Can i use an external Hard drive

[mike H 456]

My trusty old PC with Win XP looks like it's finally giving up,so I have installed FSX + some addons onto my Win7 laptop, but with only a 250Gb HD I am fast running out of space.

 

 Q. I would like to use my 500GB  external drive if possible to install more addons ,but do not know how to do this also how to go about connecting it with FSX on the laptop or if it is even possible to do this.

 

Any help please would be great so I can keep  flying with my Fav. aircraft + Orbx / Rex. while I start saving up the pennies  for a new PC.

 

Regards Mike

 

 

[britfrog 180]

presumably your drive has a usb connection? simply connect it to the laptop so that it recognises the drive and then create a directory where you will install the scenery. then all you have to do is go into fsx under the scenery installed  and tell it the location of the scenery that you wish it to recognise

[allardjd 1,853]

USB connected drives can be pretty slow, due to the speed of the USB connection.  I think you'll find load times and updates pretty unacceptable for a USB 2.0 setup. USB 3.0 drives are about 10X faster (still much slower than an internal drive with SATA connection) but must be connected with a USB 3.0 cable to a 3.0 port on the computer to achieve those speeds.  If the drive, the cable or the PC port are 2.0, you only get 2.0 throughput.  

 

3.0 cables and ports can be identified by the color of the plastic "blade" within the connector.  If it's blue, it's 3.0.  If it's white, it's 2.0.

 

John

[dogtrack 346]

Have tried this myself some time ago with both USB3 and e-Sata connections (USB3 is slightly faster, not that the eye can detect the difference).  Neither option proved to be worth doing...slow tile loading and blurred textures being the main bug bare. Also tried running FSX program on PC but using the external device for scenery. Again a poor outcome.

 

You could of course try buying a larger internal Disc for your laptop, clone the original and then swap them out. If you shop around, 2.5" 7200 rpm drives are not expensive.

[flybytes 34]

Heartly agrree with Arnold,

 

Most laptop computers have separate compartments for accessing the disc drive or memory, so you you do not have to completely dismantle them and upgrading your internal drive with cloning software can be so easy.

 

Just make sure that the 2.5" standard drive you purchase is not too thick to fit in your laptop. Odd that we have a standard dimension of 2.5" for the hard drive platter diameter, yet the standard for hard drive thickness is normally measured in metric millimetres.

 

To go off at a slight tangent, no wonder that a NASA Mars probe crashed landed when  Imperial measurements were confused with metric & if my memory is working, wasn't it a Canadian aircraft flight crew who confused litres with gallons or was it pounds (weight) & almost ran out of fuel?

 

Ray.

 

[mike H 456]

Thanks  alot guys for your help and advice. I think I will leave well alone adding my external drive in the view of what you have said.  I really do not want to spend any money on upgrading my laptop, so will put that extra cash towards my new PC.

 

Thanks

Regards mike

[Tim_A 997]

The best external interface is eSATA, since this is a direct bus connection using the drive's native interface - no bottlenecks; it will run at the same speed as an internal drive, (if you look at the eSATA on a desktop PC, you'll see that it's literally just a cable from the internal drive connector)

 

Next best thing is USB3. It's a little bit slower but still acceptably quick for FSX. I run FSX from a USB3 drive, and you really wouldn't know it's an external. No stutters, no blurries.... But you must have a USB3 drive, a USB3 cable (has the extra section on the top of the connector) AND your PC must also be USB3. If any of those are USB2, it'll switch down and it'll be like watching a dog swimming through treacle with its legs tied together.

 

Beware of cheap external drives though - they often have really slow drive mechanisms, which will degrade your performance. That's because they're primarily intended for archive, where performance isn't an issue. Better to spend the money on a decent drive (you can buy drive and housing separately if you wish - it's just a matter of 4 screws)

[IZ0JUB 162]

Hi,

 

For what its worth I run an old XP machine and use an external USB 2 hard drive which has FSX and my home made scenery stored on it. My PC with FSX runs perfectly OK and has done for the last 12 months. In fact I would go as far to say its running better now than when FSX was installed on the internal hard "C" drive.

 

Cheers, Michael.