Hi there,

 

I believe my 1TB internal HD just failed yesterday. It's still accessable but I hear a weird clicking sound when booting up FSX and scenery loading has now increased from 30 sec. to 2-3 mins and the sim crashes or gets stuck frequently. I used the MS tools (defrag, disk check) and the error-check took about 6 hours (not sure if that's normal)!!

 

Since I'm hardware challenged, I'd like to go for an external drive. My main concern is, will it diminish the gameplay (fps, fluidity, loading times)? I had FSX setup to Word Not Allowed's brilliant tweaking guide and get pretty much the same smooth results other users get as a result of it.

 

Another question, if an external USB HD is an option, how can I find out if my PC has USB 2.0 or 3.0 (I have a Gigabyte Z68X-UD4-B3 SATA3MB and I'm pretty sure it's 3.0, purchased 8/2011)? I'm running Win7 64 bit.

 

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

Cheers,

Pete

My main concern is, will it diminish the gameplay (fps, fluidity, loading times)? I had FSX setup to Word Not Allowed's brilliant tweaking guide and get pretty much the same smooth results other users get as a result of it.

 

 

I think you have a misunderstanding on what an external drive's functions are.

 

And external harddrive is typically a slower Western Digital Caviar Green drive which will safely store your data on the drive while you spend the time to re-format etc. External drives are not designed to be used as main boot devices. Doing so will likely fry the internal SATA to USB 'converter'.

Since I'm hardware challenged, I'd like to go for an external drive.

 

Hello Peter

Four screws and two cables, challenging ?

Just open the PC up (2 screws), unscrew the drive and remove it (4 screws)

Fit the new drive in place, plug the two cables in and you are done.

Here you go:

Hey Guys,

 

thanks for your words of encouragement. I took the bait and got an internal replacement, and evidently the case I bought last year paid off. Slid it in the bay, connected it and voila!

 

Thanks again, no on to installing GB's of add-ons.....

 

Cheers,

Pete

Hey Guys,

 

thanks for your words of encouragement. I took the bait and got an internal replacement, and evidently the case I bought last year paid off. Slid it in the bay, connected it and voila!

 

Thanks again, no on to installing GB's of add-ons.....

 

Cheers,

Pete

Well done Pete!It's not at all as hard as many people believe to change components inside a computer. You just need to read up a little and a bit of courage.What replacement drive did you go for in the end?

hello

I am really pleased that it worked out well for you.

Lets not hear any more of this hardware challenged stuff, you are well on your way to building your next rig now

Now get yourself a backup so you don't have to do this again! This is where an external drive would come in handy. Use a backup program such as Acronis True Image to create an image backup to which you can safely restore your system should you have a drive failure. Otherwise, simple file backups can be accomplished using the Windows 7 backup or a 3rd party program like Cobian Backup (free). Note: I do not recommend using the Windows 7 image backup utility as it has a bug that forces Windows to check the image every time it boots up, increasing boot times unnecessarily.