Well, I've gone for the Seagate as it was a very good price. The priority for me is to get FSX on its own drive, with a bit of photoscenery and mesh. Hopefully all will be well... I love the wealth of knowledge on this forum!Ian

No kidding. I've learned many a thing from Dazz and Jahman. What do those guys do in the real world, anyway?By the way, I thought 500GB per platter was becoming kind of low in this day and age. Doesn't Seagate make some drives with 1TB per platter?

Edited January 24, 201214 yr by cmeeks

No kidding. I've learned many a thing from Dazz and Jahman. What do those guys do in the real world, anyway?By the way, I thought 500GB per platter was becoming kind of low in this day and age. Doesn't Seagate make some drives with 1TB per platter?

Yeah they do. I had no idea, thanks Corey1TB2TB3TB

I agree, and to expand on that, get a Caviar Black with a 64MB cache...much better performer than the 32MB version.

Yes! (I forgot about the 64 MBy cache...)

Yeah, the 1TB 64MB version has higher density platters (2x500MB)

Some more trivia: The other leg HDDs stand on today besides fluid bearings. Turns out the HDD platters used to store data as small magnets ("magnetic domains") laid out horizontally on the platter, until one day, while brain storming how to increase platter density (they had reached a plateu because the domains couldn't be made smaller) one fella said: What if the store the magnetic domains vertically on the platter to save space? Ergo the 1 TBy and up HDDs we know today.

you guys would be surprised how little disk activity FSX has.

Not when FSX is starting up? My HDDs go for a 10 minute aerobics session :Big Grin:

I've learned many a thing from Dazz and Jahman.

It's a two way street.Cheers,- jahman.

With that HDD shortage in mind, it seems not really smart to me to buy a new HDD yet. I also think of getting a new HDD for FSX cause my old one is to unsave for me (FSX has its own partition on my 1000GB.). So can you guys advice me a fast and reasonable cheap HDD?

HDDs are expensive now. SSDs are nominal. Why don't you get an SSD for FSX? Or is that too expensive?

HDDs are expensive now. SSDs are nominal. Why don't you get an SSD for FSX? Or is that too expensive?

I think SSD's are too expensive for me now. My FSX has now arround 70 GB of data but I suppose it'll gonna be more. These big SSD's are that expensive. I once thought about a 300GB WD Raptor but 180€ for that drive is simply out of my range (my parents would go crazy if I bought that!). Or would a 80GB SSD make sense?!

Not when FSX is starting up? My HDDs go for a 10 minute aerobics session

:lol:

BTW, I'm testing FSX - disk usage with HD Sentinel, PE, Procmon and Performance Monitor and you guys would be surprised how little disk activity FSX has.400KB/s average,50MB/s max (for a split second actually)max queue depth of only 2, almost all read ops happen at a queue depth of 1disk time = avg 0.1%, max 11%1s. samples

Interesting indeed. So that's during flight right. I guess the only time a good HDD vs SSD will affect FSX is during start up. (and no, thats not referring to the engines)

the only time a good HDD vs SSD will affect FSX is during start up.

That's correct. An SSD will speed start-up time by 10x.Cheers,- jahman.

That's correct. An SSD will speed start-up time by 10x.Cheers,- jahman.

Correct, but for the price, I find them useless and I am now regretting my purchase. I would much rather have run a RAID0 array or purchased a better graphics card.Me and a friend have tested head to head. He has a RAID0 array and his speeds are faster than my older SATAII ADATA SSD. He runs 2 1TB HDD's. Quite impressive IMO.

I think SSD's are too expensive for me now. My FSX has now arround 70 GB of data but I suppose it'll gonna be more. These big SSD's are that expensive.I once thought about a 300GB WD Raptor but 180€ for that drive is simply out of my range (my parents would go crazy if I bought that!).Or would a 80GB SSD make sense?!

Keep your HD. Get a SSD cache HD, e.g. OCX Synapse, or the upcoming Cosair Accelerator. http://www.corsair.com/blog/accelerator-ssd-caching-drive-performance/

Edited January 26, 201214 yr by OmniAtlas

I would much rather have run a RAID0 array

A RAID0 array can be slower than two separated HDDs when seek time is the bottleneck rather than BW?Cheers,- jahman.

Edited January 26, 201214 yr by jahman

A RAID0 array can be slower than two separated HDDs when seek time is the bottleneck rather than BW?Cheers,- jahman.

We tested side by side. He loads FSX as fast as I do. I promise we tested fairly.Remeber, I've got an older SATAII SSD. Rated only up to 200MB's read and write.

Edited January 26, 201214 yr by benorg

We tested side by side

For a fair test (for blurries at high speed at low altitude) you need to distribute your files over the two HDDs for max parallell access, e.g. textures on one HDD and elevation map on the other.Even better, someone could write an app that scans photoscenery directories and spreads the scenery from each directory over 2 (or more) HDDs according to a checkerboard layout, so scenery will be loaded from alternating HDDs.Cheers,- jahman.

Edited January 26, 201214 yr by jahman