Ok, I'll probably do it....I'm also asking for O&O defrag pro for my bday....I hear that defraggin by /NAME is the best way to go with that.I had a trial version of it and really liked how it worked....sped up loading times in FS9/X significantly

I tried that too. My Megascenery load times were just outrageous . . . several minutes. I had to try something and this really did make a difference. The trick is to install all your big scenery files in a directory at the very top of your file tree. For instance, I installed all my Megascenery scenery packs in the directory "AAA__Megascenery." This put it at the very top of my directory tree. I then used O&O's "Name" method to defrag. So they tell me, the highest level directorys are moved the the very edge of the platters. Other than noticeably faster load times, I'll have to take their word for that.Still though, my PATA raid made the final difference. No more messing 'round with complicated anything. I could them go back to using my computer like a normal person . . rather than the mad scientist I had become.My next step will be this: Once Intel gets that new P35 chip set out (bearlake), I'm going with a raid 5. A raid 5 is similar to a raid 0. but you give back a little performance. This array needs 3 drives, but will allow one drive to fail and continue to function. Replace the failed drive and you are back to full speed. A raid 10 needs 4 drives and allows 2 drives to fail. The P35's southbridge might have this raid 10 function. We'll see. I'm shopping for smallish 7200 SATA drives now. The 160s are getting down to <$50AR. For $200, I can have 600GB raid 5 protected storage. With these 4, 7200 SATA drives, I'm expecting tranfer rates of 200MB/S+. Compared to a competing $200 worth of raptor, access times may be 25% less overall, but transfer rates will outrun any raptor by way over 200% . . . and I can fail a drive, and survive.Where are you gonna get 600GB of protected, Raptor like performance for $200? I really don't see the competition.

Do note that the "UltimateDefrag" (Disktrix) program allows you to specify directories for placement in addition to ordering alphabetically by name.You can specify your "SCENERY", "TEXTURES"... etc directories to be placed first, *then* have all your other directories placed in either alpha(name), last access, or other orders. This would prevent you from having to rename directories in order to bring them to the top of the alphabetical list. O&O is great, and PerfectDisk is great too, but Ultimate Defrag and it's ability to specify high priority directories is a winner for me. Plus, UltimateDefrag uses the "circular disk" model when viewing your disk data, so you can get a feel for where your data is on the platters. Pretty neat!If it's not too late to adjust your birthday wishlist, I would steer you to UltimateDefrag. It's good stuff!------------------------Compared to a competing $200 worth of raptor, access times may be 25% less overall, but transfer rates will outrun any raptor by way over 200% . . . and I can fail a drive, and survive.True points on the failure protections, but when it comes to running MSFS, I'll hold fast that access times are far more important than the transfer rates. If you look at the sim's directory structure, you see tens of thousands of little files. A (7200RPM) RAID array simply cannot get to the files as fast as a Raptor can. Even though the RAID's theoretical transfer speed is seriously faster, it gets outshined with the sprinting Raptors. Because the sim files are small, the Raptor will chew through the thousands of random file accesses needed to load a flight quicker than the RAID will. Hence the perceived speed improvements.Other games, such as Company of Heros, use larger files to store their game data. These games would benefit from a RAID0/5 arrangement because of their greater dependance on transfer rates rather than access times. RAID-0/5 is also better than a single "stock" 7600, but in the world of Microsoft Flight Simulator, a 10k drive trumps all for raw speed. Take my driving example from earlier. A RAID array is like a big truck - she's got lots of horsepower, but you have to "spool it up" with a big load in order to make use of it. A Raptor is like a little imported speedster (with a God-awful muffler tone and "hoopdie" spoiler attachment) - high-revving and quick off the line, but not beneficial when moving lots of data at once.As you mentioned, a RAID5 array can give you stability improvements too - if you lose a drive, just drop a new one in as soon as practical and your computer keeps humming - that is something that a Raptor cannot provide (unless you outfit a RAID5 *with* Raptors!). There's something to be said about data security, but I personally maintain a good backup strategy so the only thing that would happen to me if a drive failed would be the inconvenience and time spent to rebuild things. My data is safe on a daily basis.My personal experience shows me that... * a single 7200RPM drive is decent for simulation load times.* 7200's in a RAID 0 or 5 setup is better for simulation load times.* a single 10k Raptor drive is noticably best for simulation load times.* (I'd guess that dual 10k Rapts in RAID0 would be better still, because you'd get xfer rate improvements PLUS the highspeed file access)These are informal observations done with clean builds and properly sort/defragged installations. For my next build, I'll probably purchase another 76GB Raptor and RAID-0 it - She should be quick! -Greg

