I was flying the other day and noticed that my frame rates had changed quite a bit, and not too sure why because I hadn't done any changes since I installed from a image disk, when I installed I was getting approximately 25 to 35 FPS with all the sliders except water maxed. after about a week they went down to 8 to 15 FPS and most sliders the other way????
So I defragged and not much changed, so reinstalled the Image Disk and everything was back up again. So I was checking on the forums and somewhere I saw "ULTIMATEDEFRAG3"
was a really good defragger and the windows one sucked. when things started going downhill again I used the windows Defragger again and it said it was 2% fragmented, I installed the "ULTIMATEDEFRAG3" from
http://www.disktrix.com and tried the 30 day trial, after the windows did it's defrag, this one said I had 29% fragmented, so I ran it and it really made a HUGE difference, It will optimize your hard drive so your files will be on the outer portion of the disk also. I'm now getting 45 to 75 FPS and no stuttering at all. Maybe the next thing to get would be an SS Drive.
It will take a while to run if you are moving the files to the outer portion of the disk, I suggest doing it at night.
Mine with the operating system and FSX and all the scenerys,planes etc about 2 hrs.