Take your scenery off your SSD drive to save space...by P38man

[Roger]

From a recent thread, a good idea to save space on your SSD...by P38man

My thoughts:
- do not buy an OCZ small SSD - there is a well documented "speed" issue with them and you will not know until after you have bought it whether it has that issue or not.
- 120GB is fine for an SSD - the slow parts are (1) starting the PC and (2) The "Choose Plane" button in FSX and on an SSD these are both much faster on the SSD - the scenery is not as slow as you might think (frankly if there is a difference I would need a stopwatch to determine it)
- why 120GB is OK? - because you can easily put your ORBX folder on your regular hard drive with this technique and save money.

Junction points
- you essentially are telling windows your Hard drive's new Orbx folder is your SSD's Orbx folder

How to
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1) turn of User Account Control and reboot machine
2) copy all ORBX directory from SSD to Hard Drive using copy and paste
(copy to E:\ORBX - if E is the hard drive it may be another letter, usually if your OS is on SSD then that would be C and DVD drive would be D making the hard drive E)
3) Delete the ORBX directory on the SSD (not just contents)

4)
Option A - for people who can - use "Command" window DOS commands to navigate to correct FSX directory

Option B - download this program (http://sourceforge.net/projects/console/) and unzip it and put the contents into the FSX directory by way of copy and paste using windows explorer then run it from the FSX directory by double-clicking it using windows explorer
(it is the same as the Command window but no need to navigate manually using dos commands)

5)
Then to make a link in your FSX folder type this:
(in either console window or command window while in the FSX directory)

mklink /J "ORBX" "E:\ORBX"

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Damn easy. I use it BTW.

Now boot FSX and enjoy the suddenly extra space you have on your SSD!

Perhaps you never really needed a bigger SSD.

[kilo delta]

I have 2x Samsung 64GB SSD's running in my old sim PC since I built it in 2008. #1 houses my OS, #2 my photo scenery (to help prevent the dreaded blurries),a 1TB 7200rpm drive houses my FSX installation and files with a further 1TB and 2x500GB drives as backup/storage/other programs and games.

[albix]

Hello,
since many years now I am using a similar system by mean of this software: http://www.rekenwonder.com/linkmagic.htm
I have FSX core set on my SSD and have SimObjects folder installed on a second HDD.
Junction Link Magic is totally free and completely reversible so I invite everyone with HDD limited capacity to try this simple trick.
Best regards.

Alberto

[txnetcop]

The best scenario is to buy an adequate SSD to begin as you diminish the access speed to your scenery files by moving them to the slower throughput of a mechanical drive. However it is a good solution for those who have limited space on an inadequate SSD. However Microsoft Flight and X-Plane 10 is coming out very very soon! You will want a 240GB SSD minimum.
Ted