Just wondering if anyone ever tried installing FS onto an external hard drive.If anyone has could they shed some light on any issues they may have encountered...like response times, heat generated by the external hard drive, any difficulties etc etc.Thanks, I'm fresh out of space on my 60GB drive and all i have on it is FS and i can't squeeze any space out of itthanks,alan

I made that move about eight months ago, and have had no problems what so ever. I have now installed FSX on the same external drive, and have not had any problems there as well. Go ahead, I think you will be pleased with the results... Ron

Hi Alan,I have two exteranl HDs. 80gig, 7200rpm,2mb buffer, and a new Maxtor 300gig, 7200rpm, 16mb cache. Both use USB 2.0. At least IMO there was no noticalbe change beetween them and internal 80gig SATA HD. I purchased the smaller one a year ago to use as a backup but when I installed FSX and FS9 on the internal drive I had only about 1 gig space remainiing. I first reinstalled only the FS9 scenery to the 80gig. I did not notice any change in fps.On occassion there might have been a very slight delay in texture display but still acceptable. When I purchased FSX I bought the new Maxtor mainly for the FSX. I see no difference with FSX when compared to the internal. I am using the external also to reduce the demand of my existing 300Watt PS. If I installed another internal HD I was afraid of taxing my PS. As far as heat, the Maxtor is a plastic case and the 80gig is metal. Would prefer metal but I only turn on the Maxtor when I plan on using FSX, which I might add is very seldom so I am not concerned about the heat. I am satisfied with using these externals with FS9 or FSX. Hope this helps,Carl Dell E510, P4-3.4Ghz, 2gig ram, 7600GS.

Thanks for the replies folks, this really helps, I think i'll make the change over to the external one tomorrow!I have a 60GB on my machine and it's full but I have a 160GB and a 500GB external which have plenty of room to spare....maybe now I can afford to buy some FSGenesis stuff too now that I will have the hard drive capacity!thanks again, really appreciate italan

Would the following situation work---FS9 on the internal drive and megasceneries on the external drive? My internal hd is a 80 gig unit with not a lot of space left.Thanks, Dave

G'day Alan,I've run FS9 on external hard drives for about 2 years now. It's been great. The first that I used was a USB 2.0 Maxtor Series 1 250gb model, which ran very well although there was a slight drop in FPS. That's been fixed now with the new Maxtor drives - I've just bought a new Maxtor Series 3 300gb External HDD - even better with no noticeable changes in FPS than stored on a normal computer drive.I'd recommend an External HDD immediately - especially the new Maxtor Series III (3) drives. They're wonderful.Hope this helps!TomBy The Way: First Post!

Runs fine of my 4 gig usb flash drive. http://www.circuitcity.com/ssm/SanDisk-4GB...roductDetail.do

i don't have any of the megasceneries packages but I reckon if they are like any other sceneries they would have to reside inside the FS root folder, otherwise how would it know where to look for them?PS Thanks alot to everyone who has replied to this post! This is really helpful

A couple thoughts here. There aren't a lot of specifics by the posters here on system specs, fps etc. Some simmers find 15fps at 1024x768 "acceptable." Others would consider anything that might cause stutters or pauses when running at 40fps on a 1600x1200 display unacceptable.I use a USB 2.0 external on my laptop...but I use it to store add-ons that are not disk speed critical, like Radar Contact, ActiveSky etc. If your PC is relatively slow, it very well might work just fine, but the lower transfer rates will affect loading of texture files, for example. Of course if you have 2GB of RAM and a 512MB+ video card on your PC you may not be doing much texture loading during a flight anyway. Recommend that you compress the external drive so that you're pushing more effective bandwidth across the relatively narrow USB or FireWire pipe. Also, you don't have to put it all on the external...putting FS itself on the external with your scenery library on the primary HDD might be a decent compromise.But all things said, putting FS on an external is a compromise. I run a 10,000 rpm SATA drive on my primary FS machine, and a fast drive on the local SATA port makes a noticeable difference, at least on a fast PC.The one evolving exception would be the emergence of eSATA external drives, and that may change things, as they can run as fast as an internal port.RegardsBob ScottATP IMEL Gulfstream II-III-IV-VSantiago de Chile

Good point Bob, here is my spec...I think i will move over to the external drive today, I really want to be able to add FSGenesis stuff and Ultimate Terrain to the mix and my internal hard drive is a constraint.Dell Inspiron 9300PM 1.86GHZ 2MB L2 Cache, 533MHz FSB2GB DDR2 533MHz256MB Nvidia GeForce Go 680060GB internal HDD 7200RPM160GB External HDD 7200RPM500GB External HDD 7200RPMCreative Audigy2 ZS PCMCIA Sound CardAltec Lansing FX6021 SpeakersNormally run FS at 1600X1200 in around 15FPS with all sliders maxed out running;RCV4FE & GE ProASV6.5UT @ 100%FS2Crewas well as a few other bits and pieces

Hi,(Most) FS scenery can be installed everywhere, in other folders, disks etc.You can adjust the path during installation of add-on scenery and/or move the scenery manually to another location and adjust/set the path in FS.Most of my FS sceneries run outside the FS folders.

My set up is a hp zd8000 laptop, p4-3.2, 256 meg ati x600, 80 gig 5400 rpm hd. With all the info in this thread ( thanks! ) I think I will get and external hd and move fsgenesis, re-install megasceneries,etc to it.One more question -- what is an eSata hd? First I've heard of it. Thanks. Dave

>i don't have any of the megasceneries packages but I reckon>if they are like any other sceneries they would have to reside>inside the FS root folder, otherwise how would it know where>to look for them?>>PS Thanks alot to everyone who has replied to this post! This>is really helpful>> See my post in the FSG - HD Space " thread here today ( or words to that effct ). Paul

>One more question -- what is an eSata hd? First I've heard of>DaveeSATA is 'external' SATA, so it uses your SATA bus (if you have one) instead of an USB or 1394 interface to connect an externl drive.Originally SATA was only for internal HD use, but a lot of motherboards now also provide an external SATA connection.