Hard drive questions

I have a Windows7 64bit Desktop, and it has a 1TB HD ... If I put in a 2nd hard drive, does Windows OS have to be installed on that hard drive as well ? I want to have a hard drive that is totally dedicated only to Trainz. How many hard drives can you put in, and dedicate each hard drive to TRS2006, TS10, TS12, T:ANE ?

Windows can just use the other drives for programs and data. I think the limit is to do with the letters of the alphabet, a and b are reserved for floppies, C is the normal hard drive, your dvd drive is probably D etc. I'm supprised you didn't upgrade to win 10, it gives slightly better frame rates in TANE and TS12.

You can also put in a 4 gig drive then carve it up into partitons and call each a drive letter.

A more normal way would be to install them all on one drive in different folders, it saves having spare space on each drive. H:\TRS2006, H:\TS10 etc.

Cheerio John

I don't like the desktop tiles in WindowsX ... Windows7 will do me until it quits

My old beater integrated graphics laptop (in Driver) is getting @ 4-8 FPS with TRS2006 ... Yet the same game installed on a 1TB WD USB external HD is getting 8-12 FPS ... explain that ? I thought USB external HD had slow data rates

I really need to get it off my 10 y/o beater laptop ... and get it onto a new higher spec laptop, or onto my desktop PC

My disc space is down to 3 GB free space at times, and I always optimize and defrag, and move downloads to an external HD ... It is coming time for me to get Trainz off of my beater laptop

It works well when laying track (in Surveyor), as framerates are pretty high

I assume the frame rate on the internal and external dirves are on the same machine.

What matters is free space, no matter what operating system you use once your conventional hard drive is above 75% full then you can expect performance to drop. Basically the machine stuffs things in small corners and then has to work harder to find them again.

Conventional defragging is not good for trainz. What it does is clusters all the bits of a file together, fine except these days the sectors are no longer all on the same track, each track has a different number of sectors on it so a translation table is used which means your defragging software normally is unable to know exactly which sector is physically next to another sector on the hard drive. The second thing it does is move files around each asset is trainz uses a number of files, if they are together then you get good performance, if they are apart spread out over the disk you get bad performance. This is one reason why SSDs work well with Trainz you don't need to physically move the head when grabbing the next file.

There is one type of defragging that does work, on a new drive or just formatted drive just install the software and assets. All the files for each asset will be together, all the program files will be together. You can get a similar result by backing ip all the file, deleting everything then running a defrag software to get all the space together.

Windows 10 actually does a nice job of keeping the files used together together on the disk, its certainly better than XP for example. Could you just buy a decent sized SSD or bigger hard drive and replace your existing hard drive? The disk companies have software that will clone a drive so you just copy over the operating system program and data files.

Cheerio John

I don't like the desktop tiles in WindowsX ... Windows7 will do me until it quits

Click to expand...

Hmmm. Windows 10 here, no tiles to be seen. I win 7'd it.

In response to the original question, Windows is only installed on your boot drive, usually the C: drive. The boot drive is determined by the BIOS (Basic Input/Output System). You can add as many physical drives as you like, limited only by space, power, cabling and the number of letters in the alphabet. Anyone with some knowledge of the innards of a PC should be able to open the lid and check it out.

That's it in a nutshell. Some of us like to have different arrangements with multiple operating systems, virtual drives and all sorts of combinations but for you I think it would be an easy addition.

BTW, Microsoft did listen to their customers and tiles have disappeared although you can still have them if you want. Win 10, for me, looks much like Win 7.

If you don't want to open your computer up - consider external hard drives. A 1 Tb one goes for around $100 or so (possibly less since its been a while since I bought mine). Just plug it in and away you go.

Ben

I think the USB cable has a slow data transfer rate though ?

cascaderailroad said:

I think the USB cable has a slow data transfer rate though ?

Click to expand...

No need to have an external connected through USB, although USB 3.0 can get up to around 100 MB/sec data transfer - theoretically more again. If thats not enough, you can connect external drives though eSATA (not all drives support it, and your MB probably doesnt have eSATA ports though) which is much faster again.

