XP & Raptor installation

[flyingbart]

Hi guys
Can anyone give me advise as to this heres my specs first:
my computer is a p4 ddr 3200 2048mb ram/ radeon 9600xt card 3 drives -80gb/ 120gb/ 80gb raptor drive 450 watt power supply 6 fans. The question is this i have my FS9 on my E drive which is the raptor drive but i have my windows xp on the 80gb A drive but when my A drive gets full say 5gb left of space my FS9 runs terribly slow even though its on a raptor drive all by itself . Am i wasting a drive and should the FS9 and windows be on the same drive. Hope the above makes sence any technical advise would help
cheers FLYINGBART

[ctjoyce]

No having your FS9 folder on the same drive as windows will offer no speed. However the raptor will. Try defragmenting the drive.

Cheers
CAmeron

[flyingbart]

Cheers Cameron
I will go and defrag the Raptor and let ya know

[Gixer]

I was told to always put the OS on the fastest drive in your system.

I was also told that when a HDD gets to 50-60% full it start to loose efficency so with only 5gb free it wont be running anywhere near as efficient as it could be.

[ctjoyce]

Thats about half true. As long as the OS is on atleast a 7200RPM drive there is no real speed difference. However with only 5GB of space left that drive is going to be quite stressed.

Heres what I suggest for best preformance.

80GB Raptor = Windows Drive
80GB + 120GB drives in RAID 0 array for FS and other.

That way you can let your FS folder get as big as you want, and you still have the raptor speed.

Cheers
Cameron

[flyingbart]

Hi GUYS
Cameron what do you mean in RAID 0 array is there something i can set in the bios for FS9 please please tell me more???
cheers Flyingbart

[flyingbart]

It looks as if i am going to have to re-install my windows onto the raptor drive Guys. The reason i only have 5gb left on my main windows drive this is because a friend once told me to partition it so i did which ment that one side has 55gb free the other all my software for windows ect. it would be nice if i could take out the partition but i dont think its possible . sorry for telling you guys this now.
cheers Flyingbart

[ctjoyce]

You can use a program called Partition Magic to do it.

As for RAID 0, its when you setup 2 or more harddrives to work as one big drive. The other nice thing is that you get all the drives looking for the information at once, so you effectively get one huge raptor. Most boards have IDE RAID, and some of the higher end nForce 4 / 945P and up boards have SATA (I know my board does).

If you do setup a RAID make sure to backup all the data onto a fourth drive, or onto DVDs because if it goes down all the information of those disks is gone.

Cheers
Cameron

[NicksFXHouse]

Thats about half true. As long as the OS is on atleast a 7200RPM drive there is no real speed difference. However with only 5GB of space left that drive is going to be quite stressed.

Heres what I suggest for best preformance.

80GB Raptor = Windows Drive
80GB + 120GB drives in RAID 0 array for FS and other.

That way you can let your FS folder get as big as you want, and you still have the raptor speed.

Cheers
Cameron

disagree

Your bottlenecking your rig by placing the game and the OS on 2 different speed I/O's and especially with RAID.

CPU cycles come into play as well and everytime you run FS on a separate drive as the O/S you sucking cycles away from the sim.

The only time that is not true is if the FS9 texture scenery is mostly photoreal and huge in size. At that point it is faster to place the photoreal scenery on a second drive and do a NAME\Defragment so the files are relocated at the beginning sectors of the drive and are alphanumericaly placed in perfect order.

Anything else is a waste of resources.


In any case, if I were to load the OS and games on different drives I would never place the OS and a game on 2 different spec I/O.

RAID sucks almost TWICE the CPU cycles as a single drive so it would be better to either put it all on the RAID array or shut down RAID and use 2 10k RAptors side - by - side.

and to everyone...

AND NEVER PARTITION A PERFORMANCE INSTALL


Partitions are for STORAGE DRIVES only

[ctjoyce]

AND NEVER PARTITION A PERFORMANCE INSTALL


Partitions are for STORAGE DRIVES only

I thought that was common knowladge

Cheers
Cameron

[NicksFXHouse]

I thought that was common knowladge

Cheers
Cameron

to you and I and experienced folks it is...

[cheesegrater]

I want a Raptor now.

[Politically Incorrect]

You should always place your FS on the same drive as your OS.
Anyone that says different doesn't know a thing about how FS and Windows works.

I would recomend a RAID 0 array and install everything there, you will see increase in performance in all areas.
Of course be sure to back up data, as said above if one drive goes South all drives do. But the gain in pc performance is well worth the risk for me.

[haroldkip]

... NEVER PARTITION A PERFORMANCE INSTALL ...

Obviously I'm not that experienced

Nick & Cameron: are you saying that it's better to have the FS9 dir on the same drive as the OS?

I don't even have it installed on the same physical drive. I have two SATA drives (300 & 120) and divided them into several partitions; C=OS, D=Apps, E=Docs, F=Music, G=Non FS Games, H=Films

On the other drive I have I=Vista and J=FS9

There's some additional future space left in the K drive ... which I hardly ever use, exept for maybe storing some temporary work ...

My FS9 library is on a 120 GB mobile HDD. On that I store everything I download for FS9.

I'm pretty happy with this set up and am not very likely to change it, unless you say I can get a big increase in FS9 speed/sharpness if I alter my setup ... after your tips in the "AA on the card and in the Sim?" I've locked the sim at 24 FPS and it seems pretty happy with that

The sharpness of ground textures could be better and load faster but I'm OK with it ... what would you advise in this situation?

I'm also leaning heavily towards the FS-GS Service ... but need to get a headset for that first  ;)

[Politically Incorrect]

I have yet to try the FS-GS service but I am willing to bet that the first thing they will have you do is what I stated above and that is install FS9 and Windows on the same drive for performance purposes .

Here is a simple way of explaining why you should have both on the same drive.
Where is your FS9 config? in a Windows directory correct?

So that means if your FS9 is on one drive and Windows on another your pc is needing to read from both drives to make FS work properly. Common sense says if the  reading is from one drive it will be faster than two seperate drives

So why one would think having the OS and FS9 on two seperate drives would increase performance is beyond me, all you need to do is look where the install files are placed to see that FS9 relies on Windows to work.

But someone who has used the FSGS service please correct me if my thinking is wrong.