>>If it's not too late to adjust your birthday wishlist, I would>steer you to UltimateDefrag. It's good stuff!>You talkin' ta me?I already own and use UltimateDefrag. It gained me loadtimes.It is great to be able to specify dir's like E:SCENERY for outside of the disk.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

>Compared to a competing $200 worth of raptor, access times>may be 25% less overall, but transfer rates will outrun any>raptor by way over 200% . . . and I can fail a drive, and>survive.>>True points on the failure protections, but when it comes to>running MSFS, I'll hold fast that access times are far more>important than the transfer rates. >...yes and to add to what you said, when it comes to failure, if you image your Raptor to another drive, you've helped that situation, too. Not as good as a RAID5, for example, but still of some merit.If my soon-to-be-FSX drive (the Raptor) fails, I will have an image to restore my FS-install from. If the Raptor can be re-formatted and recovered, fine. If it has catastrophically failed, not fine but at least I have my FS-install as-is, with no need to re-do every little mod and tweak.To a person that mods and tweaks to oblivion that is a nice option short of rebuilding a RAID array.I want the ultimate for my FS, and that would be Raptors in RAID5 (or gasp, RAID10). When I build my 45nm/Penryn-based system, I'll be using a Raptor (or 3) in a RAID--possibly. Probably this 150gig Rap will be a part of that new sys.I am not messing around with my next FS build, like I did with my current build, which was never intended to even run FSX, much less FSX+6 months.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

yeah ok I checked out the ultimate defrag site and its 10 bucs cheaper than O&O....and I think theres a 25% off coupon since I downloaded the trial version....I guess I'd go with that then

Intel is in the midst of its China IDF (Intel Developer's Forum) this week. Lots of interesting stuff being discussed. Here's a bit on our topic. Thought it might be interesting to ya'll. After all, this is great fun! http://www.bit-tech.net/news/2007/04/16/in...sata_and_flash/There's a lot here, but one of the main elements is a discussion of Intel's Robson, or Intel "Turbo Memory." It's something to watch evolve as you consider buying into these big dollar, low capacity hard drive setups.The first incarnation of this Turbo Memory will be with the Santa Rosa Laptop platform releasing next month. (Don't confuse this with that Vista USB, dongle based turbo flash stuff.) I've been holding off on a new laptop for a while now . . . but I believe it is finally time. The C2D CPUs will upgrade to include a new feature called Dynamic overclocking. Any C2D running at stock speed is (at least) a 50% waste of horsepower. That's why I'm such an O/Cing advocate. I'm glad to see Intel finally letting us have some headroom - as a standard feature - on laptops. That'll be great, but even greater might be this "Turbo Memory". These load times for our FS are just a beast . . . and the whole point of our discussion here. This might just address the issue. The theory is to load often used files into a flash based cache . . . and keep them there. This would allow a google of little files to be available at virtually ZERO access times. If an argument proceeds that access time is the holy grail (i.e., transfer rates are not so important) this should provide a significant improvement, even with a 5400 RPM laptop drive. The desktop application of this Turbo Memory could follow immediately, but will certainly be available with INTC's P35 (bearlake) chip set refresh. I'm gonna snag one of these Santa Rosa laptops ASAP and I'll let you know.Actually, I'm hoping for the hybrid drive's to become available soon. These hybrid drives will have a flash application called "Ready Drive" This provides the same basic function. If you read the Intel article carefully, you'll see Intel states that their Turbo Memory can act as "Ready Drive" or "Ready Boost," but not both. This imples that both Ready Drive and Ready Boost can work together. So the smart choice might to be to use a Hybrid HD (with Ready Drive) installed on a system that has Intel's Turbo Memory functioning as Ready Boost. This is not pie-in-the sky stuff. Next month,(if I don't blow out my Turbo Memory's preloaded FS files with a Photoshop session!) a Santa Rosa laptop - with a plain old 5400 RPM HD - will likely provide FS load times that will put a raptor to shame! This is Next Month . . . with the desktop versions (probably) immediately available thereafter. To the Mfgs, flash costs $2 a gig these days. A gig of Turbo Memory is no cost at all. How soon will it be before we have 20 gig-a-boost capacities. Maybe Perfect Disk will let you load your entire scenery pack into the system's onboard NAND. How soon will flash based HD's get big and cheap enough to use as a system's normal storage component? Soon. Very soon. Look ahead . . . and it won't be long. This all starts in less than 30 days with the Santa Rosa. A raptor is not an investment. At best, it is an extremely expensive short term solution.

