I am ordering a new system for FS9 and FSX. The basic specs are:Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bitGigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R MotherboardIntel Core i7 950 3.06GHz - Overclocked to 4.00GHzGeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2048MB GraphicsCorsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 12800C9 1600MHz RAM.. and I was thinking of 2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000RPM SATA as the hard drives.But the latter add a lot of money (like £300 +) to the system and I am having second thoughts. Can anyone say whether adding 10,000 rpm drives to the above rather than 7,200 rpm drives would make much difference to performance? Over £300 worth (if any??).Thanks,Martin

.. the WD Velociraptor access times are under half that of the Seagate 7200 rpm alternative - 7ms as opposed to 14.8. Enough to make a difference in FS?

I am ordering a new system for FS9 and FSX. The basic specs are:Windows 7 Home Premium 64 bitGigabyte GA-X58A-UD3R MotherboardIntel Core i7 950 3.06GHz - Overclocked to 4.00GHzGeForce GTX 460 Sonic 2048MB GraphicsCorsair XMS3 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 12800C9 1600MHz RAM.. and I was thinking of 2 x Western Digital VelociRaptor 600GB 10000RPM SATA as the hard drives.But the latter add a lot of money (like £300 +) to the system and I am having second thoughts. Can anyone say whether adding 10,000 rpm drives to the above rather than 7,200 rpm drives would make much difference to performance? Over £300 worth (if any??).Thanks,Martin

Depends what you think performance means...1) fps : no difference - fps is not dependent on you disk speed2) Load times : yes - but this is a function of sustained read rates and generally this is directly proportional to the disk rotation speed.3) new textures & blurries : this is a function of burst disk read speed - which istherefore also dependent on access times. So you have to decide whether load times are £300 issue for you, and whether anychance of blurries is a £300 issue for you. I only have a 7200 disk dedicatedto FSX, my blurries are minimal - but occasional - but this does not bother me.A separate disk dedicated to FSX is probably the best use of money (ie not thesystem disk), and then you have to decide how big this is going to be.Just my 2p worth.

I think you are looking at the SATA600 drives from WD but you have to verify that with the company you are ordering. They indeed are expensive but if you look around for reviews you will find they completely leave behind the normal disks in terms of speed and acces time's during the tests. Wich is of course not an proper indication of what they are doing during normal use but i guess you can expect sort of the same. It doesn't beat an SSD though.Only thing you have to look for if you are going to buy them is that your motherboard must be able to use them at that speed. Wich means that your motherboard must have an SATA600 connector. Take care with that though. A couple of motherboards do have them but when you use them the transferspeed of your videocard slot is halved.

At this point, the SATA 6gb drives are a hype. Unfortunately the drivers supplied on the mobo's do not work so at best you get the old 3gb speed. This is more than adequate however.*IF* the Marvel driver is fixed, then there might be a difference but as far as FS goes - not really noticeable. When I built my last system, I ran several comparisons using the WD Vrap 600 set up on the standard SATA 3gb and SATA 6gb connectors and saw no real difference. Sadly, the 6gb setup kept crashing due to the flaky drivers.I'd still buy the vrap 600, which I did.Vic