I'm using FS9 and want to get 2 or 3 SATA2 7200rpm disks e.g.:Disk1: WinXPDisk2: PagefileDisk3: FS9Q1) What is the best performing 7200 SATA2 hard disk in the 250GB to 320GB size, or are they all pretty much the same?. (I've heard good things about the Hitachi T7K500 series and the Samsung T166 series drives).Q2) I'd rather not use such large drives but smaller drives such as 80GB or 160GB only have 8MB buffers. For FS9 would I see a performance advantage if my hard disks have the larger 16MB buffers - does FS9 not access lots of smaller size files when running?

Hasn't anyone bought a hard drive around here recently LOL?

Anandtech.com has been reviewing drives lately.scott s..

My personal experience is that hard drive performance doesn't affect FS much at all, other than initial loading of the game. As long as your drives are occassionally defragged, even a 5400RPM drive (as I have used on my Dell 9300 notebook with FS9/X) can easily keep up with scenery read needs without jerking things around. Others here swear by the 10K raptors and RAID 0 setups, but IMO there are much bigger fish to fry to get better FS performance (CPU, CPU, CPU!)Gary

Thanks for all your replies. Well if the hard drive is not worth loosing sleep over then I'll probably just go for Seagate.Does anyone have any thoughts about the difference the buffer size, 8MB verses 16MB, might have on FS performance? I thought that a larger buffer is only useful when you are working with larger size files.