External hard drives...

[Otters2000]

I've never ventured into these parts before, but have a quick question to you clever computer types...

I'm planning on investing in some scenery packs for flight sim... 3 of them each taking up over 20GB hard disk space which would take my lil laptop to its limits with everything else on. If I was to buy an external hard drive could I install the scenery to it and run it from there, or is it just for storage of things like music?

Sorry for a possibly obvious question... :p

[green granite]

Yes, no problem, it will be seen as just another storage device. I'm assuming that you can point to the scenery location in the sim program if it is different than the program location. If you cant you may need to re-install the program onto the external drive.

[Jimmy Macintosh]

As GG says you should be able to point the FS to look for the scenery files on the external. But be aware of the transfer rates for the hard drive connection.

At the bottom of this page it shows transfer rates:

Serial ATA - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA)

It could slow the sim down a lot if the connection is slow.

[Saab Dastard]

The transfer rate is a bit if a red herring, frankly, although you are right that the USB interface might not be as fast as the attached disk.

USB 2.0 allows up to 480mbps, and real-world tests suggest that 320Mbps should be possible. That's 40MBps, which is actually higher than the hard disk - IDE Ultra DMA, ATA-33 throughput.

OK, if you have ATA 66 or 100, then the disk will be 2 or 3 times faster than the USB interface it's plugged into (but that is not an order of magnitude different - unlike the difference between RAM and disk transfer speeds).

Even then, the scenery files will only need to be loaded from disk into memory once (and you won't be loading all 20GB at once!).

If there is insufficient physical RAM, then the paging file will be used - and that's on the existing hard disk.

So all in all, there's a negligible effect of using an external disk.

Of course, if the lappie only has USB 1, then that's a completely different story! 12mbps :yuk:

SD

[Otters2000]

Thanks for the answers so far nice people...

If I was to install the game to the external hard drive would that solve any of those issues?? Also how do I find out if they're USB 2 or 1??

[Wing Commander Fowler]

I think I'm correct in saying that if the program requires you to point to the location of the scenery files at install then you need to be certain that the drive path remains the same. If you have other removable media then depending upon the configuration at the time the "D" drive may become the "E" drive........ I stand to be corrected on that though! :confused:

Edit to say - I just thought if your D drive now contained the memory stick that you have all your porn stored on then you may prefer the look of those pink valleys hehe! :}

[Saab Dastard]

If you plug a USB 2 device into a USB 1 port, Windows will kindly tell you that "This device could perform faster if plugged into a USB 2 port" or some such message.

That will confirm a USB 1 port!

You can also check Device Manager - expand USB Controllers, and if you have an ENHANCED USB Host Controller, the system has High Speed USB (USB 2.0) capability.

To get around the problem that WingCoFo quite rightly brings up, you can actually mount the USB disk as a folder on your existing hard disk. This will fix that disk into that folder, so getting around the drive letter problem.

Here's (http://www.pcstats.com/articleview.cfm?articleid=1676&page=9) an article that explains in detail how to do it. It isn't difficult, just longer than I care to spend right now!

The only points to note are that your existing disk must be formatted with NTFS, and you can only mount the disk into an empty folder - say C : \ External Disk 1, for example.

Then Windows treats the external disk (when present) as if it is part of your C drive. When the drive is unplugged, the folder will still appear as normal, but will be inaccessible.

Mounting the disk in this way doesn't affect the way data is stored on the new disk - so if you plugged it into another PC you could see it normally as a drive letter (or indeed you could mount it as a folder on that PC also).

Neat.

SD

[jimtherev]

"Neat.

SD "

... and elegant!

You couldn't do that with Windows 3.1! :)

[P.Pilcher]

Eh? And before that you would get your operating system on the first track or two of a floppy, with your wordprocessor, spreadsheet or database program(me) on the same disk. This also happened with games, but the publishers often used to bugger up the operating system to try and prevent illegal copies being made.
Happy Daze............................

P.P.