Thanks for the info....actually a coworker and I discussed this very topic tonight - so its funny you brought it up.I have never heard of the hybrid drive myself but very interesting...

Very interesting reading here gents! As you can see from my signature below, I had always been of the Raid-0 mindset as well. Until now! Time to buy some more drives. I'll reuse my two WD SE16 320GB 7200 SATAII drives, buy one more and make a Raid-5 for everything but FS. Then buy a Raptor 150GB (FS9 @ 80GB now) for FS and UltraDefrag to the front. The 3 x 320GB drives in a Raid-5 should give me ~ 75% actual usable storage space. So, 3x300x.75= about 675Gb of usable formated space. I'll then be able to store a periodic drive-image of the FS raptor drive onto the Raid-5 for backup.But, please remember folks, reliability on a Raid 1, 5, or 10 will allow for misc. internal drive failures, but it will NOT protect you from events like lightning storms, Huricannes, fire, tornados, floods, earthquakes, volcanos, voltage surges, etc, which can happen very quickly and wipe out everything in its entirety.I've been there, done that, got the t-shirt! Thanks to lightning hitting two trees in my yard and and finding every possible wire underground, it hit the 486-CPU (and everthing else electronic my house) and it wasn't pretty! Nothing electronic survived. You don't want to loose those cherished family pictueres, valuable financial data, retail FS Add-ons, and other irreplaceable data that you can't recreate.Ask yourself, where's my data if a torndado or fire happened with a few minute's notice and you were not home.Backup or drive-image priceless data to a seperate hard-drive or media and keep offline. Not connected to external wires, power or busses! Heck, put a drive or media in a small fire/media-proof box. Better yet, keep a backup off the premesis. Even if you only update the off-premesis copy once a year, you won't have lost everthing.Thanks again for the seek-time vs. transfer-rates discussion. Very thought provocing indeed.

>Thanks for the info....>>actually a coworker and I discussed this very topic tonight ->so its funny you brought it up.>>I have never heard of the hybrid drive myself but very>interesting...I think possibly a drive with flash mem on it will be standard--much like onboard cache is today. But I am not sure of the specifics--as to if the only advantage of flash is that it's larger in size than traditional cache memory is. (?) Is that it's only advantage?With FSX load time, anything that can help us is big.In FS, I'd like to see a 5400 rpm with flash beat a 10,000 rpm raptor.I'd like to buy that bridge. :)Maybe possible I guess but I am not sure, especially for the type of small-ball file access we need in FS.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Well I just installed the 150gb WD Raptor. Wanted to make sure it worked just in case I needed to RMA it.It has an 80mm blowing across it, and it's at the bottom of the case.People complained about the noise of the drive. I don't find it noisy at all. Obviously those people were not around in the old days...I had an 80 meg drive that sounded like gravel when reading and writing.So far, I have not installed anything on it. Moving FSX to it is going to be a chore. But at least I'll have a clean install for SP1.HDTach benched it at about 25-30% faster than my 7200 rpm Cav. I will have to see how this translates into FSX load times, which are presently at 65-70 seconds on my 7200 rpm Cav.I'm thinking of only putting H:FSX and H:SCENERY on the Raptor.I don't see any need to put my scenery design stuff (E:FSTOOLS and E:PROJECTS) on the Raptor.I'm tempted to put the swap or OS (one or the other) on it but I won't for now.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Hey Rhett - I got my UD defrag running now...and load times are about the same as yours, about 65 seconds when it used to take 75.......so that's some improvement (on my WD caviar 7200rpm)Let us know how the raptor pans outedit: on that HDTach program my raptor says it is slower than the old ATA drives... 127 MB/sec burst (short test) avg read 58.6 MB.....why would it be so low?lol my WD se16 7200rpm runs faster....170MB/sec

