A seperate drive for FS? Please answer me!

[Brett_Henderson]

[quote]Thats another rumor that will not change performance enough to be worth the hassle.

[NicksFXHouse]

I've done it. Not dual boot either. I had two drives in my bay. Each with its own installation of Windows. I'd physically unplug one drive and plug the other in when I wanted to fly. That drive was Windows and FS9 only.. It ran much quicker and much smoother.

That is a placebo effect. Do you mean frame rates increased significantly, as in a jump of 10 or more?

If that is true, how can FS9 run physically quicker? ... here is what I have found:
There are several people in my local area that are FS9 users. When personally inspecting a system that someone has done what you describe and found it runs faster and smoother, I compare the new install to their original primary C install. In some cases (not all) I find is that they have their FS display, traffic, weather and other settings different AND a new installation will create a new FS9.cfg file which removes entries that were causing slowdowns compared to the original C drive installation. On top of that, I have found many times that an add-on texture or scenery in the original install also created slow-downs and stutters. Quite simply, I have tested 9 systems and always found the same results. By making a backup of the new install on a single drive and importing the entire

[Brett_Henderson]

I've created the gaming profile and YES.. individually disabled the services through "log on" for that profile.. That technique did not improve frame rates much, if at all. All things equal (scenery settings and the like), I'll agree.. once a game is up and running there isn't too much you can do along the lines of hardware profiles or second drives for frame-rates. Game loading time is a big "who cares".. WHERE I SEE the big performance gain is when the computer is taxed (banking and turning with lots-o-clouds, for example) and there's a curious, coinciding studder and HDD activity. THAT SIMPLY DOES NOT HAPPEN when FS9 and Windows are the only thing on the HDD !

Of course I know a hardware profile doesn't load all that other stuff on the "bloated" drive.. But all that stuff is there.. along with all the other, fragmented/fragmenting files. Like I said.. I've no idea what files are accessed during a sim session but I know for sure that if those files aren't sharing space with all your other apps and their files (and quite possibly spread out all over the drive even after a defrag) it runs better.. period.