Had a little time this weekend to do some PC work. One of the tasks was to replace my almost-full 500 GB SSD with a 1 TB WD Velociraptor HDD (10,000 rpm). Just for the heck of it I decided to plug the Velociraptor into docking station, copy over both FSX and P3D and see how they worked. Amazing. Other than a 40% increase in initial load times there was absolutely no detectable performance difference between the SSD and the external HDD (but the cost difference is huge). The external HDD is mounted into an Anker SATA 3 docking station which, in turn, is plugged into an Anker 13-port SATA 3 USB hub (along with 32 TB of other external drives).

So.....I'm keeping the SSD with only the OS installed and leaving the Velociraptor in the docking station for the sims. Maybe this is old news to many but I've been at this for a long time and I never had a clue that the performance on an external HDD could be that good.

 

Doug
 

Hi I bought Seagate HD external with ITerabits and installed FSX on it plus all info pertaining to FSX. Since I'm new to FSX I am still trying to equate it to FS9 and it works very well.  Robin

Provided it's a high end HDD, with good read speeds, it'll run fine. It's like my phone, it's rooted, and I have a Class 10 Sandisk SD card, I can run mobile games with no issue, but with older ones, even my music would skip. You seem to have a good setup, keep it if it works, just know that external storage isn't as reliable as internal, in most cases.

 

-Alexander