Which of the following drives would be fastest and best for FS1) Two WESTERN DIGITAL RE 160GB SATA/300 16MB (designed for raid) in raid 0 setup2) A single WESTERN DIGITAL RAPTOR 150GB 10000RPM SATA/150How much difference? What about soundlevel?

Are you going to have a seperate drive for your OS?If your not thinking about it, you should you will get much better performance.As to wether you should use 2 WD SATA300 drives in RAID 0 vice using a WD Raptor to install FSX on its a toss up accept for taking the price into account. RAID 0 will give you some performance increase but not as much as you think. In a synthetic benchmark RAID 0 will look great. In a gaming environment you won't see a significant boost in performance (every lttle bit helps).If price is driving the question you may want to think about getting the 2 WD 160GB drives and using one for your OS and one for FSX. That is where you will most likely get your best performance trade off.

Clarification follows. My situation is as follows , I already have two WD SATA300 drives in RAID 0 and they simply refuses to work on my Asus A8V deluxe S939 motherboard. The same applies for my previous SATAII Maxtors. I have had three SATAII drives replaced and still encounters the same problem (eventid 51 9 and drive drop out of array). Therefore I see two main paths to choose between,A) Replace mb i.e major upgrade of mb CPU memory and videocard (PSU chassi ?):( Use a non SATAII disk with my current mb and wait for a major upgrade. Already have a 60 Gb IDE but that's to small for FS.Had almost decided to go for A) but got a feeling that it's not the right time for a major upgrade now. Wan't to see what happens with DX10 and decide if to buy Vista oem when buying the new hardware or continue using Win XP with it. Also I fear the CPU I can afford will still be insufficient for FSX+addond. If I upgrade now the OS will propably be Win XP (i.e claiming my mb is defect and moving my current license to the upgraded).If :( I need to get another HD and was considering the Raptor since it's both fast and a SATAI drive. If so most of my stuff will be on it, but of course I would only have 150 Gb. Another possibility is to get an a IDE drive which can be found in big size and cheap. Also I know that my nb has no problem with IDE drives, but of course this means a slower drive. I think there is a third possibility i.e two IDE drives in raid 0. Then when I finally do the major upgrade my intention was to use my WD SATA300 drives in RAID 0 on my new mb wich will support SATAII. Also if I get a Raptor now I will move it to my new systemand have OS (propably Vista) and FS on the fastest drive. At this point I would practically have parts over to setup a second computer where I can keep the IDE drives and my current Win XP. Might also try out Linux here.What do you think of this? Have missed something?

Well, I cannot tell you what to do they are all viable options.Ultimately the decision is yours.

>Which of the following drives would be fastest and best for>FS>1) Two WESTERN DIGITAL RE 160GB SATA/300 16MB (designed for>raid) in raid 0 setup>2) A single WESTERN DIGITAL RAPTOR 150GB 10000RPM SATA/150>How much difference? What about soundlevel?I have a Asus A8N SLI mobo with an AMD Athlon XP 64 939 4800 dualcore and 4 Hitachi 320 gigabyte drives drives running in Raid 0 + 1 giveing approx 620 Gigabytes disc space. My best estimation of Raid is that, whilst it is faster than a standalone disc in FS, it is not something which is appreciable and that it is only in areas in like writeing a large multi gigabyte folder to a disc drive that Raid would make a significant difference. My suggestion to you would be to buy a 74 Gigabyte Raptor Raptorhttp://www.nvnews.net/reviews/western_digital_raptor/index.shtmland use it as a C drive for your operating system and buy a Samsung Spinpoint T166 HD501LJ http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/114085/sams...66-hd501lj.htmlto carry your Flight Sim programmes and files, and run the two drives seperately without any Raid configuration. Best and Warm RegardsAdrian Wainer

It is MHO that the best move you can make having to do with file system performance is to set your swap file to as close to zero as possible. There is continuous use of the swap file unless you get rid of it, or at least that was my conclusion. I proved this to myself by placing a typical fixed size swap file on one drive, FS9 on a different drive, and the OS on a 3rd drive. By using perfmon.exe, I was able to show constant writes to the swap file--variable sized writes, but happening many times per second. By setting the swap file to zero or 2mb, the write activity I saw before disappeared. I also witnessed significantly larger use of my 2GB of ram after this maneuver. So, it seems valid to me tho others here have contested the theory, but have yet to show me how this experiment was invalid.Since you aren't moving that huge of file sizes, except when loading up your first flight environment, I would think RAID 0 would actually return a decrease in performance as your controller works to coordinate activity on TWO drives. It was my understanding that unless your read requests are very very large, you won't see much in the way of improvements as the amount of data a single drive can read in one pass is much bigger than in-flight requests would require, esp a nice drive like the one you are looking at. Seek times could help, and the drives you are looking at are around 7-8ms. I am using Cheetah 15K.3 drives at about 5-6ms. In I/O/second the WD Raptor is almost as high as the 15.K drives. Noel

>Since you aren't moving that huge of file sizes, except when>loading up your first flight environment, I would think RAID 0>would actually return a decrease in performance as your>controller works to coordinate activity on TWO drives. It wasI actually notice increased performence with my raid 0 compared to my IDE drive. But of course that is an old a propablt slow drive compared to current standards.Also in my case I already have two HD that are specially designed to be used in raid setups.

Although RAID 0 is faster with large file IO, in FS you have manythousands of small files (your textures). The 2 disks in a RAIDmust synchronize, that is find the same file before the startof reading. Since this synchronization is an overhead with RAID 0there is a file size where smaller files spend more time cos of this overhead, and larger files are quicker due to the raw data throughputof RAID. In FS the overhead of disk synchronization slows FS dueto the many small files.Have 2 disks in non-raid configuration.Put FS on a non-C disk with all the addon.Preferably 2 raptor SATA disks, but otherwise put FS on the faster disk.

Adding to 'confusion', MS recommends having the pagefile on the fastest drive... Source: WinXP 'Help & Support': Search for 'Pagefile' Trying to look at HDs from an OS perspective, my feeling is the further we advance, the harder 'non-default' is going to be. Vista, FSX and everything else will function best, if we (at least theoretically) stick to certain conventions, ideally leading to a reliability that certain dependencies are in place. But how?!? :-) This thread shows there are 1001 possibilities. :-) Not to mention that conventions would help troubleshooting and analysis tremendously... Cheers and kind regards Jaap

>make a significant difference. My suggestion to you would be>to buy a 74 Gigabyte Raptor>Raptorhttp://www.nvnews.net/reviews/western_digital_raptor/index.shtml>and use it as a C drive for your operating system and buy a>Samsung Spinpoint T166 HD501LJ Only OS on 74 Gb Raptor? Win XP takes very few Gb I think.Otherwise I already have two 160 Gb WD drives that are specially designed for raid use so using them separately might not be a good idea. Also the guy from FSGS told me that raid 0 is never slower then using the drives separately