
Posted:
Sat Sep 18, 2010 8:46 pm
by IslandBoy77
Not sure exactly what sort of symptoms Ian had with bleeding (are you able to describe that for us Ian?) - but my experience has been that if a Windows install is setup well and maintained well, and if a person organises their system well (file-wise) and with forethought, 2nd & 3rd drives pose no problems. It could be that 2nd & 3rd drives are problematic on XP, but under Vista & 7 (32 & 64 bit) I've had zero problems with FSX at all. I know some people try to assign their doc folders to a drive other than C - I've seen that cause all sorts of problems, on XP, Vista & 7 (and I would be careful in re-assigning special folders - although 7 is far more "able" to cope with this than previous OSes). Keeping it simple is always a good idea, especially if you like tinkering.
My config is thus:
1) Main Drive: Windows 7 64-bit with assorted utils, games & progs
2) 2nd Drive: Win virtual mem file / Nero & Photoshop temp file repository ONLY
3) 3rd Drive: FSX & SDK + all FSX sceneries etc ONLY
The way I have it setup, the 3 drives compartmentalise things nicely & cleanly, with no issues. Win 7 puts a Program File (x86) folder on the 3rd drive, and it causes no issues with the folder of the same name on #1 drive.
What I'd really be interested in is confirmation of another post on NZFF about SSD performance. I see that there is now a wide spread of read / write speed drives available (so if anyone reading this is thinking about it, watch for that), so it's possible that an SSD that can hold a sustained read or 100MB/sec or better could outperform everything but a Raptor-class HDD. I'm toying with the idea of 1 or 2 SSDs in the future, but their size / speed / cost ratio is just too high at the moment.
A thought: has anyone got an SATA3 motherboard / hard drive configuration up and running? I read that the SATA3 drives still won't deliver full theoretical speed (in the same way the the 2's generally only got 60-70% max of their best theoretical speed), but even if they only get half their top rate, a 3 should eat most SSDs for breakfast, and at a much more attractive $/MB ratio (not to mention much bigger drives).