I'm sure the answer is obvious but I'd like to hear it from you pros for reassurance.I have a Maxtor 250Gb external one-button hard drive on order. Quite a leap from the 20G that came with my Dell.Is it feasible that I move all my FlightSim software over to it freeing my C drive for actual business, personal and data work.My intent is to uninstall from the C drive and reinstall FS2004 to the external drive along of course with all the components, add-ons, etc.This way the program will be run only from the Maxtor. Does that make sense and are there any contraindications to doing that?I'm not looking to spark a debate on one maker's hard drive vs another. Just to address the basic issue.It will be connected via a USB 2.0.Thanks.Louis***************************************Spirit Tracker - featuring Louis Eagle Warrior performing the haunting music of the Native American Flute. http://www.nativeamericansmusic.com

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"USB harddrives eats a lot of CPU cycles too from what I have heard."Agreed. USB hard drives aren't the best choices for gaming. The USB 2.0 versions are fine with regard to throughput, but the access times (read and write) are much slower than the average IDE drive.Most of all though, I would be concerned about Oqvist's point... all USB devices use alot of resources. And I want eveything available for gaming when I'm in game.Greg

your dell should have room for a second internal drive (unless it's a laptop). Buy an internal drive an install it yourself. They come with installation instructions, and they're easy to install. Much better performance and they're cheaper than external drives. Get an SATA. You can get 160GB's for around $100...

actually your mobo prolly doesnt support SATA, so you're stuck with IDE

IDE or SATA don

Does it matter whether the internal hard drive is IDE or EDE? All I see listed from Dell are either SCSI or EDE.Louis

I cancelled the external hard drive. So, would I be okay with aninternal drive with some of the following characteristics -Has an Ultra ATA/133 interface, it delivers a high data transfer rate of up to 59 MBps. Featuring a rotational speed of 7200 rpm and an average seek time of less than 9 ms. Thanks.Louis

Yup sounds good. But would help what brand and model it is. WD 800 JB SE harddrives is killers really. Western Digital sell these hard drives so low no competitors can really match them. I would recommend you getting one of those.

What about Maxtor?

maxtor is popular too

A bit slower but it

Hi guysDon't forget Hitachi (ex-IBM), slightly deerer, but worth every penny. Just to give you an idea, avge seek time on the WD80GB-8MB=11.2ms, avge on the 80GB Hitachi (2MB) is 10ms. IMHO, a IDE Hitachi 120GB-8MB currently is the best deal. Avge seek-time: 9.5ms! Good luck and kind regards Jaap PS: If you have serial-ATA and you can't care less about noise, get a WD-Raptor.

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