OK, it's settling in!Might just not be a bad move to depart permanently from SCSI, it's an easy argument to make. I could take the drives and send them along with their tried and true compatible components from teh old box, and call it good, a clean break.The Seagate 7200 SATA 3gb/sec is a wonderful price, but the access time could become an issue with Gigastudio, so 10K like the WD1500ADFD sounds safer, tho those suckers are very pricey at newegg. From Gigastudio's Ultimate System requirements:"The limiting factor for polyphony is hard drive speed, so you'll get the best performance with a RAID array using 10,000 RPM SATA drives."The 15K scsi without raid have been fine for Giga. It's best to put data samples on a sep drive.In 10K drives using the P5E's onboard SATA RAID, what is a good drive, the WD1500ADFD or others? I like 5y warranties!How would transfer rate compare again my SCSIs, which do an average of 84mb/sec using HD Tune? I'm liking this idea, tho this means my 4-day weekend will not result in a new PC! Oh well, waited many years for this new build so what's another week or so!How are boot times with SATA RAID? I know SCSI slows it down considerably. And how about problem proness? How does one recover from ONE drive failing? Do you have to scramble to find an identical drive to replace the one hosed drive? Sounds iffy!Another option, complete with painfully slow boot times, is to go with the cheaper Seagate 7200s 3GB/s and RAID them (does the P5E do that, or just SATA150 raid?) AND keep my 73GB scsi for Gigastudio data. Your thoughts are highly appreciated . . .Noel

$3700 on a supercomputer so I can run what I think is the poorest version of FS to date, which in-turn only cost me $69.95?Im good though, really, I am... Thanks for the offer... Bills must be paid, not put off. :)

FSX is not the poorest version of FS. Its got everything that no other sims have: Missions, Reflective water, Jetways, Pushback Trucks, Anisotropic Filtering and far better graphics than FS9.You dont need a supercomputer for FSX get a mediocre one and itll still look better than FS9.

I find the performance of FSX to be sad. I can argue that all day long. Many have spent 1500 or 2000 grand for a new computer only to have the FPS drop to the low teens at the airports or in high detail areas. I spent 1200 for this computer (see specs below) after FS9 had been out for 20 months or so. Even before my current pc, my 4 year old HP was able to smoothly run FS9.I think MS forgot what FS was truly about. FSX, IMHO, was nothing more than an attempt to give kids another video game. I think they only wanted to increase their sales for the FS product line which had been falling for several years. I have had FSX going on 2 years... My total flight time? Probably less than 6 hours. With all the tweaks, patches, configuring settings so my hardware wont explode, and patience, I got little satisfaction. Beautiful Sim? Yes, very. I think it's about 3 years ahead of current technology though. It'll take about 3 years until people can have the same picture MS put on the box with acceptable FPS. I surpass the minimum hardware requirements according to the box, but you would think otherwise if you actually flew it on my system. I personally think FSX was more of a disapointment for the general population of experienced simmers than a success. I am looking at new pc's though. #### sure not with FSX in mind. If I can run it? Great. If not, oh well. With so many options and expansions for FS9, it looks just as good.My 2 cents... Im off to stick my head in some ice water... I need to cool down. :-roll

That cracks me up... Even with a $600 card, half the recommended settings are "Medium Low/Low/Minimal/Off." Anyone else find that humorous?

