Hi Guys,Im currently running a single 80GB Seagate on my system. I've had FSX Delux since December, but my HD now is so full I cant load it. Anywho. :)Im looking for 2nd HD to put FS9 and FSX on, as well as storage for my addons. Im looking for a quick 300GB from www.compusa.comCan anyone make any reccomendations?Thanks,

Look at the thread right under yours for info on 10,000 rpm drives and 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

I did, but 10k's are a little out of my price range.

Get 2 160s. Set 'em up in Raid 0. (Two weeks ago CompUSA had the Seagate SATA 160G/B at $40AR.) Clone your 80 to the new 320 G/B raid. Acronis works great for cloning to (and from) a raid. I use it all the time. The 320 raid is your new boot drive.Now format the 80 and ImMediaTely COPY (not move) your important personal flies to the 80 for redundancy. The 320 raid will cut load times dramatically (compared to your current, single 7200 RPMer) and you'll have an actual, redundant backup for your important files with the 80. Win. Win.Maybe someday we'll be able to afford those Raptors . . . or discover our cheapo 7200 RPM raids rock and are actually the smartest cost / benefit choice.

Just to followup on Acronis - I have an old C: drive (6gb) as well as two 80gb ATI drives. The old C: drive is there because I was chicken to try to remove it an put XP on one of the 80gb drives. Now the Acronis package seems to be a method to move the "XP stuff" on the old C: to one of the newer drives.I imagine that the process is important. That is, I would have to boot from the CD and then use Acronis to move all of the "stuff" on C: to my D: drive. Then declare my D: drive to be C:. Reboot with fingers crossed. Is this a correct assumption of the process???Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke

Boy, I still remember the days when a 2GB seagate SCSI drive for our SGI workstations cost $2000 apiece. And we all thought that was a TON of storage space. Or, when on a trip to EMC, he gave us a tour of their new storage servers of 32 9 GB drives was top of the line in storage capacity.Or, I guess, when I got a 20 MB drive for my Leading Edge 8088 was just an amazing amount of space.Or, I guess, the tape drive on my Mom's Commodore 64.Oh well, LOLThomas[a href=http://www.flyingscool.com] http://www.flyingscool.com/images/Signature.jpg [/a]I like using VC's :-)N15802 KASH '73 Piper Cherokee Challenger 180

Well guys, just a heads up, but if any of you fella's live in or near houston, you might want to take a trip down. Compusa is closing all but 2 stores. The two staying open are the two on Westheimer at Royal Oak Village and the one in the Galleria. I actually had no clue, but I went to the willowbrook store to take my MX Revolution mouse back and get a replacement (something was wrong and it would stop working about every 20 minutes) and I was suprised to see a store closing sign out in the front. Walked in, and everything was tagged. They only had a few hd's left, but I grabbed a Western Digital Caviar SE16 320GB for just under 100$. I jumped on it. So just a heads up, but alot of houston area stores are closing with huge sales, might wanna take a look if you live in the area. :)

Acronis really works well. As suggested, boot from the Acronis CD. Select "Clone." Now select your source drive( the little guy), then the destination drive (the 80). Go. In about 5 minuites, you will have made an exact copy of the 6 gigga biter onto the 80. Shut down Acronis and remove the CD from the CD/DVD drive. Shut down the computer. Now here's what I'd do. Open up the box. Set the "just cloned" 80 gig as the master on one of the IDE channels (I assume these are EIDE drives?) That means jumper the drive as a master and leave it plugged into the ribbon cable. Now disconnect ALL other harddrives. Leave them in the box, just remove ALL the wires from them.Now reboot. You are forcing the computer to recognize your new drive as C. There are several other simpler ways to do this, but NONE as fail safe. Once you are up and running, work it for a day. make sure all's well. That 6 had a xfer rate of about a bit-per-century. I have an old 6 gigger running on an equally old 333 mhz antique, It's all that poor thing can do to load a web page. That "modern" 80 gig will make your box feel like whole new computer. Now, do you really want to go? Raid the 2 80s into a raid 0. You won't believe that capability was in your box the whole time.I would NOT recommend leaving 2 hardrives with XP installs plugged in at the same time. After the cloning, unplug it! Your system could get confused about which one to boot from. Even worse, it could boot from one and try to get startup files from the other. I've had 2 cases where I left both the clone and the primary drives connected after a clone (C and D, or whatever) and they were BOTH damaged during a boot. During the next boot, both were severely damaged . . . so badly that neither would boot. UGH! Both my primary and backup. Double UGH! There is no doubt this should NOT have happened, but it did. I got em back, but it was not a fun afternoon, to say the least. So true 'nuff, something weird happened, but do you feel luckly? Your backup should really be in the closet anyway. For me, just unwired but still bolted into the harddrive cage is good enough for me. Your 80 is gonna fill right up now, so use your 2nd 80 as your backup clone. Format the 6 and use it as a 3rd backup for the absolutely critical flies. Or let's really rock. Get down to CompUSA, Snag a 160 and a PCI / PATA raid card (My "going out of business" CompUSA had em for $9.99). Raid up the 2 80s and use the 160 as your clone backup. Still keep that 6 as your 3rd backup for financial files . . . and those really great torrent links. Raid on.

Sam,Thanks,Well written and very informative. My 6gig is only used for the pure C: drive to keep XP happy as well as some FSX backups. D: has XP and FSX. F: has addon photo-scenery and the page-file. Ultimate Defrag keeps the good stuff at the edge of the platters.Credit card time for Acronis.Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke