FS2004 and external hard drives

[ThinkingManNeil]

I've got a year-old Dell Studio XPS 9000 running 64-bit Windows 7 with two hard drives -- one a primary 500GB drive and a secondary 1TB drive that I ordered specifically dedicated to flight sims -- and it's run fairly satisfactorily so far. There have been a couple of glitches with FS2004, namely rotating beacon, strobes, and nav lights don't appear on almost all my aircraft, there's no solar disk in my sky (the glare is there but no sun itself), the instrument panel in my default J-3 cub has vanished, and instead of shoreline waves I get moving white squares, and I've not been able to resolve the issues but those are mostly minor annoyances - so far.

But I want to expand things. Perhaps add FSX as there are some aircraft and scenery I want that are only available in FSX (eg., Rob Richardson's DH 103 Hornet fighter, FSD International's Cirrus SF250 CirrusJet and the scenery for Mountain Air Resort in North Carolina). I also want to add IL-2 Sturmovik: 1946 -- if I can ever find a copy -- and IL-2 Sturmovik: Cliffs of Dover once they get the bugs worked out of it. I'm also thinking of doing a clean re-install of FS9 at some point and am always concerned about back-up issues. So I'm thinking of adding a 2TB Iomega external hard drive (or other brand if need be) but what I'd like to hear from those in the know is if I run FS9 off of an external drive what kind of issues may crop up? Will performance or response times be degraded?

Thanks in advance,

N.

 

[alastairmonk]

Hi Neil,

For a long time I ran FS2004 from an external USB2 drive until a sudden power cut "fried" the external drive interface software. Extracting the drive from the housing and adding it as another internal drive didn't seem to improve the performance, so I assumed that running it as an external drive hadn't caused any performance loss.

One possible problem I can see with your proposals is possible fragmentation issues from running at least three different packages from the same drive. Make sure that you keep it defragmented for optimum performance, and you might be better off partitioning the 2Tb drive into three partitions each dedicated to the specific sim.

Alastair

 

[DennyBoy]

Flightsim on external HD

Hi!

I have for several years now, all my flightsim on a external HD. So far without

problems.

On the primary HD I have only OP releated programs. My flightsim I have on a 1TB

Lacie usb2. and all my downloaded addon on a other extern 250GB Lacie HD.

After I have install new addons, I´m allways defrag the HD. Use "Auslogis Disk Defrag",

it is more faster than the windows defrag program.

I running Windows XP home edition 32-bit.

On the 1TB HD I have installed FS9 / FSGW3, IL.2 1946 V4.101 and RoF.

Best Regard

DennyBoy