Finally bought that 4TB drive for P3D exclusive use.

And am now re-organising my P3D installs to consolidate their components onto the new drive.

The intent being to use the new 4 TB drive to hold Addons and Scenery currently spread across 3 drives.

I'd found my previous design (built originally for P3D 4.5) wasn't translating well for P3D v5 support, as there are essentially 3 types of addons, (plus I was almost out of usable drive space anyway).

For the 3 types of addons, there are those addons supporting P3D v4 only, those addons supporting P3D v5 only and those addons that are agnostic and can suit either version of the sim.

Which means I needed three unique storage configurations to avoid unnecessary duplication and thus minimise storage space usage - because disk storage is something you can never have enough of... I do remember being at a commercial computer show where the guest German hardware / software development speakers were talking about file systems and support of large harddrives and how NASA was the only org that could (at the time) afford 2 TB of disk storage 🙂 we've come a long way since then.

Currently my P3D installs are spread across the following, I'm excluding the default windows system paths P3D uses as they'll remain the same.

• Drive H - 1 x 1 TB NVMe - holding the actual P3D software, SDK installs and aircraft addins.
• Drive E - 1 x 2 TB SSD Raid drive - Holds Scenery and many ancillary programs used by P3D , items like Ai Companion, Banking Camera, Display Changer, JoyToKey, LittleNavMap, Radar Contact, Landing Rate Monitor, OpenTrack, Active Sky and tools like Model ConvertorX, Tomatoshade, Airport Design Editor and many more. This Raid drive is unique in that the 2 drives are striped (I know... not good for redundancy, but I do have backups) and built from 2 x 1 TB drives that were thrown out at work when a Linux powered Virtual Machine host (with 16 of these drives) suffered a hardware failure, I salvaged them from the bin, tested them (they were fine) and repurposed for my own use, the best form of recycling.
• Drive D - 1 x 4TB SSD - Scenery, Addons and P3D screen pics (dating back to 2018), Steam Games and various bits and pieces.
• Drive N - 1 x 10 MB ramdisk I use for Orbx Libraries and  ObjectFlow, it's actually a drive image that loads into ram on Windows startup, and provides fast ram access type speeds to those core Orbx items.
• Drive J - 1 x 4TB SSD - this is the new drive where the aim will be to home Scenery and Addons from H, E & D.

And a reorg is proving to not be without it's problems, the workflow has been to copy files to the new pathing, then rename the original folders (to break the original path) and update configs to point to the new paths, once all issues have been resolved and tested OK I remove the renamed original folders. I'm specifically not doing re-installs if I can avoid it, as many items have been quite customised or have had issues resolved, e.g. Orbx where I've edited wave control files to prevent vertical waves and edited 3rd party airports to fit better into the Orbx scenery or resolved addon aircraft issues.

I'm finding little bits of critical path settings in multiple files, for example the N: drive image was loaded on Windows bootup from H: where moving the drive image required the RAM disk app to be reconfigured to accept the new path, I've also moved from 2 x 24 inch to 27 inch monitors and an additional monitor rotated to portrait mode which required new monitor drivers, restructuring the monitor display order and re-configuring P3D display options, as well as updating Display Changer xml settings which are set on a per monitor / resolution basis, Display Changer is an app I use to automatically configure the monitor resolutions during P3D's startup and shutdown. Monitors are all DELLs as I had an opportunity to pick some up ex-work and DELLs come with a truly great monitor stand offering fantastic positional adjustment and rotational options.

There were also multiple P3D startup issues with warnings of various missing files and taking some time to track down where those paths were configured, additionally license issues, broken symbolic links - essentially all the hubris of a P3D install dating back to 2018, plus Orbx gives it's own unique take on where things must be located resulting in a case of Fallout style 2 headed deer @ Sekiu airport...

The above said I worked through each issue one step at a time and now have a working base P3D v4.5 install and am moving onto a base P3D v5.3 install, followed by the more challenging addins.

