LAST EDITED ON Dec-28-03 AT 07:29 PM (EST) I must plead ignorance concerning "RAID" and "Serial ATA" upgrades. Two questions:1. Would there be any significant performance improvement in my system as described below for upgrades relative to a harddrive or drives? (Exclusive to FS9 performance)Mr. Moderator, if I should have posted this in the hardware forum, please move it, or let me know and I will put it there, but this improvement is only relative to improvement in FS9 performance, so I thought that it might be appropriate here.2. Where is a good tutorial and explaination concerning the newest harddrive provisions available, and how to install and set them up?Note: I am not a complete dummy as the system described is the latest of many upgrades I have made myself, but I must plead ignorance concerning the latest and greatest concerning harddrive provisions. Particularly, I see that I have may features applicable to these upgrades on my MB but I really do not know how to implement them, or exactly what I need to upgrade in order to comply with the requirements. (P4C800 Deluxe)P4 3.2 CPU420 Watt PS6 Fans + CPU fanP4C800 Deluxe MBOn Board SoundMax Sound1G/400 Mem.Sapphire 9800 Pro21" Viwsonic Pro Series P815 Primary Monitor21" Samsung SyncMaster 1100P Secondary MonitorDiamond Stealth S540 PCI Secondary Graphics Card17" Vivitron third monitorCatalyst 3.10 ATI DriverSavage S4 Secondary Graphics DriverSCSI 40 GB Primary HD for FS and OSEIDE 7500 40 GB Secondary HDDirectX9.0bWinXPProThanks:RTH

RAID stands for "Redundant Array of Independent Devices" (or maybe it's "Disks") but that's really for high-end system that need to be absolutely sure they don't lose data. A RAID system stores everything across multiple disks in such a way that if any one disk fails there is still enough information to completely reconstruct the data.In general, you need good disk performance but upgrading a disk is not likely to be something you notice in overall system speed and response time. If you're really short on disk space, you need to add another disk anyway, but it will just buy you time and make it easier to find space for more downloaded aircraft and scenery. A faster disk may help in your startup time for a program, but with your GIG of RAM all the important stuff will already be in memory anyway. The rest of your home cockpit screams, but you're right - your disks are too small for today's greedy applications.