Would installing FS2004 on a separate hard drive than Windows XP improve loading speed noticably in FS2004 if these hard drives were pretty close in speed to each other? Would this be better than RAID 0. I right now have FS2004 installed on a Programs partition on my Atlas 10K III hard drive and have a separate partition for Windows XP on the same hard drive.

Simple answer....Not enough that you would notice.Never be as fast as a raid0 setup.You'll probably find performance improve if you moved XP to a drive with a single partition due to the way XP arranges the file structure on the HD.With todays extra large HD this may not be the best use of HD space but if you don't have to run a partitioned drive for XP than I wouldn't. PArtition is for file recovery in the event of an OS failure. There is no need to lose everything for a reinstall. It can hurt performance slightly though.Bobby

Hard drives have a limit on how fast they can transfer data. A single drive can't keep up with UDMA 66 let alone 100 or 133. You have to at least use RAID 0 to increase throughput (a little data comes from more than one drive at a time).To see the effect it can have, check out these throughput tests:http://www6.tomshardware.com/howto/20010906/raid-06.htmlGoing from one drive at 36 MB/s to two drives in RAID 0 yields 70 MB/s, a 2X improvement. If you can attach three drives, each on their own IDE channel, throughput doubles again to 130+ MB/s!Peter http://bfu.avsim.net/sigpics/PeterR.gifBFU Forums ModeratorRenegade/Seawolf Design Group (RSDG)[table border=2 cellpadding=0 cellspacing=1][tr][td][table border=0 cellpadding=8 cellspacing=0][tr][td bgcolor=#6f0000]http://bfu.avsim.net/sigpics/logo75t.gif[/td][td align="center" bgcolor=#FFFFF6]Bush Flying Unlimited"At home in the wild"Looking for adventure? Come join us! * [link:bfu.avsim.net|Web Site] * [link:www.cafepress.com/bfu,bfu2,bfu3,bfu4|BFU Store] * [link:bfu.avsim.net/join.htm]Join!][/td][/tr][/table][/td][/tr][/table