I can feel spring getting nearer and with that comes the urge to upgrade :-lolI currently have two drives for 280GB total storage:160GB Maxtor DiamondMax9 and 120GB WD 120JB. Both have identical specs: 7200 RPM and 8MB cache though the 160GB is slightly faster and comes with (P)ATA133 vs ATA100 for the WD.I was thinking about getting a 74GB 10K RPM Raptor SATA drive. However, my computer case, being only 18cm tall and all, only has room for two 3.5" drives. I can't really afford one external drive aswell as a Raptor right now so I'd loose about 46GB of storage. This is why I'm not sure. I *think* I could manage to delete or burn some stuff out to DVD but it would be a bit of a challenge since I'm using almost all 280GB.So, is the additional speed of the Raptor over a normal 7200 RPM drive noticable and worth the inconveniance of loosing 46GB? In FS9? In other games? Boot speed? Sometimes it feels like all I ever do is wait for the slow harddrive to read some data but on the other hand, once the sim has loaded up there's almost no HD access at all as I fly.Also, are those Raptor drives terribly loud? Having two 7200 RPM drives running contributes quite a bit to the noise. When the system is idle, the harddrives are probably the loudest thing though the CPU and GPU fans quickly overpower that noise when running games. Wouldn't really want to have anything much louder than those installed.

Boot times Wrooooom wrooom wrooom :)As for FS 2004 performance it will hardly do any difference. Perhaps if you run a lot of photorealistic scenery. Anyway you already have quite fast harddrives. Getting a Raptor will help your load times. Those I am sure you will notice will be quite a bit shorter. However after that there won

Well I ordered one :) Should have it on friday with a bit of luck (stupid local stores sell them at about

>remember when 4GB was a LOT of space :-lolI remember when 20MB was a LOT of space, on my first PC - a 286-12 (landmark 16MHz because it had zero wait state memory!) :( Gary

My first harddrive I think had a whopping 800 mb harddrive. We bought the larger ones. Was for a 486 but I cam be wrong. It had 4 mb of RAM :(Haven