Moving Scenery to a Diffeent drive

[Joe Lavery]

Hi Guys,

I recently built a new i7 based machine, with a 240GB SSD and a pair of 2 TB hard drives.
Using info gleaned from the net I moved most of my scenery to a different drive creating a link in the SSD to the new location. While this works (sort of) after about a hours flying if I try to go to another airport from the menu, the screen gets totally corrupted. This varies in the effect from missing bits of the cockpit, to a sudden repeating of the scenery, yet FSX does not crash altogether, I can still get to the main menu but the issue always requires a restart of FSX.

I also have both P3D-2 and FSX Steam on my machine and these are both native with no other scenery installed, yet this problem does not happen with either of these. So has anyone else had this sort of problem? or do you think my FSX has got screwed up, or has moving the scenery to another drive caused the problem?

I've checked the hardware by swapping the video card and RAM, even the power supply (suggested by a friend) but the problem persists. I would reinstall the whole lot if necessary but it's going to take me hours because of all the scenery I run with. Incidentally I didn't have this problem on the old machine, but there was no SSD so everything was installed on the main C: drive.

Any advice would be appreciated. 

Joe.

[HarryZ]

Hi Joe,

What you are experiencing is the dreaded VAS (Virtual Access System) that exists in the ancient 32 bit FS code.  As FS X goes from scenery area to scenery area, it loads all the data into memory for display....but it can't dump it once FS X doesn't needed it anymore. It just accumulates and once you reach the 4GB maximum memory usage, FS X will crash. 

When you try and change airports after flying for a while and that airport is large and perhaps an add-on, you quite often will reach the memory maximum and that's it.  Only a re-boot will get you flying again.  There are few things one can do to stretch the flying time but with all the fancy add-ons and utilities that may be running with your FS X,  the out of memory and problem that you are experiencing happens.

Also not sure why you want to move the scenery away from the SSD drive and place it on a regular HD.  That only adds a layer of latency and slows FS X down a bit.

Hope this helps.

[Joe Lavery]

Thanks Harry, a great help for sure.

I had heard about the VAS problem but never experienced it before. I moved the scenery to keep the SSD clean and lean. but it appears to have done the opposite. I only have a 250 SSD so with all the airports and scenery I have I was concerned it would soon fill up.

I saw on the internet that many others had moved their scenery files successfully, so I thought I'd give it a go. But I guess it's time to get a larger SSD. And put any other stuff (non FSX related) onto the other drives.

Thanks for the clarity Harry, I appreciate you taking the time to explain.

Regards
Joe.

[HarryZ]

Hi Joe,

I also have FS X on my SSD along with the operating system.  I have a lot of add-on scenery as well and there is still a lot of room on it.  Anything that is for storage only and other programs that I may need for that computer are all on the SATA drive, leaving the SSD only for FS X related programs and the O/S.

Also, when you first open FS X, have it do so at a small, default scenery airport.  That way very little data gets loaded to the VAS.  You can then go to the airport you want.  I used to start at CYYZ which is a Fly Tampa add-on...lot's of data.  If I want to fly from another airport, such as EGLL that is also a large amount of data, I now have CYYZ and EGLLS loaded into the VAS and I haven't even left the ground!  Since doing this procedure I haven't run out of memory yet....come close though  :-)))