Several people seem to have 10,000 rpm Raptor hard disks in their FS systems. Has anyone done a before and after comparison of FS performance after installing one in place of a conventional 7200 rpm drive?--Bryn

Load times for photorealistic scenery drastically shortened :).In game performance negligable difference with standard FS 2004 scenery anyway.

Actual FS performance doesn't improve (as in FPS or precieved smoothness). Only thing it really helps with is initial load time and anything else where there's a lot of harddrive access involved (opening the Select Aircraft box with lots of planes installed for example). Boot time is also reduced and general working within Windows such as starting applications is much faster. It's a bit loud - not unbearable but something to keep in mind if you want a totally silent system. The seek noise is very "throaty" and the high-speed rotation easily causes vibrtaions and resounance/humming noises against the case. Runs a little hotter than a 7200 RPM but still surprisingly cool (about 5C hotter than my 7200 RPM Maxtor).It's really a bit of a noverlty piece of hardware, so before spending the money for it, look at the rest of the system to make sure any other obvious bottlenecks are eliminated - do you have enough RAM, a high-end videocard, CPU, soundcard? But everyone hates waiting so it's not completely wasted money. Also comes with a 5-year warranty and is supposedly very reliable.If you decide to get one, I'd recommend the 74GB version - obviously more storage space but it's also a more modern design with some performance enhancements over the old 36GB version. Also if you buy two and run them in Raid0 you get very high transfer rates (over 100MB/s sustained) and super-low seek times resulting in very little waiting for things to load up.

Seek times go up with Raid ;).Also the 36 Raptor is revised now and is much closer to the 74 gig in performance :). Also much quiter. I had two of the old 36 gig Raptors and they where really loud. Much better now with the new revision.But that 5 year warranty is great. I am always unlucky with my harddrives they tend to break often. However I had some deskstars have a WD 800 JB harddrive that still holds together :). Though I only use it for storage now really.

"Seek times go up with Raid"Yeah but they go down with Raptors :)

Hmmm, so overall it doesn't seem like an open-and-shut case if my main interest is FS2004. I notice that in the other recent thread the system builder put his FS on a standard SATA drive, and not on his Raptor.Would that be what you all would recommend?--Bryn

If you have a Raptor I would definiatly use it and use the SATA drives primarily for storage ;).But harddrives you should consider only when you have everything else top notch and want to shorten load times a bit :).So yes apart from load times you will not see anything dramatic at all.But I would put the scenery on the Raptor definiatly and other files you use often. See it as Raptor for active usage, slower hard drives for storing junk and installation files and such that would otherwise clutter your Raptor and keep things messy. On a junk drive it doesn

I don't get all the fuss about Raptors. Honestly can you notice the millisecond differences in load times? All for what? 300 dollars for a measly 80 gb drive? No Thanks. I paid half that for my 300 gb SATA drive and see no stutters and load times are extremely high. It's a waste until the prices come down and the storage capacity goes up. Spend your money on something else instead

>I don't get all the fuss about Raptors. Honestly can you>notice the millisecond differences in load times? All for>what? 300 dollars for a measly 80 gb drive? No Thanks. I paid>half that for my 300 gb SATA drive and see no stutters and>load times are extremely high. It's a waste until the prices>come down and the storage capacity goes up. Spend your money>on something else insteadMilliseconds? There is a huge difference in load times of normal FS 2004 scenery and photorealistic scenery :). It

Someone said my Raptor and my Sata drive...Raptor uses the SATA interface, it just has a higher RPM.

Yeah there's a big difference, not just milliseconds. Modern 7200 RPM drives are approaching the sustained transfer rates of the Raptor but nothing comes near the seek performance of them. The harddrive is by far the slowest component in the system and the biggest bottleneck (how many times have you sat listening to that rattling noise waiting for something to *load* from the disk?). The Raptor provides enterprise/SCSI-level performance and reliability which is nothing to sneeze at.

As he said in a lot of high gaming systems the HD is the bottleneck, just because its the only part that moves inside. In the future we will probably see Chip harddrives with high capacities that will give us the performance of RAM. That is a long way away however, so right now the Raptor is giving us some better performance. (btw I cant wait to try this, im upgrading my computer and before I used a laptop, unknown to me they use 5400 RPM to save power, this should speed things up a bit :) )