I just returned from the convention in Denver and after attending the Microsoft presentation, decided that my computer needed some attention.I wanted to partition my hard drive and possibly add another hard drive for storage.I contacted my computer technician and told him what I wanted to do and he then suggested that if I was doing this for performance issues, that I should be purchasing a SCSI drive as that would be the best thing for performance issues relating to FS9.I asked him what the difference was between a normal IDE hard drive and the SCSI drive. He said I could purchase an 80 gig IDE hard drive for around $90. The SCSI hard drive would be 36 gig and would cost $199. Then I would need a $250 controller and a $40 cable.I am not computer literate at all and am now confused.My current system is a 2.6 gig Athlon processor, a Radeon 9800 Pro video card and 1 gig of ram.AM I going to notice a $400 difference in the performance of FS9 with the SCSI hard drive??Any comments would be appreciated and welcomedThanksRoger Hollands

No! Most of the simulation is stored in RAM when you start the simulation. Only Scenery is updated from the drive as you file along and it is cached, so it to is available when needed. Visit http://www.xmission.com/~comphope/jargon/hdd.htm#i .W. Sieffert

Roger,It would not be money wise spent. If you have enough RAM performance of your HD has negligeable effect on FS9. But if you do want a fast drive buy a Western Digital Raptor (10,000 rpm) - it is more expensive than IDE drives but nowhere near as expensive as SCSI and it has performance characteristics almost approaching SCSI drives. I have one and it is great - loads applications much faster.Michael J.WinXP-Home,AMD64 3500+,Abit AV8, Radeon X800 Pro,WD 36GB Raptor,1 GB PC3200 http://www.reality-xp.com/community/nr/rsc/rxp-higher.jpg

Bill and Michael:Thanks very much for your comments and insight. It is much appreciated. I think at this time I will stay with the IDE hard drive and see what happens.Again, thanks for the helpRoger

I've been using SCSI drives with my systems for a long time now. I am very happy for what SCSI has to offer from speed, booting up options and ease of daisy chaining the drives.I use 2 36-gig drives paritiioned to 4 partitions (for both). For backup, in addtion to a DVD burner, I have 2 120-gig external Firewire drives.Never have problem with any system or fs2004.Abe