Which hard drive? Discuss if you will....

[Guest stan29]

Hello Fellow Flightsimmers,I hope you are all well...I have a dilemma, possessing little technical knowledge I am unsure which hard drive would be more suitable, or should I say give better performance when running FS9. the contenders:Serial ATA 1.5Gb/s 10,000 RPM w/ NCQ & 16MB Cache ...or..RAID 0 Serial ATA 1.5 Gbit/s, 10,000 RPM with 32MB Cache (2 x 160GB).I have read alot about RAID 0 on this forum without ever really knowing why it seems to be favoured..(don't worry I will google that later)The same goes for running FSX, if I ever feel brave enough to dip my toe in that currently murky water. (No doubt I will and love it once the hardware and addons catch up!)Many thanks, no THG stylee answers required just a quick one liner would be great.All the best, Stan Harvey EGPE

[Guest wayupthere]

Hi Stan,>>possessing little technical knowledgeBy that what you said above, stay away from RAID, its nice when it works, but it can be a pain when issues show up, specially for the non-tech crowd.A normal SATA drive with a 16mb of cache is sufficient for regular day to day users, more cache like 32mb, can increase your drive performance, but then you'll also look into perpendicular storage technology.So... To keep things very simple as you want ;) in short, if you just want to run FS on a high-speed harddrive, get yourself a nice 10.000rpm Raptor, or have a look at some 10.000rpm Caviars._____PS. THG Stay away from that site, very biased website, not good for reviews, you want quality reliable info visit www.anandtech.com

[Guest baksteen33]

Right! :-) After all the work to keep this part of the forum THG free..! :-) Anyway, apart from 10000 rpm drives, a good global 7200rpm bet currently are 320GB SATA drives. They're all good minus WD's 320GB without 'Caviar SE'. So, WD Caviar SE (good overall perf), Seagate (technology leader), Hitachi (fastest seek times of the 4), Samsung (quiet) I was very happy to see the Caviar SE's technical data, at long last ALL major HD manufacturers were offering drives with almost identical performance. In the past you always had to watch out which one to get. A.m. 320GBs are all around 10ms seek times, 80MB throughput and fairly quiet. Hope this adds to thoughts, kind regards Jaap

[Guest stan29]

Hi Davis & Jaap, Thanks very much for the info, copy the "avoid THG".Regards, Stan Harvey. EGPE.