Best off connecting them internally though SATA though, IMO.

There is another thing to try, right click the folder properties, attributes advanced, tick compress contents to save disk space.

Windows does an odd compression that takes quite a bit of time to compress but is very fast to decompress. Since it lowers the number of disk accesses needed to read a file it can sometimes be quicker than a conventional read. It does take a minimal amount of cpu to decompress the file but nothing noticeable. It works exceptionally well with Trainz files as each small trainz file has to have its own sector so takes up a minimum amount of disk space. It also groups all the files needed for an asset in one place and defragging the disk will not split them up.

Cheerio John

your USB drive is probably a newer and faster unit than your internal one. You can get a 1TB hard disk for under $50, but you would be better off getting a bigger one, if you have a lot of content. Then, as mentioned, just install the different versions into different folders. There's no need to put them on different drives. As for the tiles thing with WindowsX, I'm sorry but you need to get off the Windows 7 bandwagon (former XP bandwagon) and give it a go with Windows 10. It is greatly improved performance over 7, supports more hardware, and does have a regular start menu.

pdkoester said:

your USB drive is probably a newer and faster unit than your internal one. You can get a 1TB hard disk for under $50, but you would be better off getting a bigger one, if you have a lot of content. Then, as mentioned, just install the different versions into different folders. There's no need to put them on different drives. As for the tiles thing with WindowsX, I'm sorry but you need to get off the Windows 7 bandwagon (former XP bandwagon) and give it a go with Windows 10. It is greatly improved performance over 7, supports more hardware, and does have a regular start menu.

Click to expand...

The normal free upgrade ended at the end of July but the following may still work.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-free-upgrade-assistive-technologoies,32373.html

Cheerio John

I just need to dump this 2006 integrated graphics laptop, and use it for general computing, probably only has USB 1.0

My Desktop has USB 2.0

johnwhelan said:

The normal free upgrade ended at the end of July but the following may still work.

http://www.tomshardware.com/news/windows-10-free-upgrade-assistive-technologoies,32373.html

Cheerio John

Click to expand...

Yes, you can still get it free upgrade. There's a couple of ways, like you pointed out for one...

When I go to bed, I select my PC to "Sleep" ... I have an external hard drive, and I usually select it to "Eject" and I pull the PC USB plug and disconnect the AC power plug. I don't want to ever disconnect the plugs on the external hard drive, as that wears out the contacts.

Every so often my external hard drive refuses to "Eject" and says it is still in use by another program ... So I give up and go to sleep. The LED on the hard drive is either "On" or "blinking".

My question is: when your PC is on "Sleep" mode, is the external hard drive still running, and is the external hard drive disc still spinning all night long, and would this wear it out ?

Is my external hard drive in "Sleep" mode, when it is idle ?

A windows explorer might be open, antivirus might be scanning, or defrag might be running if it's set on an automatic schedule.

I do the same with my external drive, but I do shut my machine down most of the time at night. We have awful power issues where I live with random outages, and zoom-splat drivers which knock the power out when they zoom around the narrow winding road, hit a pole as they splat.

I'm not entirely sure what sleep mode is but I think it is waiting for some interrupt to kick it back into life. This might be a keyboard action, mouse movement, an ethernet card interrupt or even something coming from your external hard disk. So I just shut the PC down. I don't power everything off.

I have a couple of networked drives and a while back the WD drive I had would drive me crazy because I could hear disk accesses going on even when the PC was shut down. I think I even spoke to John about it. I was concerned that some nasty person out in the Internet was accessing my drive. After umpteen re-installs of WD software and allowing the drive to "do it's thing", it has settled down. Maybe it was the presence of the Seagate drive I bought to replace it if it didn't behave. Or maybe that nasty person realised I had absolutely nothing of monetary value on my external drives worth stealing.

You know, I thought I knew a thing or two about PCs but some of this stuff drives me crazy. I'd like an operating system where I choose what interface I use rather than some tiled interface chosen by some idiot working for Microsoft. I'd even go for Linux except I think they have also been corrupted by MS thinking.

"Grumpy mode off" (it's about 100F here )