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Best file system for FS9 ??

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petebramley
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Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by petebramley »

Over the years I have come across many ideas for arranging files in Flightsim for personal ease of use. After much trial and error this is how my system is currently set up:

Flightsim is on my D: drive and all that goes on there is Flightsim essential files.

d:\
D: Has the following main directories:
ACA2005V1, Afcad_221, AIFP, DXTBmp, FP Changer, FS2004(Main flightsim directory), FS2004SDK, FS9 Configurator,
Hide_AI, PAI Installer V25, ScanAFD, Scenery (This is where pretty much all scenery files reside except those that are specifically required to be in the FS2004 directory), World_of_AI.

The Scenery folder then has sub folders as follows:
Africa, Asia, Carribean, Europe, General, Middle East, North America, Oceania (Australia and pacific islands), South America, UK.

Each scenery that I download and decide to keep goes into the appropriate geographical folder unless it carries files that I decide need to go into the General folder.

The General folder currently contains the following sub-folders:
AFCAD, Carriers, Jetways and terminals for acof, Landclass, MAIW World Airbases Scenery, Mesh.
I am currently debating with myself about creating 2 new folders under 'General'. These would be Waypoints & excludes. Currently all waypoint files (AF2_UAE1.bgl for example) and exclude files reside in
d:\fs2004\Addon Scenery\scenery

With the advent of new AFD creation Programs the AFCAD folder has become quite messy. Afcad files tended to follow the same criteria for the Filename ie: AF2_ICAO_(Owners Initials) producing someting like this:
AF2_EGLL_PB.bgl

Now of course we have AFX & ADE Which are huge improvements on the original AFCAD, but that means now I have to search for that pesky duplicated file not only under AF2_****, But also under AFX_**** & ADE_****.
(MAIW afcad files get amended by shifting the MAIW to the end :-) )

I am now considering another change so that all AFCAD files of whatever vintage begin with the ICAO code with follow-on information as required, examples would be summat like this:

EGLL_AF2_FRF.bgl
EBBR_ADE9_DEFAULT_MAIW
PHNL_AFX_DEF_MAIW_MOD_PB.bgl


This of course is a non-standard set-up and requires a certain amount of fiddling to make it work but so far so good. Comments welcome :D * possible improvements even more so
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kungfuman
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by kungfuman »

Looks like hard work. With the amount of stuff I've loaded into my sim over the years, it would take me over a hundred hours to re-order file-naming schemes and folder structures.

Surrender to the chaos. Chaos has its own order...
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by jaguar1 »

Surrender to the chaos. Chaos has its own order...


You're damn right!!! :mrgreen:
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by delbydoo »

There are bulk file rename tools out there that make this job a WHOLE lot easier
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by Firebird »

My system is different. I tend to avoid putting anything in the default folders unless necessary, compiled flightplans I consider necessary.

I have a similar structure for scenery but under the Addon Scenery folder, AFRICA, ASIA, AUSTRALASIA etc. with national sub folders. There are three exceptions. One, the near obligatory 'Static Objects Library'. Two, I have 'UK MIL' and 'US MIL' folders, purely as the amount of changes and amendments I make in there it just saves on mouse clicks. Three I have my MAIW collection 'MAIW AFCADS Live', 'MAIW Scenery Live' and 'MAIW Scenery Library Objects Live' all my released MAIW stuff goes into one of those. Then there is 'MAIW AFCADS Test', 'MAIW Scenery Test' and 'MAIW Scenery Library Objects Test' for all my MAIW testing. These last three are obviously higher up the scenery list than the first three to ensure that the stuff being tested is visible. Finally 'MAIW Landclass' for the landclass files and that folder is at the bottom of the list with the MS default folders.

I have two extra folders in the main FS9 directory 'Aircraft Museum' and 'Aircraft Hangar'. In the Hangar I place all the flyable aircraft that I never get a chance to fly, which is most of them :oops:. When I have deleted the last scheme from an AI aircraft folder I zip up what is left and place it in the museum, as I never 100% syre that i won't need the model again :lol: .

In the Aircraft folder I colour code the folders using a freeware folder icons lib. The default beige folder for flyable, green for AI, blue for AI on test, and black for ones that I am working on, my personal Skunk Works. :D

On the afcad naming side I tend to leave, or add, the MAIW prefix followed by creation tool followed by ICAO, e.g. MAIW_AFX_EGXC. I had a mad hour the other week at the number of ways that excludes were named and spelled. So I fixed them all to say 'exclude'. All the afcads and scenery files that you guys create I rename using the prefix 'MAIWUSER' so I can tell them apart from the rubbish that has gotten onto my system over the years. :D

Oh yes, I manually install everything. I consolidate aircraft folders when I can, to cut down on the number of folders, and I seem to rename nearly every aircraft that I put on my system, and quite often the schemes, so it can sometimes take an hour to install a package (self-inflicted injury).
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petebramley
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by petebramley »

kungfuman wrote:Looks like hard work. With the amount of stuff I've loaded into my sim over the years, it would take me over a hundred hours to re-order file-naming schemes and folder structures.

