I had built a new rig about a year ago with a Gigabyte Z790 Aorus Elite AX motherboard. I installed two WD Black SN850X (2000 GB, M.2 2280) and used these in a silly mix as I see it today. One was split in C and D drive, C containing the OS and D Sceneries and Documents folders. The second drive assigned as F contained the sim and more addons. I got both filled up to 70% by the time, when I got a warning from my backup software, that one drive is becoming low on free space.

The solution was to get another WD Black SN850X (2000 GB, M.2 2280), create a RAID 0 with 3 SSDs, now my new F drive and put everything there, inclusive the documents library, containing lots of Prepar3D v5 addons. It was an evenings work, restoring files from my backups, change all former D drive assignements to F in the add-on.xml files. In the scenery.cfg it was done with one search and replace. A good help was Lorby Addon Manager, showing wrong paths in red in the scenery listing and in the other addons tab. 

After fixing everything the sim runs really soft like a new install without addons. I also removed add-on.xml where only one scenery entry was referenced and put it back into scenery.cfg. This was also done with Addon Manager too. The only stutter still there, when I approached ORBX KEGE, it had to load the airport and sourroundings. But the whole flight from KDEN over the Rocky Mountains was a great pleasure. After loading KEGE it was smooth to fly a standard pattern around the airport and land on runway 25.

Dan

Edited November 8, 20241 yr by blaunarwal

2 hours ago, blaunarwal said:

One was split in C and D drive, C containing the OS and D Sceneries and Documents folders. The second drive assigned as F contained the sim and more addons.

I have a similarly confusing configuration at the moment, and am planning a consolidation as well. Looking forward to correcting all the lines with paths 🙂 Wasn't thinking about a RAID, but that does sound interesting. Did you create the RAID in the set-up of your motherboard, or in Windows?

4 hours ago, d.tsakiris said:

I have a similarly confusing configuration at the moment, and am planning a consolidation as well. Looking forward to correcting all the lines with paths 🙂 Wasn't thinking about a RAID, but that does sound interesting. Did you create the RAID in the set-up of your motherboard, or in Windows?

I created it in the BIOS. I saw it in the manual there was a possibility to create a raid of three M2 SSDs and I already had two identical SSDs. I always wanted to buy a 4 TB SSD, putting everything together. When I bought the parts for my right a year ago, the 4 TB was more expensive than two 2 TB. Lucky me, so I only had to get another 2 TB.

Make sure your MB does support RAID on M2 SSDs. Not all do, unfortunately. I was just lucky.

There is a setting in the BIOS, enable VMD controller. This has to be enabled. Then if you use non raid SSDs, you have to exclude them. I have one older for the OS. It is still fast enough.

At the end, windows needed also a raid driver. I got it from the board manufacturer on the driver website.

Dan