Did you see this spec sheet on the -11s?http://www.anandtech.com/cpuchipsets/intel...aspx?i=3184&p=4105 sustained xfer and 4ms access. That's as good as it gets.The Raptors are old technology and not a reasonable value anymore. The new Seagates bet 'em at 7200RPM. Before I raided the my -11, 250s, I ran HTtune on them just to prove it . . . to myself. They ran as advertised. http://www.seagate.com/docs/pdf/datasheet/...uda_7200_10.pdfNote the ST3250410AS is actually a -11 in disguise. These are what I have. The transfer rate is listed as 100/300. It appears they are trying to say 100MBs is the drives maximum and 300MBs is its SATA II's buss potential. In any case, I got 100MBs xfers with ~ 5ms access times on the individual drives before I raided them. With 3 raided, I get a 280 xfer over the 1st 20% and 6s access thru this same area.Raptors xfer at 70MBs and have similar access times. I don't see them as a current option. In the old days, yes. But not no more. The simplest backup strategy is to clone the whole raid to a single, separate drive every once in a while.Something is still holding that cat back. It really looks like some kind of a buss limit. I'm really not famaliar with the nuances of the SCSI buss, but it appears that something's going on there. I don't see anything impossible about that 125MB/s with a 15K RPM drive. That's the whole point of spinning at 15K. The drive is giving up hundreds of gigibytes of capacity to do it. It's a huge trade off, but if you are looking for a very fast data drive, that's the one. Might as well use that little guy for something. But I really don't see the need for a separate drive. All this advise that might have been valid in a by-gone era, but drives are fast these days. There's no performance reason that a second data drive (or swap file drive) might be needed. How would that work, anyway? Would data transfer faster from one drive than it would from some other drive. How? Why? This makes no sense. If an operator needs faster data transfers from a particular data set on a boot drive, we can defrag the drive to put the high priority data at the fastest outer edge. Technology marches on. If things worked OK with the data on a sepeate SCSI, it'd be fine on a single -11 with the critical data moved to the outer edge of the drive. There would be no need for the extra performance provided by the raid. It would feel the same. But consider some absolutes. What is the absolute highest performance available for us normal folks? Whatever it is, it will be Buss Limited. Even the most super-duper, Hyper SCSI U12,000 Raptor X2 drive raid set will not be able to move date faster than the buss will allow. The SATA II buss can facilitate the fastest xfers of any storage system available today, other than Fiber Channel. But even with Fiber, this is still just a buss and would Still need drives to fill it up. Can we even buy Fiber Channel drives? Even if we could, they would still be limited by the same laws of physics. How fast can you spin a disk before it disintegrates?The SATA II buss can accommodate xfers at up to 375MB/s (aka 3.0Gb/s) minus some for overhead. If I were to raid 4 of these -11s, I'd be near 350MB/s and right near the maximum potential transfer rates available from SATA II's buss (i.e., any consumer storage system). There is nothing beyond this for us normal folks. You already have the best single drive solution, if that capping issue could be resolved. If it can't be resolved, ya might as well just get a $70, 250gig -11. Triple the capacity, third the price and give up 2ms in access times. Pretty good deal. The boot time with the raid is startling. Bang, you're up. Raid doubles the chance of data loss, so one Has to back up. Rumor has it that the P35s raid controller can deal with non-identical drives. If a raid 0 drive fails, there is No recovery. Raid 5 can be used. One drive can fail and the array can be recovered. It takes 3 drives and imposes a performance penalty. Raid 10 can loose 2 drives, has no performance penalty, but takes 4 drives. The P35R can do any of these , plus . . . run a raid 1 to automatically backup a raid array all on the same set of drive. This would be advanced Raiding! Overall, raid is a toy. I really enjoy the snappy performance, but with the performance and capacity available from these new 7200RPM -11 Seagates, it's hard to insist raid (or 10K Raptors, even 15K SCSi) is necessary.Great fun though. Get a couple of 500s (or 250s). All Seagates are 5 year warranty. Raid 'em, unraid 'em. Play. $250 for a terabite of Very fast storage? It's a magic time.

