Greetings All, I am in a great position in building a new system from scratch. I am looking for some guidance from knowledgable folks on this forum. This rig will be used primarily for FS but still has the need for all the 'everyday' PC tasks that beset us - Email, MS Office and the like. There is enough information on the forum to make 'enlightened' decisions on what CPU to install, do you go RAID0, RAID5 etc. What I am after here is what is the best way to set up patitioning with all the tasks to hand. I will be having at least two 250 Gb HD's maybe three. SATA II 16Mb. So I will have the following:-1. OS (Win XP home)2. FS93. FSX (when it arrives)4. FS Addons5. All of the rest of the everyday apps:- MS Office etc. (nothing 'heavy' here)So, can you give me some clues on how I can allocate my hard drive space to the applications I have, to get the best performace for FS?While I am it, I will sneak in another little question. :D Anti virus software :- I have always used Norton's but there is no doubt that it is a resource user. Is there something that will give the same protection without the 'overload'. I am prepared to pay if need be.OK, folks any assistance will be appreciated.Regards to allJock

RAID0/5 will give you neglegable improvements in speed for MSFS, simply because any throughput speed gains that RAID0/5 will give you may be offset by the access-time penalty that RAID0/5 imposes. If MSFS used lots of large files, it would be of benefit - but because MSFS uses thousands of small BGL and texture files, the primary strengths of RAID0/5 are not used to their fullest. You may get an MSFS improvement on RAID0/5, but not very large. (I speak from experience!)RAID5 will only provide you with better drive redundancy - performance should remain on par with RAID0, perhaps a touch less with regards to MSFS. If you choose use RAID, you may wish to partition your drives to keep the MSFS install on a separate partition. This will NOT help performance much at all, but it will help to keep your information separated and neatly organized. You may get some benefits during defragments, but because the simulator will be sharing the read/write heads of the drives with the other system and program partitions, benefits will be quite minimal.If you choose NOT to use RAID (*my recomendation), DEFINATELY dedicate a physical drive (not just a partition) for your MSFS install. By isolating MSFS onto its own drive, you give the sim its own read/write heads. This insures that if the game needs access, it has it - even *during* a read/write event on the Windows system drive. Personally, I ended up investing in a smaller (70GB) but rocket fast WD Raptor drive for MSFS. This high speed 10k RPM drive has seek times that are unparalleled in the industry - this seek time fits the sims perfectly... all those small files can be quickly and easily accessed, and as such my sim load times are VERY low as compared to my experience with two SATA/300 (SATA2) drives in a RAID-0 striped config. The 70GB Raptor may be a good MSFS fit because it seems quite spacious even with the great number of terrain mesh, airplane textures, and general addons available. The 30 GB Raptor may be a little cramped, and the 120 GB raptor may be a little large. If you don't need the sheer capacity of two or three 250GB drives, I'd recommend taking some of that investment money and putting it into a Raptor. Use 1 250GB as the system and "program" drive, and use rest of the budget on a single Raptor drive (30GB/70GB/120GB) for MSFS. If looking at the capacities you were interested in before, you have a need to manipulate lots of LARGE files (video, large multimedia) the RAID config may be suited for those needs, but keep in mind that MSFS is not - it's up to you to judge which is more important. heck - you could do both! RAID for your normal system and program drive, single/raptor for MSFS. :) Others may have different experiences, but I must say that I was quite surprised at the improvement in load speed when I went from having MSFS on my RAID0 SATA2 array, to a single fast 10k RPM drive. Good luck!-Greg

Oh and dont forget to keep a bottle of Tylenol by your side:)...........................Robert

Nice to meet a fellow Jock... :)A RAID-5 setup should provide best performance for FS9 / FSX, to help eliminate texture pop-ups, so if you can manage that I recommend it.If I were you I would install FS9 and FSX and whatever add-ons you plan to use first, then de-fragment, then put Office and other apps on there. This should ensure that your FS files are arranged on the HD array in the best way, and should speed up access. Office is not as badly affected by disk geometry.The fact you're going for SATA-II drives with 16Mb cache seems a good choice. You could try to get some with 10,000 rpm spin speeds instead of 7200 rpm. Bear in mind that these usualy generate more heat, noise and vibration, so a good case and cooling solution would be a wise move. I hear the Antec P180 case has great airflow and an insulated space for the PSU to reduce ambient temperatures around the motherboard and CPU. It also has vibration dampers for hard drives, and is one of the best-made cases on the market.If you're going to have 2 x 250GB hard drives in a RAID-5 setup, this will give you effectively 250Gb of space to divide up how you like. This is entirely a personal choice, but something like 50Gb for OS, 50Gb for FS9 / FSX, 150Gb for other uses (data storage, music, videos etc) would seem reasonable to me.RAID-5 should give you good data protection, but you are not immune to an OS crash or genuine hardware failure, so you should give some thought to how you're gonna backup your data. Since you mention possibly having a third hard drive, how about having another 250Gb drive as a backup solution using something like Norton Ghost or Acronis True Image. Once you've filled your 250Gb RAID array, you're not gonna enjoy backing up to DVDs (or floppies for that matter.... ;) )I currently have a single 200Gb SATA-I drive in my ring, and I'm considering buying 2 x 200Gb SATA-II drives to set up a RAID-5 array and use the existing drive as a backup (like I suggested above).I also want the Antec P180 case (and another GFX card, and water cooling, and a Ferrari Enzo.....), and I'm watching the price for a good deal. About

I agree with Greg's solution I have 2 70GB 'rocket fast WD Raptor drives'. One for the system Windows XP and swapfile the 2nd is the dedicated FS drive.Another pro for this kind of setup is that you ony have to defrag the system drive once. Al new files on that partition are just temporary and don't influence the performance. The FS drives get defraged after each change (very rare these days for me). Defraging is very fast if you setup your system this way.I tried the RAID approach but configuring it by hand with to drives works faster for me.