New Hard Drive upgrade possibilities

[rycy]

Hello. I have a question regarding upgrading my hard drive. Would upgrading from a 7200rpm IDE drive to the new SATA HARD DRIVE from Western Digital at 10,000rpm (or a SCSI drive) improve performance in Flight Simulator 2002 or 2004? Or would it just be a waste of money? Thanks.

[W2DR]

Waste of money. It will make no difference at all.

[Biff]

Loading times will decrease slightly but it won't do anything for your frames per second. CPU, videocard and RAM are the key factors in FS performance.

[Captain_Slarty]

as said above.. forget it...
the hard drive is one of the least important systems in any PC. !!! virtually ANY will do and give equal assumed performance....

it is only closely followed by Case, PSU (Providing its recent ! ;-), keyboard, mouse, floppy, cd and dvd as the items you spend the least on cos they make jack all difference to most people in normal useage...

Joe :-)

http://homepage.ntlworld.com/captainslarty/Images/coolskul.gif

"Are you jealous that the voices are talking to ME ?"

[MadMaster]

As Joe and everybody said it is not worth it to upgrade your HD. You will see near no performance difference.

If you insist it would be better to set up a raid. What it does it takes blocks off files and transfers it onto 2 HD so your getting about twice the HD transfre speed and you are useing 2 HDs. You would have to buy one about the equal size as your current one and redo everything. Also if you don't have an onboard raid (unlikely) then you could buy one that goes through your PCI slot. When you raid it you get the space double your smaller HD.

Setting up a raid will probably cost you $100, (give or take a few based on which HD your going to get) and you will only see a faster boot-up time. Thats all.

Regards,
Paul

[davidsmit]

Sorry, not really about your Harddrive, but Biff wrote:

>CPU,
>videocard and RAM are the
>key factors in FS performance.
>

How will my 1.4GHz AMD, 256MB DDR and GeForce 2 MX440 run FS2004? Think the GeForce 2 will slow it down the most... And to what card should I upgrade? Don't like to spend a lot of money... Thanks in advance,

D@vid

[The_Association]

Stick with whatever you've got unless you're running low on free space (less than 20% remaining). I run two, 5400 RPM Maxtor drives (one 8 GB and one 11 GB) that haven't given me or my dad a lick of trouble in the 4 years that we've had them. My FS2002 and CFS3 performance is great and I have no problems with seek times or anything. They are a couple of microseconds slow on spooling up after the system's been idle for awhile, but nothing annoyingly long.

Tim Kotula
KDTW/KPTK/KPLN

**New System Specs Coming Soon**

Proud to be 100% modern music free since 1994

[srs148]

Your two downfalls are the lack of RAM (should have AT LEAST 512, if not 1GB for best performance given your chip) and the video card...you should have a better card, but if you turn down the bells & whistles, you should be ok.

>How will my 1.4GHz AMD, 256MB
>DDR and GeForce 2 MX440
>run FS2004? Think the GeForce
>2 will slow it down
>the most... And to what
>card should I upgrade? Don't
>like to spend a lot
>of money... Thanks in advance,
>
>
>D@vid