I have been using for the last few years Win10 and Prepar3D installed on the same SSD. I remember in the past it was quite common to have OS and Sim installed on two separate drives. Is it still a good practice ? Is there any noticeable advantage in terms of performance in using the "two drives" option ?

Thanks

 

Ezio 

I still use my C:Drive for the O/S only W10, worst case scenario reformate C dive re-install Windows , my sims are safe. I used to re-install windows XP every 18 months which cleaned out windows and loading time got better again.

2 hours ago, Eziocin said:

I have been using for the last few years Win10 and Prepar3D installed on the same SSD. I remember in the past it was quite common to have OS and Sim installed on two separate drives. Is it still a good practice ? Is there any noticeable advantage in terms of performance in using the "two drives" option ?

Thanks

 

Ezio 

I don't know if there's any performance to be gained, but (IMO) there's certainly is security-wise and maintainability. Also, having P3D installed on the C-drive (especially in C:\Program Files) is rather restrictive on newer versions of Windows (8 and 10) and because of this, I would highly advise against installing P3D in the default location. 

Also - as @G-RFRY already said above - if your computer crashes, you can re-install Windows without losing any data.

Personally I don't have anything besides OS and installed programs (NOT games) on my systemdrive. 

You will still have to "repair" P3D if your OS gets reinstalled, as unlike X-Plane with it's single location and no registry entry, P3D has many registry entries and config files in the appdata and local data that get wiped, therefore you might need some forward planning when you reinstall your OS.

 

1 hour ago, Jude Bradley said:

You will still have to "repair" P3D if your OS gets reinstalled, as unlike X-Plane with it's single location and no registry entry, P3D has many registry entries and config files in the appdata and local data that get wiped, therefore you might need some forward planning when you reinstall your OS.

 

Did it for FS 8 9 and FSX no problem I keep 2 backup images Updated one on the cloud and on an external drive.

Edited May 22, 20206 yr by G-RFRY

On 5/22/2020 at 12:27 PM, G-RFRY said:

Did it for FS 8 9 and FSX no problem I keep 2 backup images Updated one on the cloud and on an external drive.

But there’s a difference between restoring your system from a backup and a clean Windows install. A restore from a backup puts your system back to were it was before you had a problem, with all the registry entries still intact. Reinstalling Windows gives you a fresh registry which means that most of your apps and games (and add-ons), even if they’re on another drive, will probably need to be reinstalled to create the correct entries.

Edited May 24, 20206 yr by vortex681

On 5/22/2020 at 9:01 AM, Eziocin said:

I have been using for the last few years Win10 and Prepar3D installed on the same SSD. I remember in the past it was quite common to have OS and Sim installed on two separate drives. Is it still a good practice ? Is there any noticeable advantage in terms of performance in using the "two drives" option ?

Thanks

 

Ezio 

Performance-wise I would say no wrt to one or two drives.

There are other benefits from having the sim installed on a larger secondary drive, some of which are mentioned above. The increasing size that the add-ons for aircraft, scenery and various utilities all take additional disk space which is another driver for having the sim on a second and potentially a 3rd drive.

If you are considering additional drives, I would go in the direction of NMVe SSD drives if you have that capability on your MB. Prices for these types of drive are coming down in price and more affordable.Easy to install.

Regards,

 

Does gameplay get affected if you have it the games stored on a mechanical drive as opposed to the OS SSD drive? I'm only rocking a 500GB NVME m.2 for now to cover everything...

23 hours ago, mattdebrugha said:

Does gameplay get affected if you have it the games stored on a mechanical drive as opposed to the OS SSD drive? I'm only rocking a 500GB NVME m.2 for now to cover everything...

Game?  What game?  The sim will load considerably faster off an SSD than a HDD...and unless you are using lots of big photoscenery areas or doing like Mach 2 on the deck, the lookahead scenery caching works well enough that storage system throughput isn't really noticeable in flight.

For the OP...a separate OS drive does come in handy for backing up the boot drive and OS to protect against the boogered-up Windows updates that keep coming down from Microsoft.  Because it's relatively small and fast, it makes a weekly snapshot of the boot drive with the current OS version just a 10-minute affair.  I use a separate 256GB SSD for the OS for that reason.

11 hours ago, w6kd said:

Game?  What game?  The sim will load considerably faster off an SSD than a HDD...and unless you are using lots of big photoscenery areas or doing like Mach 2 on the deck, the lookahead scenery caching works well enough that storage system throughput isn't really noticeable in flight.

For the OP...a separate OS drive does come in handy for backing up the boot drive and OS to protect against the boogered-up Windows updates that keep coming down from Microsoft.  Because it's relatively small and fast, making a weekly snapshot of the boot drive with the current OS version just a 10-minute affair.  I use a separate 256GB SSD for the OS for that reason.

Thanks....this is basically what I was expecting, so most likely I will go for this solution.

Regards

Ezio

15 hours ago, w6kd said:

Game?  What game?  The sim will load considerably faster off an SSD than a HDD...and unless you are using lots of big photoscenery areas or doing like Mach 2 on the deck, the lookahead scenery caching works well enough that storage system throughput isn't really noticeable in flight.

 

Apologies - Sim! OK great - thank you!

Even though access speed is not a big concern with a SSD, I am still a fan of having the OS on its own drive, flight sims on a separate drive.  Yes, it increases costs and power consumption, but I have done it this way for many years and without regrets, unlike back when I had my sims and OS on the same drive that failed.

On 5/29/2020 at 5:54 AM, w6kd said:

For the OP...a separate OS drive does come in handy for backing up the boot drive and OS to protect against the boogered-up Windows updates that keep coming down from Microsoft.  Because it's relatively small and fast, it makes a weekly snapshot of the boot drive with the current OS version just a 10-minute affair.  I use a separate 256GB SSD for the OS for that reason.

Alternatively, you could partition a large drive and just backup the (small) OS partition. Saves you needing an extra drive this way. You must be unlucky (or I’m lucky) as I’ve yet to have an update which broke my system.

Edited June 1, 20206 yr by vortex681

I have P3D and Flight Sim related apps farmed out onto multiple drives.

And have built a RoboCopy script to pull all the various bits and pieces and config etc. onto an ejectable backup drive, the script even emails me the backup log file.

It's amazing all the bits you don't think about that would typcially be wiped if the OS was re-installed.

e.g. many aircraft place state and config files in the "My Documents" location, for example A2A create quite large numbers of folders (one for every plane installed) for their Accu-Feel product, and other developers do similar.

And I'd hate to loose all the config changes I've performed, things like shader tweaks, changes to stars.dat and many other files.

At least with the scripted backup I can re-install the OS, re-install P3D, then all going well use my backup to restore P3D functionality back to the way it was.

Cheers