Hi allThis may be a real stupid question, but I'm wondering whether an external USB harddrive will give me sufficiently high data rates to be able to use it to run FS9 from?I've got physical and financial limitations which make any form of internal drive non-viable and I'm looking at options for improving my storage space for FS9 sceneries etc.All help/advice appreciated.CaffeineBomb

Hello,I my opinion the USB speed is a lot lower than a "standard" HDD connection.May be a "Fire wire" connection is OK?An internal HDD is not that expensive and faster.I have 2 internal HDD (40 & 60 GB) and an external 160 GB , this one I use for backup copies.

My firewire is pretty fast. It is using the Prolific PL3507 dual usb/firewire chip. But I don't see how any external is cheaper than an internal. scott s..

I've tried it on a Western Digital 320MB 7200RPM external with USB 2.0 and it worked just fine. No transfer rate issues at all. But I only tried the default installation. I have no idea what would happen with complex add-ons.Doug

Thanks for all the replies.The reason I'm looking for an external drive is because I'm currently running a 3year old Dell laptop with a 28GB harddrive. Upgrading the internal drive is more expensive than an equivalent sized USB drive and leaves me with the pain of having to transfer operating systems and everything else over from one drive to another.Since the system is pretty clunky anyway (Centrino 1.4, 512MB RAM, GeForce Go5200) then hopefully the USB drive won't be too much of a bottleneck. Guess I'll give it a try and see what happens - if nothing else I'll have more storage space!CaffeineBomb

Hi,I use an external drive only for backups. I asked techs at the manufactures help site and they said the external drives are best suited for use as a backup rather than a routine drive which is used all the time. I unplug mine from the computer and the wall outlet when not in use and I back up FS9 files about once a week.Hope this helps,

Hello,You do not need to replace the 28 Gb HD, just add an other "slave" onto your PC, move some file from the "old" HDD one to the new HDD one and all is done.....Afterwards you can still move out the 2 HDDs and install them into an other machine.

I'm not sure most laptops support 2d internal? But I found that firewire is much faster for my WD 3200 sd16. Don't know the impact on FS9 though.scott s..

Scott is right, the laptop won't support a slave drive in the same way that a desktop will. I believe it would be possible to replace the CD/DVD drive module with a 2nd harddrive (if I could find a compatible one), but that still doesn't allow me to run FS9 without some serious hacking around.It definitely sounds like USB2/Firewire is a possibility though.