DCS Filling Up My Computer Hard Drive

[RuskyV]

Why is it so HD storage intensive?

I've had to delete over half my other games just to have DCS on my computer.

I want to purchase the F-14 while it's on sale but again it's requiring a huge amount of my HD space just to download it.

 

Go to your save games folder and delete all the track files from the folder, these can get fairly large and if you have a lot of them you will be surprised how much space these take up.

 

Got to:

 

C:\Users\YOURNAME\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Tracks

 

you can right click this folder and check the properties if you are curious about how bit this file is before deleting the contents!!

[msmith301]

Go to your save games folder and delete all the track files from the folder, these can get fairly large and if you have a lot of them you will be surprised how much space these take up.

 

Got to:

 

C:\Users\YOURNAME\Saved Games\DCS.openbeta\Tracks

 

you can right click this folder and check the properties if you are curious about how bit this file is before deleting the contents!!

 

There's only 19 megs of video in there. I've only been recording my videos for a short time now.

Usually dogfight videos and only have a couple of those.

Most of my flight time has been learning the planes and training.

Good thing to keep an eye on though.

[silverdevil]

@msmith301. what sort of internal drive do you have now? is it EVO or SATA? if EVO check to see if you have an internal bay for a SATA. if you do have a space for SATA then try to get larger. essentially $100 for 1TB and $200 for 2TB. problem solved.

[msmith301]

@msmith301. what sort of internal drive do you have now? is it EVO or SATA? if EVO check to see if you have an internal bay for a SATA. if you do have a space for SATA then try to get larger. essentially $100 for 1TB and $200 for 2TB. problem solved.

 

All I know is it's a 512 GB SSD laptop.

Can't really do anything to it because it't my work laptop.

That's why I was looking to do external drive.

I only have 10 gigs left. Most of it being in program files for either DCS, GOG, Steam or Ubisoft.

Problem is I've probably uninstalled most of the other games because of DCS.

[msmith301]

Yes, you can. Just move the eagle dynamics folder onto the external path

 

It can run, but since the usb 3.0 interface is slower than the one used by internal drives, the performance will be slower as well.

 

I thought the base files had to be located in the [Program Files] or or [Program Files (x86)] folders.

I don't know a lot about computer base code so I'm just reaching here.

[Rudel_chw]

I thought the base files had to be located in the [Program Files] or or [Program Files (x86)] folders.

 

Dcs main folder can be located wherever you want, but you will need to edit the windows shortcut that you use to start Dcs so that it points to the proper path (or create a new shortcut).

[msmith301]

Dcs main folder can be located wherever you want, but you will need to edit the windows shortcut that you use to start Dcs so that it points to the proper path (or create a new shortcut).

 

So [Program Files] and [Program Files (x86)] have no special meaning or design to them other than a place to store all program files?

[Rudel_chw]

So [Program Files] and [Program Files (x86)] have no special meaning or design to them other than a place to store all program files?

 

Windows provides some extra Protection to Folders located within /program files/ .. that’s why it request permission before the installer writes there, and if a software tries to store data on its folder, the data wont be placed there, but on a separate hidden folder.

 

DCS doesn't need that extra protection, so you can place it wherever you want.

 

Also, 32-bit programs get installed to the “C:\Program Files (x86)” folder, so DCS, being a 64-bit program, never installs on that path.

[Worrazen]

You would need a proper USB3 HDD Case adapter with UASP so that Windows can recognize it more properly as a HDD instead of an ordinary USB Flash Mass Storage device.

There is also another downside to using an external HDD, you're going to be carrying that HDD and potentially handling it a lot more than usual, HDDs aren't optimal for this kind of use due to their intolerance to physical stress.

 

They actually have skins for aircraft that aren't even available?

Where are these found?

[update]

However if they are just going to keep re-installing every time you load the game why bother.

