I recently purchased a 500 G SSD hard drive just for X-plane.  Not surprisingly, it is almost full.  I am planning to purchase a huge disc drive to move X-plane files.

Question:  I am certainly going to move my ortho files to this hard drive and place shortcuts in the custom scenery folder.  I assume the main X-plane folder (through steam) will stay on the SSD.  Anything else that I should move vs. keep on the hard drive?  Obviously the ortho files are the big issue.

External vs. internal?  Any specific recommendations?  External would be easier...

I keep everything except my ortho files on the main drive. My ortho's sit on a couple of 6tb internal drives. Use simlinks to point the orthos to the custom scenery folder on C:

I have seen people just use shortcuts.  I am not familiar with simlinks...what is the advantage?

You may want to search the Knowledge Base on the X-Plane website. I remember reading something about moving X-Plane files to other directories and drives was creating permission issues and there was a way to address it. Hope this helps.

Karl

Bumping this topic...

I'm not at all comfortable with simlinks on Windows. Is there another way? (I couldn't find anything specific to this topic in the XP knowledge base.)

I have to find a way to link to my ortho scenery on another disk. It's just too bulky. Can you use complete absolute path names in the scenery_packs.ini perhaps?

You can just place shortcuts in the custom scenery folder and use them in the scenery.ini file.

 

Yes - that works! Initially, I tried to specify an absolute path to the scenery folder of interest but XP would erase the entry since there was not local copy of the folder. With the shortcut serving as a placeholder, it seems to work just fine.

I recall trying to use shortcuts as well but ended up ditching that idea. I think the issue was if you have a lot of ortho files, it becomes very tedious (I recall having to rename each shortcut and take out the actual word "shortcut" from the filename).

I'd run out of drive space long before that's an issue. Take the recently released 'Ortho4XP_California'. I need to rename one folder (well, nobody says I actually have to rename it, having 'shortcut' in the name works fine) and it takes 108Gb on my drive. Ten or fifteen US states and I'm done.

4 hours ago, exodus1977 said:

I recall trying to use shortcuts as well but ended up ditching that idea. I think the issue was if you have a lot of ortho files, it becomes very tedious (I recall having to rename each shortcut and take out the actual word "shortcut" from the filename).

Just out of curiosity, why do you re-name the files? I just create a shortcut in the main "tiles" folder and then copy/paste into custom scenery. Never an issue and keeps the size file (=load times) clean and efficient. 

13 hours ago, dvlourie said:

Just out of curiosity, why do you re-name the files? I just create a shortcut in the main "tiles" folder and then copy/paste into custom scenery. Never an issue and keeps the size file (=load times) clean and efficient. 

I actually don't use shortcuts. I use sim links through the ortho4xp program. It is much more efficient for me. I tried shortcuts once but it was a hassle.