I have FS9 installed on a WD 80 gig HD installed in an external case plugged into a high speed USB Port. And, it runs better than it does on the internal WD 40 gig on the IDE. Don't know why, but I'm not asking either -just a happy simmer.Anyone else doing this?

Doesn't make sense to me. I once was going to try my DVD but didn't.John

hmmm- yeah, I don't know how- Even a highspeed USB 2.0 port is substantially slower than an ATA 100 bus. ATA 100 has a theoretical throughput of 100MBs, while USB 2.0 is theoretically 480Mbps, and realistically, if you are using a hub and more than 1 device it will be less than half.How much RAM do you have? The Swap File could be hampering your hard drive. MS recommends to keep it off of your system drive, but that's not always possible. My SATA RAID 0 drives, scream, but I still find load times for something like Megascenery are pretty long. You could try getting a real defragger, like Raxco Perfect Disk, and see if that helps things. After a defrag, my PC boots to desktop in about 10 seconds, sometimes just as the monitor is warming up.Anyway- Your not looking for help since it's working good, but I have a habit of trying to help even when it's not needed :) That's just my nature.

I would never have guessed it would even perform at all let alone as fast as it is. I originally loaded FS9 on this drive as a backup only and I was curious what would happen if I tried to actually run the sim from this drive. I was amazed! I have one gig of ram (PC2100), AMD XP2000 cpu, ASUS A7N8X mobo. This is certainly a medium performance system.I also have the following devices on USB all plugged in at the same time: MS Optical Trackball, HP Printer and a Kodak camera. My FPS flying the RealAir SF260 is set at unlimited and runs at 34 to 76 in the air and 18 to 24 landing. The performance is comparable to the other installation on the slave drive, better in fact- smoother - because I don't have as many addons on the USB drive probably. The above FPS is with "normal" autogen and Scenery complexityLow setting for VC, reflections on.High quality terrain, medium terrain and water, no water effects1/8 cloud cumulus. Go figure!