one directory will be stored together physically. That speeded up the FS startup a lot and reduced stutters as well.Btw. I'm not affiliated with O&O Software in any case, I only noticed it in a test report and found it worth a try.Regards from Germany,Tom.

Drac:There is no reason at all to have two versions of Windows to run FS2004. If you are #### bent on doing this then there is a MUCH easier way that accomplishes THE EXACT SAME THING. Do the following:-In your current version of Windows XP, simply create a NEW USER with Administrative priviliges.-Log off your current user andlLog into the new user.-Go through and stop any services that you don't need, also, use a start-up manager and ensure that no startup programs that are not needed are being booted. This will NOT affect your other user settings that you will use for non FS daily use.-Once this is done, you can install FS2004 in this cleaned environment (actually you may find that it is already installed). Most of your payware keys will still be valid this way and you will NOT need to reinstall everything.With all that said, I can say with great confidence that this is all simply a waste of time and effort in the vast majority of cases. You are not going to gain any noticible improvement in FS2004 unless your current setup is a total mess of spyware, adware and you are loading a whole bunch of programs at startup and running them while running FS2004 and you are low on memory; and a combination of all this is mucking up your FS2004 performance. If this is the case then one really should FIX the current Windows configuration because a large increase in perfomance means your main Windows configuration is pretty hosed.There are much simpler things that will ensure continued or increased FS2004 performance.- Defragment your HD with a 3D party defragmenter that will organize your files and directories into alpanumeric order. DO THIS REGULARLY.- Use a startup manager and delete any unnecessary programs at boot-time- Use a good spyware proggie (ie. Microsoft Antispyware) and have it run checks daily to get rid of malware, spyware, adware and other crap.- Use good antivirus - Ensure that unnecessary services are disabled- Place your paging file on a different HD than the one on which you are running FS2004.- Verify latest drivers for your rig (bios, video, MoBo, CPU, etc.)- Disable any unnecessary programs while running FS2004If after doing all of this anyone is still getting crappy performance then its not the software, its the hardware and it is time to save your money and get a new rig.As I said, those of us who perform the neccessary housekeeping on our current Windows configurations have absolutely no reason to go though this process.Now, get back to dem horsies and stop fiddling around with this stuff! Don't you have some hay to bale? :-lolCYA!!!Mike T.

Tom's absolutely right. O&O defrag is the best and the complete/name defrag method for FS2004 with documented increases in overall performance and smoothness.I think O&O Degrag makes up 1 leg of the HD optimization triangle.1 - Pagefile on a seperate (faster if possible) HD2 - COMPLETE/NAME Defrag3 - SATA (or SCSI) 10,000RPM Drives in RAID 0Regards,Mike T.

Hello Mikewhile i agree with most of what you wrote the main reason that i have a seperate drive with XP and FS9 installed is that every household memberuses this machine.I dont want to come home from work to find my flight sim installationtrashed by something downloaded from Emule or similar sitesThe nice thing about BooitNG is that aside from being a great bootmanager and partition tool it also will let you image a drive to DVD from the bootscreen and also password protect a drive.