SSD, Raptor or SAS?

[RIC_BARKER]

Ok, I'm building a new system:

The OS will be on a standard WD 7200RPM 32MB buffer drive, for FSX, I'm looking at this as an option. http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAM-SSD64M. I could do two of these in raid0.

Would this be ok for FSX? Hardware raid, is there much of an overhead on the processor for that?

My other options are:

Single 150GB Raptor
A SAS system (double the price of the raptor!)

Any views/guidance?

Ric B.

[NickN]

1. SSD has issues unless its the new Intel SSD drives and even then they need 6Gb/s SATAIII ports for full operation in multidisk systems... be another year

unles you are like me and have military spec/grade SSD drives used in high level aircraft computer design/security at your disposal

[RIC_BARKER]

Cheers for the input Nick,

So, with SSD out of the picture I'm left with an interesting choice.

I'm very lucky that I might be able to get a 300GB 15.5k SAS drive for free, all I would need to buy would be the interface card.

So my two choices are:

2 x 7200rpm 16mb buffer sata HDD in a raid 0 array (for the OS)
1x 15500rpm 16mb buffer SAS HDD with controller (for FSX)

This will cost between

[a1]

Great chart Nick.

[NickN]

NO RAID unless its true full hardware PCIe card RAID

I would go with the 7200 single for the OS and a Vrap for FSX

[RIC_BARKER]

NO RAID unless its true full hardware PCIe card RAID

I would go with the 7200 single for the OS and a Vrap for FSX

Cheers Nick. This is now the plan.