I have according to MB mnual set up two 160 Gb HD in raid 0 configuration. They areas expected treated as one c: drive. But it is reported that this drive is about 300 Gb big. That does not make sense for me. Because configured as raid 0 does not give the added space. During installation everything went as expected according to the manual. I have a Asus A8V deluxe mb.

That's the right size. RAID 0 just combines the two if equal or uses the lowest size as a denominator times 2.Jim Karnhttp://www.precisionmanuals.com/images/forum/pmdg_pf.jpg

RAID 1 would have givein you around 160MB because it mirror what is in 1 disk to the other.RAID 0. Is like concatinating both disks and write across two disks... kinda like half the sentence in disk 1..and the other sentence to the second disk. To get the full sentence, it would read the first half from the first disk and the second half from the second disk. Like Dual channel. But the space you have is both the disk. which in your case is 300G

>RAID 1 would have givein you around 160MB because it mirror>what is in 1 disk to the other.>>RAID 0. Is like concatinating both disks and write across two>disks... kinda like half the sentence in disk 1..and the other>sentence to the second disk. To get the full sentence, it>would read the first half from the first disk and the second>half from the second disk. Like Dual channel. But the space>you have is both the disk. which in your case is 300GSo I havn't needed to sacrifice anything compared to have the drives installed as two separate C,D drives. Terrific I haveended up with a HD double the size I expected. I wasa little worried that 160 Gb would bea bit to little considering my planes to have both FS9 and FSX installed.I have read that this is supposed to double the loading speed. Is that a theoretical figure that can't be accomplished in real life?My impression is that Win does not load twice as fast as before.

Well... I am not an expert here.. but my guess is the HD Read portion would theoratically be twice minus a little overhead. But then there are other parts of loading and running a program that is not related to HD access. Those would remain the same. So overall it may not be a 100% increase but it is much faster.:)MAnny

> I have read that this is supposed to double the loading speed. Is that a theoretical figure that can't be accomplished in real life?VERY theoretical.. in fact, highly unlikely. You will only see significant improvements if you use lots of large files, for video/audio editing, etc. etc. With day-to-day use, the improvements are noticable but not large. RAID-0 improves the 'throughput' of your drives. Think of it in terms of driving a car - RAID-0 adds more lanes to the highway, allowing more data to flow at once. This leads to faster loading and writing of larger files. Where RAID-0 falters is with 'seek time'. With two disks in use, both read heads need to synch up on the file they are retrieving, and this takes a little more time than with a normal, single drive. Looking at it with driving a car again, having more lanes comes with the price of it taking longer to get on the highway and driving fast. Once you get on the highway you can go FAST, but it takes a little more time to actually get there. When you combine the two things together, you get this...RAID-0 is great for working with large files - the larger bandwidth that the system gives you makes loading big things into memory a breeze. You will see the most improvements here. RAID-0 is not as beneficial when working with lots and lots of small files - because seek times are reduced, the drives spend more time finding the files than they do actually transferring them. You will see less improvement in this case. Personally, I've found that a FAST single drive works best for my MSFS installation. I recently moved FS2004 from my SATA RAID-0 array to a new Raptor (10,000 RPM) stand-alone drive - the loadtime difference is remarkable. Because MSFS uses thousands of small BGL and texture files, seek time tends to be more important than raw loading power - I was stunned to see the difference going from RAID to a fast drive, becuase I was under the impression that the RAID array would always be faster. Not so! From personal experience, in the case of Flight Simulator:A single Raptor drive is much faster than a 7200RPM RAID-0 array, and...A 7200RPM RAID-0 array is somewhat faster than a single "standard" 7200 RPM drive.I know it's a little late for this in your purchasing and setup process, but I wanted to chime in with my experiences...-Greg

Very interesting Greg.I am building a PC with two 7200 drive in RAID 0. Maybe I should have gone with a Raptor eh? Hmmm... I can still order a Raptor and add it as a third disk. 150Gig and use it just for Flight sim. 150G should be large enough I guess.Hmmmm.....MannyBut a Q. For flight sim.. A Raptor 10,000 RPM single is better than a pair of Raptors in RAID 0? Anyone done this comparison?

>From personal experience, in the case of Flight Simulator:>A single Raptor drive is much faster than a 7200RPM RAID-0>array, and...>A 7200RPM RAID-0 array is somewhat faster than a single>"standard" 7200 RPM drive.>>I know it's a little late for this in your purchasing and>setup process, but I wanted to chime in with my>experiences...I ruled out the raptor drive because they were so expensive. In my case the situation was that my old 160 Gb Hitachi drive broke down and since my warranty was still valid I got it replaced by a 160 Gb Maxtor 7200 rpm (I have been advised to not getting i Hitachi drive). I asked if I could have it replaced by a better drive and pay the difference but they could only agree to replace it with a similar drive.So to get a raid 0 config I only had to buy an additional identical Maxtor drive which was priced rather low. I think this was well spent money. To get a 150 Gb raptor would have meant four times higher price. But I had the impression that raid 0 was alwaysfaster than single drive config.

If you can stomach the cost of at least three drives, a RAID5 array will give you decent performance on reading lots of small files, and fault tolerance as well.RAID 1 (mirroring) can give the best performance, as when you request a bunch of files, file 1 will get read from disk 1, file 2 from disk 2, etc... basically the controller assigns the "closest" read head from all available disks to perform the read.

> But a Q. For flight sim.. A Raptor 10,000 RPM single is better than a pair of Raptors in RAID 0? Anyone done this comparison?From what I've read, a pair of Raptors in RAID-0 scorches. ;) You get the improved speed of a 10k RPM seek (minus the small RAID-0 seek penalty), and the benefits of the RAID-0 throughput.That uber-expensive RAID is the cat's meow. :)