I probably have a quite complex P3D installation compared to most people, certainly not stock by any means and I do love the tinker / development aspect that comes with such an install and that I have pretty much full control over the system to do what I want.

Anyone else follow a similar style?

Cheers 😁

A few pics of my P3D v4.5 testing scenario where I was working out the bugs related to pathing changes, Pics are P3D v4.5 Milviz PC-6, Orbx Tapini Airport New Guinea and surrounding area and all flying is @ 60 fps vsync'd thanks to Lossless Scaling.

6 hours ago, Rogen said:

Orbx Tapini Airport New Guinea

My favorite bush strip since fsx. You use the EMO MISSION scenery too? What an approach! 

8 hours ago, Rogen said:

A few pics of my P3D v4.5 testing scenario where I was working out the bugs related to pathing changes, Pics are P3D v4.5 Milviz PC-6, Orbx Tapini Airport New Guinea and surrounding area and all flying is @ 60 fps vsync'd thanks to Lossless Scaling.

 

Excellent pictures for P3D v4.5 as always... just curious, is there a reason on how you selected letters for your drives?

4 hours ago, sloppysmusic said:

My favorite bush strip since fsx. You use the EMO MISSION scenery too? What an approach! 

Not atm, still working on the pathing and reorg, and have P3D 5.3 to do next.

Cheers

3 hours ago, bofhlusr said:

Excellent pictures for P3D v4.5 as always... just curious, is there a reason on how you selected letters for your drives?

Historical mainly, e.g. D & E are local and raid, F is a bluray drive, then leave a few drive letters out for plug in USB drives, then H for P3D, followed by I mapped to a local website, J is the new drive, N is the ram drive, K is for video production work, then there are 3 x mapped network drives for downloads, music & photos and my login account's network profile, leaves plenty of spare drive letters should they be needed.

Backup of the local and remote drives are either image based, or are scripted via robocopy and are scheduled via Windows Task Scheduler.

Does take a lot of backup storage though, which is to rotated high capacity hardrives (4 & 8tb atm) plugged in via ESTATA drive caddies.

Cheers 

11 hours ago, Rogen said:

Finally bought that 4TB drive for P3D exclusive use.

And am now re-organising my P3D installs to consolidate their components onto the new drive.

So which 4TB did you get? Just curious.😉

 I "ummed and ahhed" over which 4TB to get for my system as I needed more space for sceneries too and originally was planning for a cheap 4TB HDD, but then I changed my mind and went for the WD SA510 4TB SATA 2.5". This was the best capacity/cost/reliability compromise at the time plus I did not have any more room for another M2 drive. I also performed the same merge of sceneries that I had collected across different disks and moved them to one.

So far its working fine.

15 minutes ago, 787flyer said:

So which 4TB did you get? Just curious.😉

[snip]

It's a Samsung 4TB SSD, 870 EVO, 2.5 inch SATA III, Read up to 560MB/s, Write up to 530MB/s, 98K/88K IOPS, 2,400TBW  Model: MZ-77E4T0BW and has a 5 year warranty, all my large SSD's are Samsung.

Cheers

Edited July 23, 2025Jul 23 by Rogen

Bought this NVMe as a second drive for an Acer Spin 3 Core Intel i7, 16 GB RAM 14" 2-in-1 laptop which runs P3D 4.5 and DCS better than I thought it would.

Edited July 24, 2025Jul 24 by bofhlusr

13 hours ago, Rogen said:

Not atm, still working on the pathing and reorg, and have P3D 5.3 to do next.

Cheers

Your P3Dv4.5 looks great. What was the point of having P3D v5.3?

 

Edited July 24, 2025Jul 24 by bofhlusr

On 7/24/2025 at 12:32 PM, bofhlusr said:

Your P3Dv4.5 looks great. What was the point of having P3D v5.3?

 

That's a bit of a complex question in reality.

Yeah I like P3D v4.5, pretty much everything works out of the box with that version and it looks pretty good with my customised lighting and cloud shaders.

