A seperate drive for FS? Please answer me!

[Saitek]

If I chopped up my drive into a seperate area for my Flight SImulator would that benefit me? Currently it is swamped in  C drive. Or would it not make any difference?
As you can see there is plenty of room for me to seperate 15 or 20Gigs or so just for FS, (My FS folder is currently just 6GB)  but would it help?

This is C drive after defragging.



Thanks

Ben

[Ecko]

That seems like an excellent idea, a whole drive just for FS would mean so much less defragging.

Mine would have to be BIG though..

[Saitek]

I'm awaiting expert advice on the matter. Get behind in the queue - I'm first!

[Saitek]

Bump.

[Jimbo]

Ooops Buggar, wrong queue                            

[Weather_Man]

Would it help make the game run better? Probably not unless it was on a separate harddrive. Even then the difference would be neglible, with load times the only relevant factor. The theory being, files at the front of a harddrive are read slighty faster than those in the middle or rear. We're talking fractions of seconds to possibly 1 or 2 seconds faster for huge files.

Game performance is determined primarily by hardware. File structure/partitioning has very little to do with it. As long as you defrag regulary, be it C: or it's own partition, that's about as good as it's going to get without hardware upgrades. Shutting down non-essential MS services prior to playing would make more of an impact by freeing up CPU resources.

[GunnerMan]

I agree with Weatherman making separte partitions will be more trouble than its worth. Assuming you have 1 gig of ram and fs does not need to use any page file then the only increase you would see from a new hard drive is better load times.

[NicksFXHouse]

I'm awaiting expert advice on the matter. Get behind in the queue - I'm first!

Nick N = Electronics Engineer (retired)

Answer = NO

There are allot of FS "tweaks" on the net which are as useless as the multitude of WindowsXP reg hacks and tweaks. The best performance tweaks for FS are system (motherboard/CPU/Memory), proper driver and O/S maintenance and video card related along with tuning FS settings.

There is no "holy grail" of settings/tweaks that work for every system. One must spend the time to learn about their hardware and how to properly set up and maintain their operating system, then test FS settings for optimal results.

Edit:
My statement above was targeted at FS performance, not loading time. If you place the FS installation on a HDD that is faster (access, rotation and throughput) than your C drive, (ie, RAID-0, etc) then FS will load faster. It will not net a single frame increase or change performance.

[Saitek]

Well it can stay put in its place. Thanks guys.

[Ecko]

Ahh.. You're still here Nick. Did you ever get that "Niks Mix" finished?

[NicksFXHouse]

Ahh.. You're still here Nick. Did you ever get that "Niks Mix" finished?

I was close to finishing when a death in my family ocurred. I have not had the time since then to resume the project. As time become available I will finish and release it.

[Jared]

I'm running my sim on a 250GB seagate barracuda all of it's own.. Runs real nice too

[Brett_Henderson]

There IS one way to make an FS dedicated HDD make things run better/faster, but it's pretty extreme.

Have a stand-alone drive with nothing but Windoze and FS9 on it.. and boot to that drive when you want to fly  

[NicksFXHouse]

[quote]There IS one way to make an FS dedicated HDD make things run better/faster, but it's pretty extreme.

Have a stand-alone drive with nothing but Windoze and FS9 on it.. and boot to that drive when you want to fly

[Ecko]

I was close to finishing when a death in my family ocurred. I have not had the time since then to resume the project. As time become available I will finish and release it.

I'm sorry to hear that.