Hard drive read times are one of those technology areas that has not improved much at all. Am I wrong to think that the Average Seek times have not changed in many years?

Well, hd's are the slowest part of any system these days...If you go back, say, 10 years, then yes seek times and rpm speeds have improved/gone up. But for the last several years things have been largely the same except for sizes, and a greater proliferation of SATA/SATA2 drives.Last year I heard about some emerging hard drive technology that would combine a flash drive with a traditional hard drive. These hybrid drives would feature flash memory to speed access times. I don't know what the status of this technology is though.RhettAMD 3700+ (@2585 mhz), eVGA 7800GT 256 (Guru3D 93.71), ASUS A8N-E, PC Power 510 SLI, 2gb Corsair XMS 3-3-3-8 (1T), WD 150 gig 10000rpm Raptor, WD 250gig 7200rpm SATA2, Seagate 120gb 5400 rpm external HD, CoolerMaster Praetorian

Hi Stan,I think it depends on a number of factors. For example, how many scenery addons you have installed, type of scenery, the level of detail radius setting, whether day or night, the list goes on and on.Friday Harbor, Day, Fair Weather, level of detail radius (medium), Trike ultralightTime taken to get to the FREE FLIGHT screen:1st load of FSX = 65 secs (i.e. very first time FSX is loaded after booting to Windows). 2nd and subsequent loads of FSX = 17 secsFollowing virgin install of FSX these times were around 60 secs and 10 secs respectively. Much has changed since then and my installation has grown considerably.Time taken to load after clicking "FLY NOW!":1st load = 3mins 45secs (Loading terrain data phase currently lasts 75 secs)2nd load = 9 secsIf I then load another flight (in this instance, Vagar - Faroe Islands Scenery)1st load = 55 secs2nd load = 2 secsThere is little doubt that the spin off from all the scanning done by FSX during those lengthy initial loads pays off subsequently with much snappier loading times as you change flight situations.Mike

This thread, which I started, has convinced me to "wipe out" everything associated with FSX from my hard drive. I will be doing a total reinstall this weekend, and taking it deliberately slow. First, the program...FSX, then SP1, then Cloud 9 stuff, then addons of aircraft, FS Genesis, UT, and everything else. I've deleted, and defragged twice, done a disk cleanup, and everything looks ready to go. I look forward to doing it right and not rushing anything. I want those quick load times.Thanks for your input.

When I hit the "Fly" button, my average load time is 3.5 minutes. I have autogen to Dense and use Cloud 9 USA and Europe, FS Genesis, and Ultimate Terrain. Water is at 2X mid level and I'm a fan of as much eye candy as is reasonably possible.What is your average load time?

Stan,Why not add a small 80gb disk for Windows or FSX. That way these two programs are not jerking the disk head around so much. Remember that Windows was a committee creation. That translates into lots of subroutines as different people wrote different elements and used other people's code to do their functions. These sub-routines aka DLLs, Threads, Fibers etc. are not always setting in memory and thus competition for disk. Two disks on two different SATA buss's may help.Regards,Dick BoleyA PC, an LCD, speakers, CH yoke