yes or no?

[happytraveller]

Shortly to upgrade by adding a 500GB (!!) external hard drive, but I am wondering if the USB 2.0 connection will form a bottleneck. Although the drive has the same speeds as the laptop hard drive, I wonder if it will be limited by the USB connection. I would like to transfer all the FS9 files to the external drive, but not if it will result in slower performance.

Anybody know if it should work as fast as the internal drives?

Makes me feel old when I can remember the ZX81 computer which I think had 16k of memory, and me about to buy a 500GB drive!!!

smooth landings!!

[G-HEVN]

Somewhere in the attic I have a 100kb 8" floppy drive... I might just get a single scaled down screenshot on one diskette...

Don't know the answer to your question - I'd like to know the answer too!

Tim

[ZK-LGD]

Howdy,

Have FS9.1 (and 10Gb+ scenery) on a USB 2.0 160Gb Seagate external HD (7500rpm). Works a treat. Only thing to remember with Seagate is to reformat the drive from FAT32 to NTFS.

Hope this is of some small assistance.

[HardCorePawn]

4. How fast is USB 2.0?
USB 2.0 has a raw data rate at 480Mbps, and it is rated 40 times faster than its predecessor interface, USB 1.1, which tops at 12Mbps. Originally, USB 2.0 was intended to go only as fast as 240Mbps, but in October 1999, USB 2.0 Promoter Group pumped up the speed to 480Mbps.

As far as we know, effective rate reaches at 40MBps or 320Mbps for bulk transfer on a USB 2.0 hard drive with no one else is sharing the bus. Flash Drives seem to be catching up too with the some hitting 30MB/s milestone. For all we know, manufacturers may claim USB interface becoming the performance bottleneck for flash drives as early as 2007.

Additional notes from Alex Esquenet - our engineer friend based in Belgium: "A fast usb host can achieve 40 MBytes/sec. The theorical 60 MB/sec cannot be achieved, because of the margin taken between the sof's (125 us), so if a packet cannot take place before the sof, the packet will be rescheduled after the next sof. On top of that, all the USB transactions are handled by software on the PC. For instance, a USB host on a PCI bus will send or receive the data via the PCI bus; the stack will prepare the next data in memory and receive interrupt from the host."

Code: Select all

BusType:       Speed (Mbit/s)
eSATA:          2400
SATA 300:       2400
SATA 150:       1200  
PATA 133:       1064
FireWire 800:   786
FireWire 400:   393
USB 2.0:        480 (burst)
Ultra-320 SCSI: 2560           


So it has about 1/2 the transfer speed (in burst mode) as an ATA 133 drive (think 250gig 7200RPM IDE drive)... The top quote claims a sustained transfer rate of around 320Mbits, so about 1/3 the data transfer speed...

As for the actual impact on your system... well there are other variables like CPU, RAM, GPU etc...

Makes me feel old when I can remember the ZX81 computer which I think had 16k of memory

And I am fairly sure the ZX81 had 1K of RAM! You had to buy a RAM pack that plugged into the back to give it more...

[ranm]

USB2 is still half the speed of SATA150. It has a burst rate of 480Mb per second, while SATA150 can sustain up to 1.5Gb per second. So yes, you will find that for FlightSim, USB2 will slow you down. You may experience stutter, pauses etc...

Ran