I posted this yesterday and it got little notice so I thought I would retry. I have a WD 80 gig HD with 3 partitions installed in an external High Speed USP case. FS9 installed on a partition all by itself. The results have been absolutley amazing for me.My System: ASUS A7N8X mobo Nvidia nForce2 Ultra 400AMD Athlon XP 2000 CPU1 gig PC2100 RamChaintech Nvidia GeForce FX5700LE 256 meg 400 watt pwr supplyI have optical mouse, printer, camera docking station on USB while running FS9RESULTS:Sliders: reflections on, high res VC, High res terrain, med land and water, 1/8 clouds (stratus), FPS unlimited, autogen and scenery complexity set at Normal, Air Traffic at 68 percentLAX in Wings of Power B-17 in VC on the ground = 25 fpsTakeoff 20 - 28 fps1000 ft 28 - 43 fpsNo stutters even in turnsSame situation from my internal HD:LAX on the ground = 11 fpsTakeoff = jerky 5 to 12 fps1000 ft = 14 to 18 fpsFor anyone with a mediocre system like mine that has high speed USB, this may be something to think about.This installation was just supposed to be a backup of FS9. I only tried running it out of curiosity and was floored! If it's a fluke, I'll keep it! Just completed a flight from LAX to Lindberg in San Diego. No faulters, not a stutter, and constant "in the air FPS between 37 and 43 FPS. I will be receiving an Athlon XP 2800 (Barton) this week which I really do not need now! But, what the heck!

Very fascinating, but it seems suspect. They say CPU utilization is pretty low, even for sustained transfers. I wonder if your findings aren't a red herring. I hope not, but I fear so!Noel

Now that you can also buy Jump Drives/USB Flash Drives up to 4GB, why not eliminate the disk access times altogether and go straight ram? The disk drives are the slowest of all the components. Would this not work?

If you have a spare HD and a USB case for it laying around try it! Red Herring??? It works on my system - why? Beats me! Didn't think it would, but I'm flying. Suspect? Suspect what? It's working. I'm only passing this on for those poor blokes like myself that can't afford a state of the art system. I cost me less than $24 for the external case and a hardrive I needed anyway. I think it is worthy of investigation by someone more knowledgeable than myself. I can build 'em and run 'em but have idea what makes them tick - kinda like an airplane, I flew 'em for a while, but I'm no mechanic.

Sounds good to me! (But what do I know!) Can you actually load a program on one of those? I have a 256 MB USB disk for file transfers, never thought about using something like that for an application. HMMM!Anyway, I do hope someone else will try this (if they happen to have the external case and a hardrive laying around. Sure wouldn't want someone to go out and buy the indgredients just cause it works for me.The one thing I noticed is that it takes a long time to perform some menue items, like changing weather or airports. Much longer than it takes on the other internal drive, but I'll trade that for the overall performance improvement.

Perhaps under these circumstances, the sim is caching all the textures, terrain, AI, etc into memory as it loads up your flight? You have plenty of system ram, and video card ram; how is the system caching option set in Windows? Is it set to programs or system-cache? That may all be relavent to what you're experiencing.Sounds good though, if the higher performance is related to the external drive!

I have the virtual memory set at min and max 1024, program controlled. Virtual memory is set up on my "D" drive.Just spent another hour and 15 minutes putts'in around Portland, OR and no problems. If I increase the cloud coverage (default clouds) and cumulus, it still bogs down, as it does on the internal drive, but not as much. My mobo will take up to PC3200 ram so I'm saving up!

the access time for files on flashdrives is a lot longer than for harddisks, which is why your loading times are so much longer.Yes, you can run programs directly from a flashdrive. I do it regularly with small utilities.

Curious what HDTach has to say about this.You can D/L it here http://www.simplisoftware.com/Public/index...HdTach&ver=2.70 And the testing is quite easy and quick.Greg

Interesting post. I have just acquired a 250GB USB2 HD, which I planned to use for backup, but if it would be an improvement over the rather slow HD in my simming laptop, I might give it a try.What operating system are you using, and did you format as NFTS or FAT32?--Bryn

I have this USB2 shell for any IDE HDD disk to be used as an external drive. The speed is limited by USB2 bandwidth. I haven't try to boot from it yet, has anyone here tried it before? Need to check myself. Is there an option in the modern BIOS to boot from an USB drive?Thanks.

Yes you can boot from a USB device. Like I said in the other post however, USB 2.0 is still only half as fast as an ATA100 drive. USB 2.0 has a theoretical bandwidth of 480 Mbps (Mega BITS per second) which translates to 60 Mega BYTES per second. ATA 100 is 100 MBps (Mega BYTES per second). It would work even better if you put the hard drive in your case, and got rid of the screwball USB case. If you don't have any free IDE spots (you can have only 4) then the USB may work better. Naturally, the best solution is to get a SATA RAID adapter, and put two SATA drives in RAID 0- This is what I have, my PC boots to desktop in seconds, and load times are significantly faster than before. Two 10,000 RPM SATA drives would be even better. Would it be overkill for FS9? Maybe, but it would eliminate any stutters you had for sure, especially if the array was not your system partition.

I don't believe so--from talking with a tech about 3 months ago.Noel

This could work (USB Drive that is).... :-)

Well, after a couple of days and several hours of flight on the USB, I can say that it is a keeper for me. My original FS9 installation is now the backup! Just got my new AMD XP2800 Barton and will install tomorrow. Can hardly wait to fire it up and see what the results are. Someday soon I hope to get PC3200 ram which should really open things up. I'm sure this old PC2100 ram is a bottleneck.