to add an external hard drive or not... that is the question

[05pricej]

Like the title says. I was just wondering if there is an advantage to installing fsx on an external hard drive instead of installing on the operating system hard drive. Im not going to get a second internal hard drive so these are the two options that are open to me.

Any feedback would be appreciated

[Tako_Kichi]

You might stand a chance IF it is a SATA external drive. Other than that all bets are off. I have heard of people trying it with USB and Firewire external drives but never saw a truly successful outcome to date.

If you can't add a second internal drive can you partition the main drive and put FSX on there. That's what I do and I have had no problems at all. My FSX resides on a partition kept solely for games, OS and 'nomal' apps live on the primary partition and then I have a partition for music and yet another for all 'general' files and data files used by the various apps (I never store files I have created in apps on the C: partition in case it goes belly up and that fact has saved my butt a number of times when I've had a C: partition crash).

[SkippyBing]

Although putting FSX on a separate partition will protect you in the case of needing to reformat the boot partition etc. it won't improve performance over having the internal drive as one big partition.
Adding a second internal hard drive is ridiculously easy, and cheaper than an external drive, and I'd really recommend going that route.

[emfrat]

External drives are meant for long-term bulk storage, out-of-hours backups, and the like. Transfer rates are very slow, because rapid access doesn't matter much in those contexts.
I would forget disk drives altogether. Save your pennies and go for a solid state drive - I see these are now up to 32GB, but so are the prices :-(
See what they can do here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/con ... ,1324.html

ATB
MikeW

[Sl4yer]

You might stand a chance IF it is a SATA external drive. Other than that all bets are off. I have heard of people trying it with USB and Firewire external drives but never saw a truly successful outcome to date.

What he said!

A Firewire or USB drive will be slow beyond belief.

James

[Quixoticish]

External drives are meant for long-term bulk storage, out-of-hours backups, and the like. Transfer rates are very slow, because rapid access doesn't matter much in those contexts.
I would forget disk drives altogether. Save your pennies and go for a solid state drive - I see these are now up to 32GB, but so are the prices :-(
See what they can do here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/con ... ,1324.html

ATB
MikeW

I'd hang fire on sold state drives for the time being. There are quite a few bugs that need working out of the system before they replace conventional drives. While they might boast instant seek times you'd be amazed at how slow continuous file transfer can be, certainly no quicker than a conventional drive. There is also the rather important issue of SSD degradation that isn't often mentioned, and while they may be advertised as being good for something like 50G/B a day for 50 years before kicking the bucket they will start to slow down alarmingly quickly, some people have reported a 50% speed decrease after 6 months of regular use. There are also issues with re-writing to the same location multiple times on SSD drives that need working out at the moment. And from my understanding there are also issues with the way information is written to SSD's, they write firstly where files have never been written before and then on the oldest available free area. This is a measure taken to increase the life expectancy of the drive but it will also result in badly defragmented drives most of the time, which you wouldn't think is an issue with solid state until you try one and realise that file transfer isn't really instantaneous. Also bear in mind that they are incredibly vulnerable to total corruption in the event of a power cut.

There will be new SSD technologies just around the corner that will be rolled out over the next few years, but the current generation of solid state drives aren't up to the task of replacing mechanical drives just yet in my opinion.

[TSR2]

SSD will be ideal for headless servers, but as Chris states, none of the major manufacturers are using them yet... though no doubt it will come. When its good enough for server class systems, then is the time to by SSD's ;-)

[Quixoticish]

It's most definitely the future, but it really needs another 12-24 months in the oven.

[nigelb]

Chris,

Thanks for that information on SSD drives. I had not even thought of those issues so that post was very helpfull.

Nigel²

[emfrat]

It's most definitely the future, but it really needs another 12-24 months in the oven.

Sounds like FSX, or Vista, or DX10..... :-( :roll:

MikeW