Hard drives and FSX

[CanadaKen]

We all know MSFS is CPU clock speed hungry but what about advice on hard
drive specs to look for?

I tend to buy a drive strictly for FS. If I want to stay away from the
10,000rpm drives is the Read Throughput the most important drive spec to
look for?

CK

[harleyman]

Hi CanadaKen....:welcome:

Yes I would sat that you are correct if you are looking for a 7,200RPM drive...

Another new twist to these drives now is Cache...They now are making 7,200 speed drives that have a outstanding 32 MB Cache......Typically they are larger,operating more than one platter....But there are more and more smaller drives appearing ..

Also a consideration would be the new SSD ones...Money....LOL


Hope this helps

[CanadaKen]

It will be interesting now that the ACES team members won't be working for
MS...maybe they will feel more at ease giving hardware advice.

I would love to hear what some of them have to say about video card
drivers. Pros and Cons on ATI and nVidia. Or is that asking too much. :-)

Phil Taylor's blog last year about video cards was a real help.

Ken

[datter]

I have two 150gb Raptor 10,000 rpm drives, and recently added a 1 terrabyte 7200rpm drive. When I reinstalled FSX I put it on the new big drive without thinking about it until afterwards. After a few flights I uninstalled, cleaned up and reinstalled it to one of the 10,000rpm drives and find it loads quicker for me if nothing else.

[harleyman]

I have found the fastest for FSX is installed with the OS...Unless your second drive is a V-Raptor or SSD drive.....Then its not faster but to me just as fast,allowing it FSX to have its own drive by itself....

[FLighT01]

I'm getting very good results with FSX plus all addons (except FEX and GEX) on D, and, Vista64 and a couple of supporting programs and the swap file on the usual C. Both HD's are Velociraptors. No matter what I load in FSX it's less than 40 seconds and I'm in the cockpit even with all the addon textures and high res mesh.

The biggest benefit I'm experiencing having FSX on drive (D) by itself seems to be that the drive defragments very little over time, and when I run a complete "by name" with O&O it takes just a few minutes. It's wierd but sometimes I think that FSX files are being put back in the spaces they were originally taken from. The Vista drive seems to have a nasty habit of getting defragmented very quickly as Vista throws files all over the place when done with them, I think system retore makes it even worse. But I let it (C)go longer without defragmenting it and I don't notice any performance related issues when running FSX.

[Bjoern]

The Samsung Spinpoint F1 series is an excellent and affordable alternative to the Raptors.