Which addons to install to secondary drive

[caleb1]

Just a general question for all you flight sim gurus out there:

 

I recently got a new flight sim PC and it has a smaller SSD with the OS and P3D v4.5 installed to it.  I also have lots of Orbx scenery and addon aircraft.  Due to limited space, I will have to install one of those 2 things on my secondary internal drive, an HDD, I believe it is 5400RPM.

My question is this:  in your experiences and knowledge, which would you think would be better to put on the secondary HDD for best performance? Aircraft or scenery?

Of course there is the option of me simply trying to see which works better, but I thought maybe I would see if anyone here has any input first.

Thanks,

Caleb

[Sniper31]

Very interesting question Caleb. I don't have an experienced answer for this, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would think maybe put the scenery on the HDD and the aircraft on the SSD. My thought process is simply that the aircraft my get accessed more than the scenery. But again, this is a guess. @renault or @Nick Coopermight have better 'guesses' or actual technical suggestions than I have though.  

 

Cheers!

Landon

[caleb1]

1 minute ago, Sniper31 said:

Very interesting question Caleb. I don't have an experienced answer for this, but if I had to hazard a guess, I would think maybe put the scenery on the HDD and the aircraft on the SSD. My thought process is simply that the aircraft my get accessed more than the scenery. But again, this is a guess. @renault or @Nick Coopermight have better 'guesses' or actual technical suggestions than I have though.  

 

Cheers!

Landon

 

I think you may be right about that.  Will wait and see what input we get from the others.

[Doug Sawatzky]

Hi Caleb

 

I would put the entire simulator and addons on the HDD, the SSD will fill up quickly with related files that you will not have a choice of where to install, and it would be nice and easy to update the OS and simulator separately, for example, if you ever need to format the SSD and reinstall the OS, you would not have to reinstall the simulator.

[Nick Cooper]

Hello,

as Doug suggests would be fine, or if you have space, put the core simulator onto the SSD

and all of your aircraft and addon scenery onto the HDD.

If you can do this, then the simulator will be working at its best speed with the files that are on the HDD.

Aircraft are loaded only once, you can tell this by the fact that you can amend the files while the simulator is running.

Scenery is loaded all the time but the simulator never demands it any faster than an HDD can deliver it.

 

 

[caleb1]

2 hours ago, Doug Sawatzky said:

Hi Caleb

 

I would put the entire simulator and addons on the HDD, the SSD will fill up quickly with related files that you will not have a choice of where to install, and it would be nice and easy to update the OS and simulator separately, for example, if you ever need to format the SSD and reinstall the OS, you would not have to reinstall the simulator.

 

27 minutes ago, Nick Cooper said:

Hello,

as Doug suggests would be fine, or if you have space, put the core simulator onto the SSD

and all of your aircraft and addon scenery onto the HDD.

If you can do this, then the simulator will be working at its best speed with the files that are on the HDD.

Aircraft are loaded only once, you can tell this by the fact that you can amend the files while the simulator is running.

Scenery is loaded all the time but the simulator never demands it any faster than an HDD can deliver it.

 

 

Thanks for the input Doug and Nick.  I can see the advantages of having the entire sim on the HDD, but being that I have already installed it to the ssd and made many customizations to it, I am probably going to leave it on the ssd for now.  The fast load speeds with the ssd are nice too.  If for any reason I need to start over, I will definitely consider this option.

In regards to the aircraft only being loaded once, this is a very interesting peice of information that I have not heard before.  For this reason I will probably keep the aircraft on the HDD if it will not affect performance once the flight is loaded up.  It is also good to know that there shouldn't be any issues with scenery being on the hdd, so I can keep that option open if I need to free up more space on the SSD.

 

Thanks again for the input everyone.