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Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

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Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

Postby obw298 » Wed May 16, 2018 12:39 pm

I had FlightGear running on my MacBook (2015, 13") and it worked well. But now I want to save disk space on my computer, so I want to install it on an external hard drive. I found this one: https://amzn.to/2rKDgYN . My computer has USB 3.0. Can FlightGear be installed on that hard drive AND: will it work as well as on the internal SSD of the MacBook (or maybe even better)?
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Re: Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

Postby legoboyvdlp » Wed May 16, 2018 1:07 pm

FlightGear takes 3-4 minutes to load on an internal HDD and an external drive would take longer. A SSD is better used for games or simulators, it speeds up the loading a lot :)
Furthermore, FlightGear is only about 3-4GB, not an awful lot. ;)
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Re: Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

Postby obw298 » Wed May 16, 2018 1:19 pm

"FlightGear takes 3-4 minutes to load on an internal HDD"
On my computer, it did not take more than 30 seconds
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Re: Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

Postby wkitty42 » Wed May 16, 2018 3:56 pm

because of your SSD... there's a lot of data that is read to get all the scenery loaded... SSD are the fastest option, AFAIK... maybe an external SSD would work??
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"Dunno. It's frightened of heights, I guess."
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Re: Can FG be installed on an external hard drive?

Postby Thorsten » Wed May 16, 2018 6:05 pm

On my computer, it did not take more than 30 seconds


Hm, it depends a lot on aircraft (the Shuttle always takes a bit to load), but for a 'normal' craft under normal conditions, I have FG up and running within 15 seconds from a normal HDD (otherwise developing would be pretty painful...)

The SSD I have on my other machine is theoretically much faster but the startup time is the same - it seems in both cases the holdup is not disk I/O but things like file parsing and creating data structures in response.

Translation: On none of my systems under none of my OS I've seen a clear benefit of an SSD over a standard drive. I know others have, but for me it's always been that fast.
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