 

He meant that in two ways, subjectively and the fact that they're meant for other modules you may not necessairly have. However if you play a MP match with other players using the liveries you don't have then I would get missing texture errors or worse.

 

Mig-21bis teams is doing lots of upgrades and the texture/livery update will see updated liveries with lower sizes but perhaps still retaining good quality (recompressed)

 

I had, and several others got to the same conclusion, that we should have a submodule system, so that you could add several optional submodules of a module, that means you could logically split liveries into submodules and then you can install the ones you would like to play with for a couple of months, then reinstall another one. The reasons why I called it submodule system is because it's best to have it generalized for any kind of optional data a module author would wish to put into them, so the system is flexible/adaptable and designed as such from the beginning

Then you'd have several types to quickly identify, this metadata is also useful for sorting/separating purposes:

Submodule ID: Mig21Bis_L001
Submodule #: 1 
Type: LiveryPack
Name: Yugoslavian Liveries
... etc

 

 

Actually for a laptop it was one of the biggest you can get. Or so I was told.

 

When you go to pretty much any generic supermarket to buy a dishwasher, TV, a computer, you're only going to be told of the options which are sold completely pre-made (OEM), not custom per-parts aka DIY.

 

I didn't like the idea of only having 256 gig on my main drive.

 

We stopped treating the first drive as a main drive a long time ago in the computer world, but as an OS drive, I had a 128 GB OS drive until some 3-4 years ago, now I'm on 250GB as I use more development and workstation type software, programming, graphics design, video editing software, but still no significant data on it.

 

For a laptop, a bigger main drive actually works far better because mobility is the point, I wouldn't want to carry an external HDD with it, perhaps the option was for an internal 1TB 2.5 inch HDD, I think laptops do have 2 storage bays these days as per standard, but I have no much experience with laptops so don't hold my word.

 

 

I was looking at a couple of USB 3.0 high speed external SSD drives today that had read speeds of over 500 mb/s.

Is this fast enough to keep DCS running properly with everything still set at high as I have it now.

 

Games usually don't read sequentially, especially DCS which is streaming in bits here and there, hence random-access and random-reads are likely to be more important.

 

Manufacturers, marketing and salesman always show, or point out the most, the higher number, the sequential one.

 

Sequential transfer is usually when you copy a large file, I guess certain areas of the loading screen could be affected and would help in DCS as well as any other game, but it still depends on their methods behind it, how that large file is read (queue depths)

 

 

----------------------------------------

////////////////////////////////////////

 

DCS Installation Size Reducer

 

Finally, I made this utility for testing/diagnosis and also edge cases like this. It's probably outdated slightly due to some paths changing I would assume (but probably not a lot), I'm going through some big PC Hardware/Data/OS maintenance at the moment so I can't update this program, I don't have Visual Studio nor DCS installed, otherwise I'd do it right now.

 

https://www.digitalcombatsimulator.com/en/files/3303133/

Edited June 29, 2020 by Worrazen

[msmith301]

You would need a proper USB3 HDD Case adapter with UASP so that Windows can recognize it more properly as a HDD instead of an ordinary USB Flash Mass Storage device.

There is also another downside to using an external HDD, you're going to be carrying that HDD and potentially handling it a lot more than usual, HDDs aren't optimal for this kind of use due to their intolerance to physical stress.

 

 

That's one of the reasons I was originally looking at SSD external storage drives.

I have had several laptop HDDs go bad on me from traveling when I was told about the SSD drives.

[msmith301]

After looking over my laptop and (finally!) finding the manual it would appear that my laptop has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C port.

Doesn't Gen 2 give you 10 or 20 GB/s?

[silverdevil]

After looking over my laptop and (finally!) finding the manual it would appear that my laptop has a USB 3.1 Gen 2 Type C port.

Doesn't Gen 2 give you 10 or 20 GB/s?

 

10 Gbps

 

https://www.tomshardware.com/news/usb-31-usb-type-c-refresher,29933.html