I am currently doing a complete uninstall of box FSX in preparation to purchase FSX Steam. I have an external SSD which I used for my photo scenery. I have read the sim would run better on it's own drive but I wondered if that would hold true for an external drive or should I install it back on my C drive and continue to use the SSD for scenery storage? My computer is kind of old and I don't want to invest in another internal drive in case I need a new rig  down the road. Thanks in advance for any advice.

hi! typically an internal sata connection is going to have a lot more bandwidth than an external usb interface. for that reason alone i would be suspicious of putting anything that is performance-critical on an external drive. if your connection is firewire or eSata it may not matter so much.

 

for a quick comparision my external hdd maxes out at around 30Mb/s sequential reads where my internal hdd gets 187Mb/s  . (my internal ssd takes the crown with 230Mb/s).

 

the fact that it is an ssd may provide a boost, IF you have a very fast usb3 interface and/or your internal drive is pretty old. you might want to try a freeware tester like crystaldiskmark and compare the numbers you get yourself. if they are similar it might be worth trying.

 

i think the main reasons people suggest keeping fsx on a separate drive are that 1. it won't be competing against the OS use of the main drive as they can seek randomly without interfering and 2. convenience and faster defrags etc. i'd bet that if you actually benchmark performance between those the differences it's actually pretty small, since seek and read times on modern hdds are really fast anyway and most people have enough RAM that worrying about hitting the paging file for virtual memory is a moot point (being memory starved to that point will cause huge fsx stutters even if the install is on a separate drive anyway). unfortunately there's no easy way to do a provably comparable benchmark between different fsx installs.

 

also keep in mind that if you do get another internal drive, there's no reason why you couldn't use it in a new rig down the road anyway.

 

cheers

-andy crosby

Thank you so much for the advice Andy. I think I'll just reinstall on the C drive.