WD Velociraptor HD worth it?

[Sean Grenyer]

Hey

NickN says one of the best upgrades for FSX you can get is a Western Digital Velocirator Hard Drive. They're about

[idahosurge]

I have a 300GB for FSX and a 600GB for my FSX photo scenery.  FSX runs great.  I can not tell you have much of an improvement it will be.

All that I can say is that I had my photo scenery on a 500GB partition of a 750GB Seagate 7,200 RPM drive with a 32MB cache.  After I moved my photo scenery to the 600GB VR my frame rates over NYC did increase at least 2 FPS and sometimes by 3, maybe more.  My photo scenery does include MegaSceneryEarth for Long Island, including all of NYC and all of NJ.

Now was the price for the 600GB worth 2FPS, probably not, but I moved it since I was running out of room.  Now I have plenty of room on the the 500GB partition and the 600GB VR.

[idahosurge]

I just thought that I would mention that the real benefit to putting FSX on a VR is that FSX is the only thing on the HD.

Since FSX is on the outer edge of the platter it takes less time to read data and transfer it to the CPU.  The more you put on it the longer it takes to read the data on the inside of the platter and that is why Nick recommends that you do not have a HD more that 50% full.  Keep in mind that the 50% figure is for optimum performance, not everyone can have a HD that is only 50% full.

Since the VR spins at 10,000 RPM this further reduces the time it takes to read vs. a HD that spins at 7,200 RPM.

[patchz]

[color=#000000]I don't know anything about the Velociraptor, but I've got FSX on a 1TB SATA-II 3Gb/s 7200rpm 32MB Cache HDD (D:/) and my OS etc on a 500GB SATA-II 3Gb/s 7200rpm 16MB Cache HDD (C:/). D:/ has 774GB free space and C:/ has 331GB free space, way less than 50% on both. I use Ultimate Defrag to keep the good stuff near the edge and though not as fast as 10,000rpm they work good for me.