I just purchased and installed a 150GB Raptop-X just yesterday as well. Dang, Newegg is fast. I had been running FS9 on my Raid-0 made up of two WD Caviar SE16 320GB 7200RPM drives for quite a while now. This raid had always been defrag'd using Perfect disk without issue.Initial indications are, the Raptor seems to be no better than a good, well maintained, raid-0. In fact, I see some tiling of heavy ground scenery as I pan views from 25K/ft that I didn't see with the raid-0. I will reserve my final opinion until a flight tonight as I just finished using Ultra-Defrag to push all the scenery and aircraft directories out to the edge of the this new Raptor. I'll post a final gut-check tonight or tomorrow.:-eekFor the same price as the non-X version, it is pretty cool to see inside a 10K/RPM hard drive while it's powered up and spinng for the first time in my computing/professional career. Some of us geeks are so easily amused...:(

>Hey Rhett - I got my UD defrag running now...and load times>are about the same as yours, about 65 seconds when it used to>take 75.......so that's some improvement (on my WD caviar>7200rpm)>Ultimate Defrag did about the same for me. Pushed load time down to about 65 from 70-something. I think I was timing from the flight selection menu until flight had loaded.I am hesitant to install FSX on the new Raptor because I know I will want to start tweaking the install...but I *can't* mess with the install prior to SP1.So maybe I will keep my E:FSX install running here another week or two.>>edit: on that HDTach program my raptor says it is slower than>the old ATA drives... 127 MB/sec burst (short test) avg read>58.6 MB.....why would it be so low?>>lol my WD se16 7200rpm runs faster....170MB/sec>>Can't be right though. ??I think the Rap was benching at 77 mb/sec(?) average whereas the Cav was running 55mb/sec if I remember.I have really been too busy lately to have time to mess with any of it. Last night I was tired and was installing the Raptor at 11:30 pm, when I really needed to be asleep. I forgot to properly tighten down one of the SATA connectors, and got no drive detection initially. I thought I was losing my skillz...and that's skills with a 'z'.But, as they say, "sleep is for the weak".RhettAMD 3700+ (@2310 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2 GB Corsair XMS 2.5-3-3-8 (1T), WD 250 gig 7200 rpm SATA2, CoolerMaster Praetorian case

Well, I did complete my first full Maddog-2006 flight last night, hosted on the new Raptor and evrything checked out. Using DiskTrix UD, I set the drive to 100%-Performance with "Custom" file settings and moved various Scenery, Texture, & Aircraft directories to the front of the drive. I did not notice any tiling of ground scenery when panning views from 25K/ft on this flight so UD appeared to help, as expected. The skin of the MD would sometimes take a second to cover the aircraft when popping to the outside view, probably becuase of the heavy 32bit files that now have less bandwidth to pass through. This only happened once twice though. But at the same time, thanks to the raw horsepower of 10,000 RPM, I think I have a little less blurry ground textures in the far distance because of the access (seek) times of the Raptor are able to keep up with the scenery sliding below at 320kt/IAS.So here is my early opinion/advise,If you're on a budget and already have a good raid-0, don't bother with the Raptor. If you have a few bucks and a SATA-port to spare, get one Raptor now for a very slight but sometimes noticable improvement. Then, when the price on these babies drop a few more dollors, buy a second Raptor and raid-0 these puppies together to get the best of both worlds as in improved transfer-rates and seek-times.On a side note, not until after I also bought a third WD 320 Caviar, did I discover that I was not able to setup a Raid-5 on my NV NForce4 or SiI3114r buses as they are only software-raids on my older A8N-SLI Deluxe MB. So I'll stick with the Raid-0 for now until I get a new motherboard, probably the EVGA 680i for a C2D when the time is right. Has anyone else setup a hardware-based Raid-5 with the 680i boards yet?FWIW, I did use Acronis True-Image workstation to image and restore my FS9 partition onto the new drive. First I imaged the drive with max-compression. ~ 80Gb compressed to ~ 45Gb. Set the old FS9 partition to an unused drive-letter such as N: then set the new partition on the Raptor to the original drive letter, E: in my case. Then restored the Acronis image on to the Raptor and defraged using UD. The cool part is, I still have the original FS9 partition on the Raid-0 as a backup, just currently set with a wrong drive letter.