That said, back when I was initially trialing P3D v5, I didn't see anything particularly great about it, in fact there was quite a few cons and still is imho.

Essentially I've since found out LM did really improve ground poly texture loading speed, I don't know if they moved it to GPU processing or if it's the CPU thread separation is what did it, but it is *way* faster and previous bottlenecks no longer exist.

This became apparent once I'd installed a couple of my existing Orbx sceneries, specifically the GoldCoast City Scene & Friday Harbor Airport.

In P3D v4.5 at the Gold Coast I'd have to pause the sim to wait for the ground textures to catch up plus there were many loading stutters along the way, and it was pretty much the same for Friday Harbor.

Low and behold in P3D v5.3 those problems did not occur and if there was one thing I could backport into v4.5 it would be the texture loading & rendering improvements.

Still leaves the effects and exclude issues to overcome, LM could have thought about it a bit more and included docs on exactly what was needed to resolve those issues, or even provided tool sets targeted to automatically making such items compatible, I know in my own company we took great care to provision the instructions and software tools sets to bring an earlier system to a fully functional compatible state, not simply say it was up the the customer to do *whatever*.

And since playing with the shaders and TrueSky cloud rendering config I've gotten it looking fairly reasonable, once I get it fully re-org'd & running I'll also look at Toga Projects stuff to finalise it - although does look like their website has expired... Still on simMarket though, anyone know if online activation is needed ?

The below video highlights the improvement of P3D 5.3's poly load and rendering speed, it covers the Gold Coast in two passes @ 30 fps with no LS.

Cheers

 

Thank you for the explanation. Nice video too. Your video makes me feel like upgrading from 4.5. The only thing that is keeping me from upgrading to v5 outright are the compatibility issues involved eg. weather radar.

17 hours ago, Rogen said:

Low and behold in P3D v5.3 those problems did not occur and if there was one thing I could backport into v4.5 it would be the texture loading & rendering improvements.

I was checking P3D v5.  Is there a reason why you are using v5.3 and not 5.4?

6 hours ago, bofhlusr said:

I was checking P3D v5.  Is there a reason why you are using v5.3 and not 5.4?

Hi Bofhlusr,

Yes there is, besides Ray's example where he found issues with the 5.4 flight plans and bgl files, there is a known bug affecting indexes when used with C:Vars, which affects various aircraft I happen to like flying e.g. the FlightSimWare Learjet.

This same bug was also introduced in P3D version 6 and was resolved in patch 4, but of course LM never resolved it in P3D v5.

P3D v6.0 Patch 4: "Fixed issue where C:Vars would not parse correctly in some cases if an index was present."

I figure I've no issue with 5.3, so why should I update to a version with known bugs (that will affect me) that will never be resolved...

Cheers

Wow Rogen, you really have a very fascinating setup.  I hope you don't mind, but I've copied your original post so that I can use what you've done to try to reorganize my own P3Dv5 and setup for other flight simulators.  What complicates things for me is that I also run other simulators, like X-Plane 11 & 12, and even still I have FSX for using old add-ons that don't work in modern P3D.

4 hours ago, Rogen said:

Hi Bofhlusr,

Yes there is, besides Ray's example where he found issues with the 5.4 flight plans and bgl files, there is a known bug affecting indexes when used with C:Vars, which affects various aircraft I happen to like flying e.g. the FlightSimWare Learjet.

This same bug was also introduced in P3D version 6 and was resolved in patch 4, but of course LM never resolved it in P3D v5.

P3D v6.0 Patch 4: "Fixed issue where C:Vars would not parse correctly in some cases if an index was present."

I figure I've no issue with 5.3, so why should I update to a version with known bugs (that will affect me) that will never be resolved...

Cheers

I enjoy the FlySimWare Learjet too and it really stinks that the problem was never addressed.  I still use 5.4 though, because I get better performance in the simulator than I did with 5.3.