Classic British Flight Sim

Hi All

I know it's basically down to pure luck and how much the drive gets hammered..... but, is there anything to say it's better to go for a middling capacity HDD (30-500gig) over a Terrabyte drive?

I was set on a system a few days ago then saw a similar rig up, but with a large HDD and lousy graphics card..... but the saving means I can take a little time and invest in a seperate card for this machine (which has enough processor and RAM to run FS at medium settings decently even with a pathetic card) - so the second machine will now not specifically be for FS, but for data and photos etc.....

Anyway... any advice?

Typically folk replace machines (or upgrade them) every 3 or 4 years. so are you going to fill 1TB in 3 or 4 years? Personally I'd go for two smaller drives over one larger one... having all your eggs in one basket etc and remember that you need to be able to backup whatever drive you buy, so if you do need a 1TB drive, then you'll need something to back it up to. One of the good benchmarks to look at on drives is seek time. If the machine is to be fairly heavily used for Disk I/O then a lower seek time is preferable. Many large capacity disks have min seek times of 10 or 11 ms which is quite high. The best performing sata drives at the moment are the Western Digital Velociraptors, but their max capacity is 300GB. Enough for me though

HI Ben

Well, at the mo, I'm going for a compromise. I have a WD 320gig on this machine, and two Samsung 160 gig Satas for backup. The new machine will be slightly faster than this processor wise, and double the RAM. I intend to copy all my non-gaming files from all drives to the new machine for sorting out and filterng, and photo editing. I'll need around 600 gig space for that. Once it's all trimmed, it will be a LOT less, so I will have lots of spare spce... but it won't be exclusively holding anything not backed up elsewhere.

My priority is to get all my junk sorted, and then I can take my time in choosing an upgrade path for Flightsim (Which is the only gaming software I use).

My thinking is to cover base in both machines and when I am happy with 'stage one' I can then decide what machine is best to upgrade.

Although seek times are not at the top of my list (as the new machine is basically for files), I decided against a lower spec processor and RAM so that if needs be, I can install a new HDD and Graphics into the new machine at a later date, and have as much power as I can for the price, rather than lock myself into a completely new machine on the basis that it would be crazy to upgrade a slower processor, and at the same time, leave an option to upgrade this machine also.

Of course, I'd prefer to go and spend a wad on an all-singing spec for FS.... but as dosh is the issue, I 'think' this is a more logical approach! :roll:

Agree mate... definately cheaper to upgrade a Graphics card and Hard disk than processor.