Another new rig question..

[Anderscn 0]

Hi,

Been away from flightsim for some years now. Now returning with brand new rig, mainly because we soon have to go with W10. Still undecided if I’ll continue with FSX DX10 or transfer to P3D v4.x though.

When I built my current W7-64 rig back in 2011, common habit was to use a small SSD for OS, and install the sim in the root a separate drive. Which I did and it worked flawlessly.

But today with W10 it no longer matters? Should I in stead buy one big SSD, and install sim in root of the C-drive, or maybe just in the default directory?

Best Regards,

Anders

[G-RFRY 1,712]

I still use the old method MV2 C:Windows Drive only.SSD flight drive + 2TB sata drive partitioned into storage and backup drive. If the worse happens and Windows screws up I only re-format my C; Drive all content on my other drives is safe.

PS bear in mind W10 will not be replaced and when I ran winXP I re-formatted my C drive ever 18 months to clean out and speed up the system, and I restored my sim links without re-install.

Edited October 19, 2019 by rjfry

[stans 703]

I'm still in the camp of putting sim and games on a separate drive.  It preserves so much if the C drive has a problem and needs to be replaced or reformatted.

[Mikelab6 89]

My recommandation:

1 TB SSD for OS and all your non-sims softwares

1 TB SSD for your flight sims softwares

2 TB regular HDD for your backups

WHY: It's common thing today that all new softwares takes more and more space on our disks. I see many new games taking more than 50 GB of space, and now the new flight sim era with real world imagery. I have a third SSD only for my Steam games. Sure it depends of how much things, such as family videos, pictures, games and softwares you will install on your machine. Think about it, It's not so easy to move all your things on a bigger drive because the installed drive was to small.

GOOD PRACTICE: It's important to backup your critical files, such your family pictures and so on.. and a good practice is to use a software capable of doing images of your drives (I use Acronis True Image). Once your PC is all set with all your softwares and files installed, it's time to do an image of your drives with Acronis. If you have a drive problem or any other major problem, it will take only few minutes to restores your PC to what it was before the failure, instead of many days of reinstalling all you things to your liking.

Mike

Edited October 19, 2019 by Mikelab6

[Bob Scott 7,721]

Functionally, there's no meaningful difference in performance whether you put everything on one big SSD or separate it out.  I have Win 10 installed on a separate smallish (256GB) SLC SSD, so backups of the OS drive are easily and quickly done in about 10 min time...frequent OS drive backups are my insurance policy against the many dysfunctional Win 10 updates that have installed themselves and broken things along the way.

Once you get past 1TB, the price per GB ramps up considerably, so separating things out to different drives makes sense if you need more than ~800GB of fast nonvolatile storage (800GB of data plus 20% free space on a 1TB SSD).

A large-capacity spinning HDD is still a good, cheap choice for bulk storage and backups...if you use an internal HDD in an external dock or an external drive unit, connected with USB3 or Thunderbolt, it's fast enough and the drive can be kept offline when not in use, prolonging its lifespan to something probably longer than your own.

Regards

[Anderscn 0]

Hi,

Thank you for the advice. I’ll go for separate drives of the OS and Simulator.

Best Regards,

Anders