Hard Drive advice

[TexasMike]

Hello,
Since Uncle Sam has given us some money to "stimulate" the economy, I'm going to do my part as a patriotic American and try to increase my FSX performance. My signature shows my setup. While it's not the fastest ever built, it should be, and has been enough to run FSX pretty well. Somewhere along the way I've developed a case of the microstutters that I can't get rid of. I've incorporated Nick N's tweaks, and while my framerates are good, these stutters persist.Currently I have 3 hard drives in my computer. One which houses my OS, (XP). One that contains FS9 and FSX on separate partitions. The third hold music. All three are ATA drives with IDE cables, 7200 RPM. Would I gain any benefit in performance by going to a SATA drive for FS9/FSX or for the OS or both? Any help would be appreciated.

[macca22au]

Get two of the fastest drives you can afford.  Put the music on to the first drive with the OS unless it is a massive collection, otherwise buy an external drive.  

Then set up the two new drives in RAID 0, and put FSX on to them.  The improvement is enormous, and if you can afford it buy a GOOD RAID controller to take the load off your CPU, and the world will be better.

I decided to abandon FS9 so I have never had to think about partitioning.  One of the resident gurus may be able to help there.

[mjrhealth]

I have FSX on one partition and FSX Global 2008 on another,this is to keep them unfragmented as possible. Good idea to look at drive performance , i have 2 sata and one is definitely slower than the other.

[Slotback]

According to Nick you shouldn't raid with fsx unless you have a dedicated RAID card. It's basically because a small stripe size as with motherboard, matrix, and software raid is too small therefore parts of the files are scattered about the drives taking multiple seeks to load a file - SLOW.

I'd stay with a single drive. The fastest of which are new Western Digital VelociRaptor 300gb 10 000rpm, but there's also 150gb Raptors which should be a fair bit cheaper and only slightly slower.

[TexasMike]

Thanks to all for your advice. Would it be beneficial to put XP on a Sata drive as well or will it be good enough just to place FSX on a Sata drive?

[Slotback]

From what I understand it's optimim to put Windows on one drive, and fsx on another dedicated drive. Each drive should optimally be as fast as you possibly can.

To be honest I'd just buy a couple of 320gb SATAS and that'd be the end of it.

[homebrewer]

Great sig, Vod. My dad has one. I won't use it...