...that is the question. I'm setting up a new system with an Athlon64 3400 CPU and a pair of 200gb SATA drives, and I'm debating whether or not to configure the drives in a RAID level 0 setup or not. I've built a lot of systems before, but always with the standard single HD, so I've got no experience with RAID at all. I'd appreciate it if someone with more experience in this arena could answer a couple of quick questions for me...1. Is a RAID 0 setup noticably faster to load, say, textures in FS9 than a single HD?2. I know that level 0 RAID offers no redundancy, so the data isn't protected in any way should one of the drives fail. But is it much riskier to use this type of setup than a single HD?3. Would I gain both speed and security from configuring the drives as a RAID 0+1 configuration instead? I don't know if this is even possible with only two drives, but I've seen it mentioned elsewhere and I'm curious.The bottom line is that I've been disappointed with data transfer rates before into my GeForce 6800GT 256mb vid card, so I'm trying to do anything I can to remove the bottleneck with this new setup. I'm going to be setting up a whole other computer with my current parts for doing everything else besides flying, so the new sim system won't contain anything mission critical if one of the drives were to fail. I'd cry a little, but only because of the time it would take to reload everything. Opinions?thanks,

I have just bought a new PC specifically for FS2004: AMD 64 FX55 CPU, NVidia 6800GT graphics ... As I have two hard drives in the system, I did investigate quite extensively whether I would benefit from a RAID setup and spent some hours on line and posting to forums on this question. Unfortunately, as it was a couple of months back I can't remember exactly the links to point you to the same forums and hardware benchmark sites. If you search for RAID on this forum, you might come up with an earlier post of mine on this subject ...The very clear conclusion however was that you will see almost no performance gain whatsoever in FS2004 with a RAID setup, so obviously I haven't gone for a RAID array in the new PC (which will, hopefully, be delivered this week). Different story for things like game loading times, but once you're in there, flying, the RAID's not going to help much.Sorry I can't back up my claim with references and URLs, as I say! It'd take me quite some time to find out where all the relevant stuff re. RAID and FS9 came from, but I assure you the conclusion was very clear!Martin

"The very clear conclusion however was that you will see almost no performance gain whatsoever in FS2004 with a RAID setup"And the proof is here.Greg

That's very interesting, thanks to both of you for responding. I hadn't expected to see an increase in fps in FS9, as obviously that's got little to do with disk access times. However, I was hoping that the lag in loading textures might be either eliminated or drastically diminished. I'm still not sure that a RAID 0 setup wouldn't help on this count, but I'm going to do some more research into data stability. I wouldn't want a slight decrease in load times to put my data at great risk!thanks,

For me there are other specs of far greater importance than HD config. Specs such as max bus speed, SATA transfer rate (as an example, the latest nVidia motherboard's SATA ports are capable of moving data at a rate that is twice as fast as their VIA contemporaries), whether or not the board uses a NB/SB configuration (best if it doesn't). The only reason I would consider a RAID set-up is for redundancy... not really that critical for a gaming rig.Greg

>>>For me there are other specs of far greater importance than HD config. Specs such as max bus speed, SATA transfer rate (as an example, the latest nVidia motherboard's SATA ports are capable of moving data at a rate that is twice as fast as their VIA contemporaries), whether or not the board uses a NB/SB configuration (best if it doesn't).<<

Again, thanks for the info gents. I've got an Asus K8N-E Deluxe N-Force 3 mobo on order along w/my CPU, so it sounds like I'll be able to take advantage of the faster SATA transfer rates. Perhaps I'll just use the extra 200GB HD to store my addons! ;-)thanks,

Or you get 3 hard drives and setup a RAID 5...you get the redundancy (1 drive fails, everythings is ok) and the performance boost with striping.

Hmmm... interesting notion, Ken. Now to see if I can find another $113 somewhere....

I noticed no benefit whatsoever when I had w WD raptors in RAID.I would instead use your 2 harddrives to keep things tidy and in place so you will get better performance over time without having to reformat every other month :).The problem with RAID is that CPU utilization go up and access times gets longer. And in game unless the game is poorly coded you shouldn

CPU utilization will not be impacted by a hardware RAID solution, since the hardware CPU on the RAID board does the hardwork and is invisiable to the main CPU.Software RAID, OTOH, definitely will affect CPU utilization.