Surrender to the chaos. Chaos has its own order...

It was done after a total HD Failure (No backup), so I had a clean slate to work with. I thought about it for several days and then finished sketching out on paper a (for me) logical directory tree. its possibly not the best way of doing things but it works for me. It also gives me summat to do when there is only Football or Soaps on the One eyed goggle box.

:) :)
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by Chrisb »

I run a system similar to Steve and have hours of work to make things retro, but thats my choice.

For the scenery I have it on a seperate drive. I have a seperate file for each country which is then further split into the airbases of that country. By doing that I can also use the 'scenery' folder to contain just the afcad/ADE if there isn't a scenery as such so that keeps them tidy too. It does take some extra work but each scenery can be updated seperately under the original file name.

The aircraft are consolidated into the minimum number but that number seems to increase weekly!

All as a result of a run of HD failures.

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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by msm8378 »

Aside from the benefits of having a separate MSFS ONLY Hard Drive....

Does running FS9 from a secondary drive have any effect on performance?

I have been considering building a new desktop gaming system and have considered putting MSFS on a secondary. Right now everything I have is on my laptop(s) single hard drive (C:).

Also..for the techies here...Which makes more difference CPU/RAM or Video Card (or combination thereof) as to FS9 performance? I have looked at some of the specs put out by Jetline Systems, but they seem to be emphasizing performance configs based on FSX...

Mat
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by Firebird »

Hmmm. That is not necessarily a simple question to answer. FS9 was designed to run on 32-bit XP OS machine. That doesn't mean to say that it won't run fine on other combinations, it just means that you won't get as big a boost as maybe other programs do. What I mean here is that 7 maybe a more efficient OS so it will run better on a system running 7 than on an equivalent running XP.

Yes, the faster processor you have it will run faster. Remember I said processor here. FS9 is a single processor app so you won't directly gain from a multi-core processor as it will use only one. You will gain indirectly, in as much as on a multi-core processor FS9 will use the entirety of one core processor whilst other apps and system tasks can share one or more of the other core processors.
Simply put if you have a single core processor and a multi core processor both rated at 2.0Ghz the only difference will be that FS9 will share the 2.0Ghz with everything whilst on the multi-core it will have 2.0Ghz to itself.

Now video card. If you have everything maxed out, settings wise, then a faster GPU with more memory will be better. One thing to remember though is that the size of your screen makes a hell of a difference. The GPU has to control each pixel, so the bigger the size of screen the faster chip needs to be, and more memory required, to get the same fps rate.
If you run FS9 on a machine at 1024x768 resolution you will get more fps than running it at 1600x1200. So the fastest GPU around is the best? Not necessarily. I will come on to that later.

Memory. Faster memory is good. However, if you are on an XP machine then you are limited to 4Gb overall, of which only 3GB can be used. yes, I know there is a patch that will allow 3.5GB to be used but I have not seen any evidence that it will allow a single app to use more than the normal 3GB limit. I am willing to listen on contrary reports on this. More memory is good but limited on XP, so does this mean that it will work dramatically better on 7? This I don't know as I use XP. You could, if you so choose, throw 32GB and much more at your PC but remember that FS9 is designed for XP so it could have a built in limit for how much memory it could actually use. Somebody that has 7 will have to answer/test this. On XP you used to have a situation that whatever memory you had the system worked best by having 1.5x that size as virtual memory. If you had 1GB of mem you really needed 1.5GB Vmem, 2Gb of mem equals 3GB of Vmem.
Whether FS9 will still vmem even on 7 I don't know, best somebody else answers that. If it does, again as its compiled for XP, then every read/write to the vmem on the HD incurs a performance hit.

Now this leads onto to something which is the reason why its a difficult question to answer. If you have a slow system then almost anything will increase performance, but what it you have a fast system? There is a time where you have a really fast multi-core, the fastest memory you can get, the fastest GPU you can get. There comes a time where having all these things will do you know good as it comes down to a system bottleneck. Remember for a frame you see on your screen all the information has to come off your HD. At some point the FS9 program has to load and be stored in memory, the aircraft characteristics, the aircraft model, the scenery, AI, all textures. This has to be refreshed at various points. Some like the main program will stay in core, but the scenery has to be refreshed on an almost constant basis. The AI needs to be refreshed often. Any new AI models have to then be read and reloaded.
So you can easily get to a point where your system resources are waiting for information to be read off the HD. So you need to take into account HD speed. The more you need to load the faster the HD needs to be. Normally, you reach this bottleneck. Can you do anything about it? Well you can start by making sure you have the fastest HD possible.
Can you read the data any faster? Yes you can do somethings to help. The simple fact is that a HD has a fixed number of heads so it can only scan and read so much data at a time. What happens if increase the number of HD's? If you add another this increases the number of heads by a factor of 2, so you can read potentially up to twice the amount of data at the same time. Now we are getting somewhere. This is the principle behind RAID0. It joins two physical HDs and treats them like one big virtual HD. It then stripes the data over the two drives, so writes one block to one and the next to the other. So if you are reading scenery from a RAID0 you would be having twice the number of heads reading at the same time, potentially.
So having two separate HDs in RAID0 for FS9 is the best? Its a lot better but thinking about what I said earlier every time it goes to the HD to load new AI which means new models and new schemes, it stops loading scenery to load that. So you could speed it up by having another separate HD purely for FS9 and just have your scenery on this new RAID0. Then you will be making better use of the system resources that you paid so much for.
Wait a minute though wouldn't it be even faster to have a RAID0 for FS9 and another RAID0 for your scenery? Yes, there will be times when it will load even faster, but you are committing yourself to at least a 5 HD computer and you may not get that much reward for most of the time. Even my last suggestion would require a 4 HD system.

