I gave myself a terrible fright! I wandered around to different sites to price SSD Drives. Having given up on that idea very quickly I have decided to get a brace of 300gig velociraptors from Western Digital to RAID 0 for my dedicated installation of FSX and Win 7 64bit. My curiosity moves me to inquire as to why only WD manufacture a 10,000rpm drive? Is their r&d dept. superior to other manufacturers as everyone else has failed to move into this area. It just seems a little strange, with the fierce competition in this sector of the market. Also, these drives seem to have, for years, maintained a very healthy price point. Anyone have a clue?Jon

I think the prices of SSD

Also,If you check around ,you may find some info indicating that FSX runs as well/better on a single drive as opposed to two drives in raid 0..Sorry, I don,t have links...

..Sorry, I don,t have links...

But I do! http://www.jetlinesystems.com/performance.html :(

Thanks for your replies. A very interesting link. I gotta rethink this whole shebang.

I

If you are considering the 300GB VelociRaptor, I highly suggest you read this article carefully. If you're crafty enough, you might be able to apply it's lessons to your situation. It describes a way to get Raptor performance from a drive which costs $100 less. To describe the real basics of the concept:As you know, a hard drive platter is moving the fastest under the read/write heads at the outside edges of the platter, as opposed to the inside. The tweak linked above takes a 1.5TB standard 7200RPM drive, and short-strokes it to be only 300GB in size. This limits all the data to being written on the outer edges of the platter. By doing this, it can match and beat a 10,000RPM drive performance... obviously this is at the expense of 1.2 TB of storage, but what would you care! You just saved $100 by doing this instead of buying a 300 GB Raptor... *AND*, if you end up needing the space down the road, you can just undo the drive adjustment and get your terabytes back. I wouldn't attempt this unless the article and screenshots made sense though - it is a little technical. There are ways of making this work with simple partitioning and defragging, but I can't vouch for those - only the linked process was actually tested. (shrug) ...and always keep in mind that hard drive speed really only helps with flight simulator load times, not actual in-game performance. (SSD's may lead to fewer stutters, but is something no traditional drive can match) Good luck!

If you are considering the 300GB VelociRaptor, I highly suggest you read this article carefully. If you're crafty enough, you might be able to apply it's lessons to your situation. It describes a way to get Raptor performance from a drive which costs $100 less. To describe the real basics of the concept:As you know, a hard drive platter is moving the fastest under the read/write heads at the outside edges of the platter, as opposed to the inside. The tweak linked above takes a 1.5TB standard 7200RPM drive, and short-strokes it to be only 300GB in size. This limits all the data to being written on the outer edges of the platter. By doing this, it can match and beat a 10,000RPM drive performance... obviously this is at the expense of 1.2 TB of storage, but what would you care! You just saved $100 by doing this instead of buying a 300 GB Raptor... *AND*, if you end up needing the space down the road, you can just undo the drive adjustment and get your terabytes back. I wouldn't attempt this unless the article and screenshots made sense though - it is a little technical. There are ways of making this work with simple partitioning and defragging, but I can't vouch for those - only the linked process was actually tested. (shrug) ...and always keep in mind that hard drive speed really only helps with flight simulator load times, not actual in-game performance. (SSD's may lead to fewer stutters, but is something no traditional drive can match) Good luck!

Wow, thats great! Never even thought of that. I just quickly scanned the link...are there proven performance measures saying that this actually works?

I wouldn't attempt this unless the article and screenshots made sense though - it is a little technical

That's not a problem. What an interesting link. Thanks for that. I understand the complete concept of this and now my devious old brain see's no reason why 2 of the subject drives could not be RAID 0'd. Not necessarily for FSX but just as a really quick and inexpensive RAID solution. I mean, crikey! They're only AU$ 139.00. I'm now seriously considering this. Thank you.Jon

Seagate has had 10,000 and 15,000RPM SCSI/SAS drives for enterprise class systems for many years now. This is also a large part of what the Raptor drives were designed for. Gamers and hardware enthusiasts aren't really that big of a market to support the development of those drives on their own.Western Digital and Seagate are also getting into the SSD market.http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?loca...0001a48090aRCRDhttp://www.tomshardware.com/news/western-d...-blue,9787.html

WD recently announced their new range of 450 & 600GB 10,000rpm VRaptors with significantly more dense platters, 32MB cache and SATA 6Gp/s connectors (not that this last item matters in any way).The appeal of WD's VRaptor HDD's remians the cost per GB which is approx. $0.50 per GB as opposed to SSD's which are approx. $2.50 per GB.AnandTech have a good review here.

Also, check out the new WD 2TB Black Caviar HD. From what I have read they are now just about as fast as the 10,000 rpm drives with they way they break up the 2Tb four 500gig platters. This is what I am planning to get rather than the Vrapters.

I just ordered a WD CB 1tb FAEX drive, cost the same as the FALS but with 64mb cache and SATA 6.0 capability.scott s..