Thank God you aren't selling things I can't afford! Hey listen, dunno who you are but I can tell you understand the material well, and I very much appreciate the guidance. Really, I mean it!I was about to buy TWO ST3250410AS drives tonight--but need some more advice on the RAID issue. I've got the 73GB Cheetah I will go ahead and use as it's only about 6 months old, plus I have another 36GB Cheetah that is still chugging along fine. It seems there is no reason for me not to use the new 7200.10(yer sure it's a .11?) for the boot drive, true? What's also part of this decision is that I seem to have pretty stable data storage capacity needs. I pretty much have a few apps I use, and really, FS & Gigastudio are about it, plus I have historically loaded and unloaded 5 or 6 FPS's over the years, and find they have very good replay value, but there's never a need to keep them all loaded simultaneously. If it's cheap enough, why notI suppose. To keep this in perspective: the 73GB I bought 6 months ago? It has a grand total of 18GB sitting on it--and it's my boot drive. I just don't have giant data storage needs. I do need fast access though . . .Anyway, back on the spin rate issue. Giga 3.x is a disk streaming sampler that loads the first segments of very large sound samples (multigigabyte piano samples for example) into system ram, then keeps the ram buffers fed off the drive where the giga samples are stored. I have tested my rig out loading giga samples on the boot drive (my 73G Cheetah, and there are troubles. You can increase the DMA buffers by increasing the latency to resolve audio pops n clicks, but that is not the best solution in playing digital piano. I thought maybe I should see if there is an upgrade for Vista coming for Giga. Yes! This is totally cool because Giga 3 had serious system ram limitations. There is a new version out that supports it all: XP & Vista 32 & 64. And it uses all the memory you can give it. This changes everything! I just found out about this, and I'm totally thrilled about this. Sometime down the road a few months I'll pick up both Vista 64 and G4, so the extra ram I'm buying should work. BTW, anyone confirm 8gb can be used in V64 with problems? I see there are some troubles with some machines, and a decrease in mem performance, which I think would be predicted simply due to more addressing demands of another 4Gbs.Anyway, you came thru again with compelling justifications for these parts. It's allowing me to initiate a slow break from SCSI, overdue, and I was a bit nervous about the reliability and heat from WD Raptors. The 15K.x's have the best of all reliability ratings from what I see on storagereview.com's site, at least for high perf drives, so I hope the 7200's can compete. What I do with these two drives I'm not totally sure yet. Since I have fairly low total storage needs, I'm almost tempted just to do RAID 1 and keep a clean copy around. Tempting to see how RAID 0 runs, but I need some more guidance. The only thing that concerns me is the data reliability part. I don't like troubles! So I may just use the 2nd drive in a RAID 1, and install FS9 and FSX on my 73Gb Cheetah, along with Giga. Both of these require a TOTAL of about 20GB, so once again, huge capicity remains, relatively speaking.If I did do RAID 0, how many drives would I need for true redundency, 3, or 4? Didn't you say you used just 3? From VistaX64 forum:"You may have much better luck with pc5300 ram. This newsgroup has dozens of postings on the problems of trying to use pc6400 ram in all four dimm slots on many mobos. I am running 3 2GB dimms in this machine now because it will not boot with all 4 slots filled. The amount of memory is not the issue but the number of dimms used seems to be. Research your mobo on the manufacturer's website and especially the user forums there. And read thethreads on this newsgroup on similar problems with ram."Any issues predicted with my P5E? I have 2 x 2gb of Mushkin PC-6400 memory, and will be running it close dialed back to 333Mhz.Noel

Yea, that ST3250410AS is the same drive as the -11, 500s. They finally got 250 gigs on a platter. The 250 is a single platter version (it's a skinny dude). The 500 uses 2 platters, the 750,3, etc. They are all just different capacities of the same drive.The fastest, best way is to use the two drives in both a raid 0 And a raid 1. You're gonna have to study up for this one, and practice recovery runs. The P35 southbridge plus Intel Matrix Storage Manager will setup the 2 drives as just a single mass of storage. Not a drive. They call it a volume. From this volume, the Storage Manager can setup one-half (or whatever portion you want) of each of the 2 physical drives as a raid 0. This becomes drive 1. Then setup the remaining portions of two physical drives as drives 2 and 3. Then the manager will allow you to setup a raid 1 between drives 2 and 3. Clone the raid to either drive 2 or 3 once in a while. Now either of the physical drives can fail and you still have your data immediately available for a reboot. Just select the surviving drive in the bios (and get your Newegg order in). It's doable, but it even makes me dizzy.Or, just try a raid 0 first. Get the 250x2 raid 0 setup, then clone (or image) it over to the cat. Now you're safe. If it blows up, you can just clone/image it back. (Note: The Image method only makes a file, so the drive remains easily usable for any other data storage needs. The image file is just a big 'ol file that sits in a folder anywhere on the 2nd drive. The Clone method formats the target drive and makes it into an identical "clone" of the origional disk.) Play. See if the raid make a needable difference. If not, make a fresh image/clone, then break the raid 0 down. Come back up in raid 1. Reclone/image to one of them. You're back. Acronis is the big dog in disk backup utilities these days (Norton is Gone). Seagate has Acronis' clone tool on its site as a utility to setup new disks. Don't know 'bout the Acronis image tool. Vista Ultimate has a full disk Image tool built in. I've used them all - a lot - and they work fine. Ultimate Defrag is the utility that can move data to the outer edge of a drive by simply selecting it. O&O can do this too, but their method is a pain. You'll be able to use these clone/image tools between the cat and SATA, but not raid function.You might notice the newegg list is "Fred's Box." Fred's running 8 gigs on Vista 64 Ultimate on a P5K-E with no issues. It was his 1st build and it booted right up. I was so proud! That box's main app will be heavy CAD work. That ram's gonna get used. I'm running all 4 filled with 1gig each. All's well. If these guys would buy quality PSs, 99% of these kinds of problems would go away.FS will eat storage. FSGenesis is 8 gigs. Megascenery can be 50. Just loaded GEX and it's another 5. All this is x2 because the program files gotta be stored somewhere. That little 75 gigger gonna puff up and explode.