Oh, one final thing. If you have a RAID0 array, you MUST take a regular backup. If you get an error on one of the disks you lose both. I can not emphasize this enough.

The upshot of all this waffle is that you can always improve your performance, but as each system is different there is no general rule. I believe that anybody that tells you one answer is talking about what improved their system, not what will improve yours. My general rule of thumb is that I will go with tweaks that will improve things a little here and there but hardware I leave until I can get a 20-25% improvement. Anything less is not really going to be noticed and you can spend a lot chasing the dream when it would be cheaper to by a new 'puter every 18months.
I myself believe that going to a new motherboard with the latest fast memory, more than 2GB, and 7 will give me that increase. That is what I will do this year.

Apologies for the length of the post but there are so many people that ask these types of questions that I thought it best to answer as fully as possible.
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by bismarck »

It's a very interesting explanation.

Thanks Steve
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by Joecoastie »

Excellent writeup. I will be doing the same as you later on this year. Thanks, Steve.
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by msm8378 »

Huge thanks for the write-up...

Very interestings and you have given me much to think about in planning for this new system.

Mat
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by ronniegj »

Steve, just wondering! What effect would solid state drives have on your discussion?

Ron
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by Firebird »

A very reasonable question indeed.
Solid state drives are very fast and energy friendly. They do have a couple of drawbacks. One, currently the cost. It will come down over time but for the size of them they are currently very expensive per mb over traditional drives. Operationally however there is one major drawback.
This is the nature of the beast. Solid state is basically millions of tiny on/off switches, the binary system. Solid state means setting these switches on or off, whereas traditional media you write a 1 or a 0 to the media. The switches wear out, they have a life expectancy which means that over time the efficiency of the drive and its capacity will reduce.
I should state that this is not too dissimilar with the traditional magnetic media it gets wear and tear the older it gets as well, but at this moment in time magnetic media has reached a state where errors are few and the life is regarded as so long that you don't normally have to worry about.
Solid State drives currently come with a life expectancy, even a util that monitors the state and tells you when it is likely to expire. We are currently on the second generation drives which are better than the first gen but still have this issue. What does all this mean to a user? Simply put the more you change data on a solid states drive the quicker it will wear out. I think, can't be sure, the the first gens were supposed to last 2 years and the second gens about 5 years. However, you can wear it out a lot faster than that.
Things to avoid. Do not put your Vmem on a SSD partition. By the nature of it it will be constantly updating it. Secondly, do not use defrag programs in automatic mode. I have a very good payware defrag proggie that runs in the background and makes hundreds of changes a day, obviously not good. My one, Diskeeper, now has an SSD mode but I would be reluctant to use it on an SSD at the moment. Likewise, people that manually defrag every week should think twice about this.
The best place to have an SSD is for the system boot partition, as long as you don't install your programs on the C: drive as well.
If you were to use it for FS9 then I think that it would be best used for your scenery. You would benefit from the constantly quick reading. Now I think that if you used photoscenery addons or a lot of third part mesh and things like Ultimate Terrain then these would definitely benefit tremendously from such a drive. Also by the nature of them you tend to install them and leave them alone. If you don't use these then your addon scenery would still benefit. Weather addons such as Active Sky or REX would also benefit tremendous, again constantly reading but no writing once installed.

I believe that for current second generation SSDs then having your FS9 drive on one would be beneficial. Even more so if you are a person that install something and leaves it alone. The only possible problem would be if the size of your FS9 partition is too big to fit on one, or it fits but not much free space for growth.

Now an interesting question would be whether it would be useful to split your scenery off and have two SSDs purely for FS9. For magnetic media there is a definite advantage as most modern PC's architecture is now faster than you can retrieve the data off of disk. However SSD is a lot faster. It may be that if you have two SSD's you will hit a system architecture bottleneck, i.e. it can't deliver the data to the CPU and the GPU fast enough. I would doubt it on 64 bit systems but I don't know for sure.
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Re: Best file system for FS9 ??

Post by ronniegj »

Thanks for the discussion. Think I'll just avoid these for the time being!

Ron
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