Are any of you doing this?
I have FSX running very nicely on a new machine I just built a couple of weeks ago.

But I would really like to use my PMDG 737, so was planning to install FS9 as well.
I would not install to 'C' (where FSX is installed) but obviously a load of FS9 files are going to go to 'C' no matter where I install it.


Just wondering if installing both of them could cause problems or conflicts.

thanks

It's strange how many people believe there would be conflicts between those two games. They are two different games installing in two different folders, why would there be any problem ? 

"It's strange how many people believe there would be conflicts between those two games. They are two different games installing in two different folders, why would there be any problem ?"

Did he say games?   

That's interesting.
I have a 40 gig. C and approximately 180 gig E partition, the rest of the drive is used for Linux which I dual boot with XP Pro.

I have some, but not all programs installed to C. It is my belief that you can install software anywhere you want to and I have always done it that way with no problems ever. the Windows registry doesn't care where you install programs.

I am not a gamer, but have ran the last three versions of MSFS with never any issues.
You may have something there, although I can't see the speed bump theory being an issue with today's fast SATA hard drives and dual core processors.

I appreciate your input.
So, given my particualar setup, would you put FS9 on C or E.
I'm thinking E would be the best thing.
the reason I even asked this question was based on some posts on different forums about people having issues with cfg. files getting mixed up and leading to problems. Could have been nothing at all or problems releted to any number of things.

I don't believe that on a clean well maintained system this would ever be an issue, but just thought I would ask in case someone had a problem..
thanks again...

Quote:


As I was curious about your theory, I put it to a friend (not a typical computer tech and even the typical IT “masters degree” expert) just someone who knows this stuff inside and out and makes his living all day every day dealing with these questions.
He read your post and replied as below:

There's not necessarily any great need to partition (a different directory would be fine, and NTFS can handle large filesystems). A partition table is only a few bytes (four 16 byte entries) and applications (other than, say, disk utilities of course) do not read partition tables or partition info. The OS kernel does that at boot time. Windows assigns drive letters. Linux assigns block device nodes for partitions, and mount points are assigned. It doesn't matter whether it's C:\whatever or D:\whatever it's the same thing that has to happen when you access files.

It does not slow down file access to read from a separate partition. (Not only that, the game would be installed to that partition and directory info would be cached anyway)

Buffering and caching greatly aid file operations and none of this is a big deal.

It's probably true that having a large disk as a single partition, mostly empty, would theoretically be faster though. Simply because the data you are accessing will be on the fastest part of the disk.

there it is for what it's worth.

Then, for what it's worth, I suggest you partition your hard drive.

Split it down further too.

Then again the last statement made tends to suggest otherwise (it isn't theory either) so unless you are sure your friend is right, I suggest you not partition and allow the NTFS system to function, with the proper free space, MFT and without forcing the head to seek. As for the details, there is a latency factor being applied by placing a partition table(s) into a mechanical hard drive.

It matters not. What ever works for you, thats fine

Buffering using mechanical or limited bandwidth solid state bus means only goes so far and in a high performance system, is useless. There is a cache to buffer spec for all mechanical drives which means the drive can never exceed that spec for I/O. The only buffer that 'theoretically' adds to performance would be a solid state buffer that is not restricted by a USB (30-40MBs) or older PCI bus systems. In that Robson Technology by Intel is being developed for PCIe bandwidth which will allow solid state buffering of data. It uses the Vista Ready-Boot and Ready-drive systems and it also has its limits which are related to motherboard bus technology, in other words, you are better off on 4 gigs of high speed system memory than using Robson Technology or Ready-boost in Vista and trying to run 1-2gigs of PM.

The best HDD system is solid state whereby partitioning and mechanical latency have absolutely no influence on file reads. The second best is a dedicated RAID, SCSI or SATA card which has a dedicate DDR2 RAM memory onboard to cache with the system RAM and communicate at only the limits placed on it by the card slot. In that 64bit PCIe or PCIx increases that ability by quite a lot, however, it all comes down to the bottleneck a mechanical drive places on a system to begin with. Memory fills up and that drive has to be paged regardless of the buffer in place, therefore, it is best to purchase a drive with the highest 'Buffer to Disk" rating possible and the lowest access specs and not slow it down further by forcing more mechanical activity.

Many people think because a WD Raptor is a SATA 150 drive, their SATA 300 is faster, on the contrary, the buffer to disk spec for a WD 150 Raptor is 80MB/s and a SATA 300 sits at about 56-65MB/s max. That, and the fact the Raptor has a 10,000 RPM platter with lower access specs, makes it much, much faster.

To partition such performance setups is, quite frankly, rediculous