Clone the raid to either drive 2 or 3 once in a while. Now>either of the physical drives can fail and you still have your>data immediately available for a reboot. Just select the>surviving drive in the bios (and get your Newegg order in).>It's doable, but it even makes me dizzy.You're saying if the one volume is split into 3 "drives", these drives will be visible in the BIOS? How does one tell which physical drive is hosed, that's apparent at the BIOS level too? Not intuitive?! >Play. See if the raid make a needable difference. If not, make>a fresh image/clone, then break the raid 0 down. Come back up>in raid 1. Reclone/image to one of them. You're back. Yes, this sounds tolerable! >You'll be able to use these clone/image tools between the cat>and SATA, but not raid function. Huh? Didn't you say I could make an image or clone of the raid'd Drive 1 section? This is getting murky! Well, I will take you at your word and see how it goes, assuming it will be sort of intuitive as we go, and if not, ok we can figure it out. I have 3 cats and a kitten still functioning. I will move my old LSI U160 to the wife's PC and send along a 36g 10K cat and an 18g kitten, and keep the newish 73g 15K and 5y old 36g 15K cats and use the 36g for a clone or image drive. Dual booting Vista when I do go there, which I'm thinking now will be sooner than later what with that wonderful news for Giga, what the heck do I do with this, in this tangled web of virtual drives n volumes? I may just keep one drive for XP and one for Vista and call it good because, if it's dizzying for you, can you imaging how it appears on this end?! Do you mind sending me an email address so I can tap into your brain for help should the wheels fly off early on? >You might notice the newegg list is "Fred's Box." Fred's>running 8 gigs on Vista 64 Ultimate on a P5K-E with no>issues. It was his 1st build and it booted right up. I was so>proud! That box's main app will be heavy CAD work. That ram's>gonna get used. I looked at the ASUS forums, and some reading in VistaX64 and some people are def having trouble with Xfire in 8 gb machines. ASUS has the QVL list and there are zero 2GB modules on their proven list. The memory I bought is the lower end Mushkin 5-5-5-18, but it rec rave reviews on newegg. Some other issues that appear to be relevent is that some who had troubles with 2 x 2 x 4 config were using nV boards. I think I will take my chances and pick up the 2nd 2gb pair of the same memory from newegg right now, when I order the 2 .11's. The price is so right, plus I will be running these dimms a 333 so they should be fine I would guess, esp since I have the serious PS in this OCZ/PCP&C 750W er. The thing is bloody heavy! Off to grab 2 drives, V64, and 2x4Gb and then hopefully we be close to done! God help me!Two more things: for dual boot XP/V64, must I have a full (non-upgrade) copy of Vista 64, or can I use an upgrade version? And, Home Premium or Ultimate? I will wait to pull the trigger on this order til I find out about this issue. Thank you kindly!

