Transfer game to differant hard drive.

[pixelpilot]

Hi all. as my current hard drive is filling up I decided i might put to use an old 150gb WD raptor drive i had sitting around, just to put my flight games on (raptor should be a quick drive). Anyhoo i was about to start the process and couldn't decide wether to unistall dcs black shark and warthog from where they are now (D: before or after installing them to drive E:. Will there be issues with activation/de-activation?, do i even need to uninstal can i just drag the the entire game directory onto my new drive? (worried then about registry issues). Any advice is, as always, greatly appreciated.

[EtherealN]

Regarding the speed of that drive - depends entirely on what you compare with. There's a couple different raptors at the 150GB capacity range, but I'm not really impressed by either. The older RaptorX is actually extremely slow compared to my media drive (which is a WD Caviar Green running at a measly 5400rpm). The newer VR200M only sort of equals that same Caviar Green drive. (This for sustained reads. Getting good data on seek time is hard unfortunately.) Essentially, the "speed" of a drive is often displayed mainly as it's interface and/or spindle speed, and both are really completely irrelevant to anything and everything if you want to find out how fast the drive is when it comes to actually reading your bits. :)

 

So for this reason I'd really suggest you doublecheck that the old Raptor isn't actually slower than whatever newer drives you might have. Even something that's only meant to sit half-forgotten storing a media library might actually outperform an old Raptor.

 

I've never moved an install this way, but I have used multiple installs of the same product and in general I'd say you should be able to just copy over. The only activation issue -afaik- would be if you have also performed other changes to the hardware since activation, otherwise the drive volume number on it's own should not be able to cause a new activation to be needed.

[Viper101]

Just cut and paste the files to a new directory on the new drive, then open the registry editor and change the directory path for each. Don't forget to edit your execution path with your icons too. It should hopefully work without having to use another activation.