Hi , I would like to try and clarify my understanding of the above. From reading as many posts and discussions here as I can find here on the subject, I will summarise the situation as I see it , with any questions I have regarding the point following. I would appreciate if then anyone can confirm my understanding as correct and answer my queries if possible. This set up is purely for FSX. I have approx 250GB of photoscenery. 1) I have a 150GB raptor, partitioned into 3, with my dual boot O/S's on 2 of the partitions and the 3rd used as a normal drive. My question regarding this is: Is this a less than ideal set up? I read from Nick that you should never partion a performance drive. Should I have the OS on its own drive ?Questions arising from this is, what is the optimum sized drive for this and would it be of any benefit to use a small (30 or 60GB) solid state drive for the os ? Is using a raptor for the OS a waste of good drive? Can I use use a lesser drive ? 2) I have another 300GB raptor for FSX and some, but not all of photoscenery ( the overspill is on the 3rd drive deriving from splitting the 150GB raptor as specified above ) I have left the drives approximately 2 thirds full. I am considering getting a second 300GB raptor and a 3ware card as advised by NIck as being the best way to run the drives, and connecting the 2 drives to the controller card. I had not decided wether to use RAID or not. I was going to store my photoscenery on one drive and install FSX to the other. I was then going to format the drives with 64K sized clusters as advised to maximise the performance. Have I understood the above correctly as being pretty much the optimal set up ? Will using RAID give better results? 3) I use O&O defrag 11, and have set up offline defrag to work every time I boot. How often should I perform the in depth Name/ space defrag as described by Nick, in the light of this? 4) Is it worth investing in solid state drives? The general consensus appears to be NO, from the posts I have read here. Can you fill them right up without any performance deterioration ?Thx in advance for the advice, Mark

After further study of all relavant posts and articles I could find, I have decided the following:Another 300 GB raptor, a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML PCI Express x4 8-Port controller card, OCZ vertex 30gb SSD have been purchased.Set up will be:OS on the ssd. FSX on one of the 300 raptors, All photoscenery etc on the other. Other 150GB raptor for other apps and games. I will not be using RAID , just running the 3 raptor drives from the controller card. One question, how should I format the raptors ? And my final thoughts now are regarding the OS. Should I change to XPP 64 , instead of Vista64 ?

After further study of all relavant posts and articles I could find, I have decided the following:Another 300 GB raptor, a 3ware 9650SE-8LPML PCI Express x4 8-Port controller card, OCZ vertex 30gb SSD have been purchased.Set up will be:OS on the ssd. FSX on one of the 300 raptors, All photoscenery etc on the other. Other 150GB raptor for other apps and games. I will not be using RAID , just running the 3 raptor drives from the controller card. One question, how should I format the raptors ? And my final thoughts now are regarding the OS. Should I change to XPP 64 , instead of Vista64 ?

I think you made a mistake.. SSD's are not what you think they are and only the Intel X drives are doing the deed right nowI have posted about SSD and their issues.. they need another year before they should be ready for mainstream. SSD takes advantage of NCQ or Queing.. where that feature kills a Vrap or other SATA drives raw performance which means in order to get the perf out of the SSD you need to enable a feature on the card that will kill the other drivescatch22Using the card for Vraps is fine .. and if you are dead set on SSD I would contact 3ware and make sure that card's BIOS will support SSD. I do not think it will but I may be wrong