If you want to play around with raid, I'd suggest a simple raid 0 (or 1) to start with. Storing data in volumes is really IT stuff: Seriously advanced raiding.A raid 0 drive will look just like another drive to the whole system. It can be handled just like any other drive. Image it. Clone it, take it to dinner. It's entirely convinced it's just like all the other kids, but we know better. If a drive fragged, the raid 0's data would be gone. Which one is the bad one? I believe Seagate's install-a-HD boot disk CD has a disk check utility. . . . or see which one will still format? Should be relatively doable. Actually, I've never lost a raid. Knock wood.You're on your own with dual boot. Vista works fine (enough). I have the oldest machine still running XP in case, but it's become a closet storage server . . . literally in the closet. It's all that thing can do to load a web page, but it's on a wireless network and hooked right up with (Old)MainBox/Vista 32 and (New)QuadBox64/Vista64. I triple boot, but it do it on 3 seperate machines. I've had the new uberBox up for several months now and I still have stuff scattered all over. How clever do I really want to get with this Matrix Storage is still a question. More and more, it's becoming "Not very." Mainly, it's a pleasure to have a second machine that is strong enough to be actually useful.I really don't think Crossfire is going to be a serious player. I already have my single core 8800 running circles 'round ATI's dualie. Also, spend 150 on a second matching monitor. You'll never go back to one. I'm running 3 and I can't imaging how anyone can get by with just one. Crossfire/SLI is limited to a single monitor output. For me, that just ends that. That 8G/V64/Crossfire problem sounds ominous.That memory is fine. Once again, it's all about the label. Craftsman works just fine. I'm always suspicious about those guys with gigantic $5000 Snapon boxes. They're so big, one can actually hide behind it. And so it goes. I'd go with Ultimate. If for nothing else, the built-in full drive image tool. I also had the media center hooked up to a TV tuner card. The media center downloaded my cable TV's channel listings and displayed full channel info as I selected the channels with the TV's remote. It also hooked up to a channel guide web interface. This was all happening on the hi def 42" in a window with my desktop in the background. Way cool, but allas, I only had the cable's coax plugged in (not the decoder box). As I discovered, media center will not display hi def, QAM channels from a coax. My TV will do it if I just plug the dumb coax cable into the side of it. The tuner card would do it with its own software. Why not media center? Well, this just won't do! So the tuner card went back. It appeared that media center was almost ready to do great things, for lack of a software patch (so the forum rumors go). I've be interested to see how Media Center would react to getting a feed from my cable box. This is something to look forward to: A Hi Def TV windowed up and over a PMDG flight half way 'cross the pond. We're getting there.

Well, I'd really like to have both OS's going in one box. This is more important to me than raid 0. I'd like to get it set up, and then go back to flying, shooting and playing the piano for another 5yr.If I did figure out how to do raid 0, AND set up a dual boot on separate partitions in the raid 0 set up to just try raid, is there any magic trick that will let you make each OS partition go to it's own physical drive, or does one have to scrub the whole thing, reformat and start all over? Might get sticky with raid drivers, or is that somehow in the BIOS and independent of the OS?I got my mem and drive order off, but still not sure if I should buy the upgrade version of Vista 64 ultimate, and if I will be able to do dual boot in that situation, or if I need a full license for the Vista install. The first step after the hardware is assembled is to decide how the drive config will be and install XP. I don't believe my Giga audio card has a driver for Vista 64, but it's very doubtful. Here's a blurb from someone that sounds like a way to do this with RAID 0, so long as I don't worry about backing it up!:"Well, thanks all, but I finally got everything installed. I not sure what went wrong the first time I did it. But this time, I did pretty much the same thing but it worked: 1. Clear MBR on my RAID0 Strip. 2. Inserat Floppy with RAID driver for XP 3. Boot from XP CD and press F6 to load both RAID driver 4. Creat a 200GB Partition 5. Install XP onto that 200G partition 6. After XP finish installing, put in the Vista 64-bit Disk and reboot 7. Creat a 700GB Partition and format the partition 8. Install Vista 64-bit on that 700GB Partition 9. And ALL DONE! DUAL BOOT! Anyway, I'm a happy camper now Now starting to put the all the games in it's proper place, DX9 into XP and DX10 into Vista!"

There are issues with volsnap.sys that I don't think I want to bother with for dual booting. I think I'll just do XP for the moment, use raid 0, and make backups and call it good. Simple, and effective it would appear. In this instance, I'm guessing FS9 or X would be best off just living on the primary raid 0 array and maybe make one huge partition for the raid 0 in 250gb drives? What do you think about that? Maybe put the pagefile on the cat. ???Noel

Howabout a simple raid 0 with a single partition. 500GBs really isn't considered 'huge' anymore. A single blueray or HD movie can take up 40 gigs. I like simple too. Initially, the 75G cat could be big enough to provide a full drive backup via the image method. Using separate drives for different purposes (i.e., FSX-FS9-pagefile) is a strategy too, from that bygone era. In those days, even a placebo effect was a welcome relief. These days, drives are fast enough that these extreme (generally useless) measures are not necessary. Leave the pagefile where windows wants it and let windows manage it. There's no need to manually set pagefile size. Get Ultimate Defrag. Use 'settings' to move high priority data (FSX, etc) to the outer edge of the drive disk. This will provide maximum xfer rates and minimum access times simply based on the data's physical location on the disk. With two -11 seagates expect > 180 MBs xfer rates and their advertised access times. This dual boot always seemed fraught with problems. I setup XP on a virtual drive once. Actually, I was amazed. It worked fine. I had XP running in a window on my Vista desktop. Very trick.