Hi. I just ran HDTach on my brand new Samsung 500GB 7200RPM harddrive and compared it to my older 74GB WD Raptor 10,000 RPM harddrive. The results are included in this post.As you can see, the Raptor only reaches about 70MB/s and quickly drops to just over 50MB/s. The first 250GB's of the Samsung drive are read at over 70MB/s. It doesn't drop below 50MB/s until at the 450GB mark. The Samsung drive also takes the crown for burst read speeds. I guess these advantages are due to the higher data density and more modern interface on the newer drive...For random access, the Raptor is still superior by far.How does this translate into real-world performance? When reading large, non-fragmented, continious files (such as FSX photoreal sceneries), is the supposedly slower 7200RPM drive actually superior to the older 10K RPM drive? Or is the seek time so important that it outweighs these advantages? What about Windows performance and general Sim performance? It's easy to be fooled by numbers, though. Has anyone done any research into this?http://forums.avsim.net/user_files/165264.jpg

Is the Raptor SATA I and the Samsung SATA II ????

The 6ms difference on the random access time makes a huge difference.Burst speed is only measuring the speed of the interface, useless unless you have 8GB of cache built into the hard disk ;-)The real improvement in speed will only happen with solid state drives (flash drives)