A little Hard Drive advice?

Being you can easily fill a single raptor with FSX-or-FS9 'alone' with mesh and other addons I am not so sure placing them both on such a small drive is the best course of action. The 1st Gen Raptors are fast but any hard drive begins to lose its access advantage as it fills. The larger the platter, the faster the access to the application located at the beginning of the 1st physical partition. Once a hard drive is filled past the 50% mark it begins to degrade in performance. By 75% that perf curve starts dropping like a rock.

So if you are sure you will not ever exceed 45GB with both FSX and FS9 with addons then a single 1st gen 74GB raptor is fine. But any higher than that and the advantage the drive presents is lost.

When it comes to storage performance and MSFS you want the applications to live on their own physical drive with the right amount of free space left over. More free space is better than less, even if that free space is 200GB. That is why I use Velociraptors. With all my addons, mesh, aircraft, etc, I am running close to 100GB for FSX. That represents 1/3 of the 300GB Vrap (no partitions) and that 1/3 full represents the absolute fastest, most efficient access speed I can get out of the drive based on physics with respect to geometric access. I could use a 150GB Vrap but that would mean I would be approaching the 65-75% max I would not want to exceed, therefore I selected the drive based on the getting the most out of it.

That being said here are the rules for a performance storage setup

1. The OS and installed software (other than performance applications) lives on the first physical partition of one drive. The amount of space the OS and the installed software should be 1/3 of the size of the partition for best results (although that can go to 50-65%)

2. That first drive can be partitioned but the OS and installed software must live on the 1st physical partition of the drive. The 2nd partition can be storage which would be protected with the partition from a OS crash.

3. The performance application follows the same rules as above but on a 2nd drive.

4. Multiple performance applications are in fact best served on their own 1st physical partitions on their own drives but they can live on one drive together as long as

a. The amount of space the multiple perf applications take up should be 1/3 of the size of the partition for best results (although that can go to 50-65%)

b. Do not install 2 apps with a partition between them. They should be installed to folders on the root of drive 2 placing them in NAME ORDER with the application the user desires to have the best access speed as 1st in the root list

Correct use of O&O Defrag will then place the application the user wishes to have max access performance at the beginning of the platter using the NAME DEFRAG process. If you are not aware of O&O Defrag I suggest you may wish to learn about it.. it is in fact the beat defrag for any MSFS performance system. You can learn about O&O, its proper use and OS optimizing here:

http://www.simviation.com/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1208959973

That list is geared for XP however a similar VISTA settings list for perf with the OS is posted here...

http://www.simforums.com/forums/forum_posts.asp?TID=30437&PID=174126#174126

but still follow the XP list for the methodology

O&O Defrag use is exactly the same for XP or Vista

5. This is true of performance storage systems that are NOT on a network or will be NOT be used as a network SERVER. The SATA system in the BIOS should never be set AHCI which incorporates NCQ. As a matter of fact is best to NEVER install a Windows OS on a system that has AHCI enabled because Windows will configure itself DIFFERENTLY with AHCI enabled in the BIOS. It is best to install Windows and use the setting ENHANCED:IDE only in the BIOS when max SATA performance is required.

NCQ (AHCI) is great for network and multi-user access systems.. it will destroy the performance of a Raptor

Based on that you should be able to figure out what is best for you and the hardware you have.

MSFS is far better off on access and rotation speed perf drives

At the same time, the larger the platter (more GB) the faster the drive access speed based on physics with respect to geometric access.

So in essence you could use your very large drive, partition it leaving 100GB for the OS and installed software as the 1st Physical partition and the 2nd partition for storage. That would leave your 2 Raptors free to be FSX and FS9 drives and then use another drive for the capture cache. In that sense you are getting the most out of all your applications

 format your performance application drives to 64K allocation.. not the OS as that must remain the default of 4K or Windows will not boot, but do that to the MSFS drives.

I use Acronis Disk Director.. its great software and allows a lot more that access for partitioning hard drives.

It will provide you with the tools you need to do the job.

And by the way,.. format your performance application drives to 64K allocation.. not the OS as that must remain the default of 4K or Windows will not boot, but do that to the MSFS drives.

Best way to do this is create the partitions first for the big drive making sure the new clean partition is the first physical partition of the drive.. the GUI in Acronis will show you that.. it will also ask where you want the new partition ... BEFORE or AFTER

You create the new partition with the free space, and make sure its the first one shown on the drive in the GUI. It MUST BE A PRIMARY PARTITION not LOGICAL and then format it to 4K

After that is done I would suggest you power down and unplug all drives in the system so the big one with your new OS partition is the only one active. When you boot back up you will need to go into the BIOS and set that drive to be BOOTABLE in the BIOS BOOT LIST

Once that is complete, you reboot and install the OS to then new partition. That way you are sure it will be the keystone drive in the system as C. After the OS is installed power down and hook all the other drives back up and boot up.. the OS will then find and assign them.. from there you can work it however you like.

UTX gets installed directly into MSFS... it can NOT be installed outside. GEX, FEX, REX and programs like that which send textures to FSX can be installed elsewhere.

I said no partitions on the MSFS drives

Create a install folder to the root of the drives first, then browse MSFS to install to that folder

 again,.. make sure before you install the OS the BIOS for the storage system SATA is set to ENHANCED: IDE and not AHCI