Performance of Flight Sim on an external hard drive?

[noodldoodl 0]

Hi everyone.What sort of performance am I likely to get by installing FSX on an external drive?I'm simply talking either a 500 or 750 gig drive, formatted to NTSC and connected via USB 2Is this a waste of time? Will I simply not get the transfer speeds required to run the sim efficiently and with decent FPS?If, in theory, it's a goer, what sort of partitioning should I go for?I've already filled all internal drive bays, hence the desire to stick an external drive on and reinstall onto that drive, just in case you were wondering why I want to take this route.Thanks for any help on this matter.noodldoodl

[Guest cbuchner1]

I assume you mean NTFS.NTSC is for watching television.NTFS is for watching smut pictures. Just kidding. NTFS is the file system - whereas NTSC is the television norm.Performance generally is good, if you have a fast connection to the drive, like E-SATA, USB 2.0 or FireWire 800.Christian

[noodldoodl 0]

Ha ha, I meant that, (NTFS) thanks Christian. Ironically I'm not in the USA, where NTSC is defacto.That's good to know, that it will work. I don't expect 30 FPS + because I only have a low to mid range system anyway, but if it wouldn't even begin to perform, regardless of anything else, then I wouldn't have considered it.Would you have any thought to the size(s) of partition(s) on the drive?best regards

[ctiger 49]

I have not noticed any performance problems with FS9 and FSX running on Maxtor 300Gig, 16MB cache, 7200rpm/USB 2.0. Hope this helps,Regards,Carl

[Guest ziporama]

Just a word of caution with Vista if you want to use external hard disks - I'd wait until SP1 as some systems have issues with the drive going to sleep and not coming back online without cycling power to the drive. Don't know if it's all chipsets. There are no issues with XP. Vista SP1 addresses the issue from what I got from forums and the public release candidate is available from MSDN.Etienne