I am very new the S.A.S site. I am very impressed with the modifications to IL-2 1946 that are contained here. I have been successful in getting both Red Core and Blue Edge running. WOW!! I want to thank those responsible for the content because this material has enhanced my enjoyment of the IL-2 flight simulator by multiples.
However, in this post I wanted to share with the community a technical tip that I have found useful but have not found anyone else on this site or Mission 4 Today suggesting it. On the chance that it may not be common knowledge and a few of you may find this helpful I will give it a go.
I have discovered that one can install the base IL-2 1946 game, B.A.T Red Core or Blue Edge on a USB 3.0 SSD thumb drive and directly play it through a 3.0 or 3.1 USB port rather than using an internal hard drive for instillation and game play. I was pleasantly surprised that it runs as well as the copy I have on my internal SSD hard drive.
I first tried this with IL-2 1946 when I had an old computer with a small internal solid-state drive. Due to the size of the IL-2 program I had been running the sim on a large disk drive. I had problems with the sim locking up in missions with a lot of clouds and large numbers of aircraft after about 40 minutes into the mission. I had checked the postings on tech problems but never found a good solution. I was suspicious that the problem was the disk drive hanging up and thought an SSD installation of the game would do the trick, but I was reluctant to have IL-2 dominate my small SSD internal drive.
Later I found a nicely priced USB SSD 3.0 1 TB thumb-drive on Amazon and thought I would give a try after Tomoose was kind enough to give me the advice on how to do multiple installs of IL-2 1946. I used this 1 TB SSD thumb-drive and was able to install and play the game from that drive which let me do multiple installs and I started really playing with the configuration and features of the various installs. By running the game off the SSD thumb-drive through a USB port I found it ran flawlessly with no freezes. I haven’t tried it on anything less than a 3.0 USB port. Since this solution works so well I haven’t returned to a disk drive for the game.
I had taken a look at B.A.T. from time to time before getting the SSD thumb-drive but with my limited SSD internal space I always took a pass. Recently I started to see U-Tube videos from Douglas Rangel using a mod version of IL-2 1946. The quality of the mod was clearly superior to the stock game and I just had to have it. So now here I am with a new computer with a large SSD internal drive and my trusty 1 TB SSD thumb-drive and multiple installs of Red Core and Blue Edge trying to get the most out of the sim. I am a very happy camper.
Another advantage of the SSD thumb-drive is that the exchange of data from and to SSD drives is much faster than disk drives and makes back up easer and shorter.
I have noted that a number of people state that they are interested in B.A.T but they shy away due to the size. But a 1 TB SSD thumb-drive on Amazon is about $100 (a ½ TB is about $65). By using the SSD thumb-drive for the game one avoids an internal installation on an internal SSD hard drive of sufficient size. To me the SSD thumb-drive was a great work-around to the size problem. The SSD thumb-drive I have been using for over a year is a Buffalo. I am not pushing the brand but just letting you know what has worked for me. I did try another SSD external drive but ½ TB of data took up 1 TB of the space on the drive and I have no idea why.
I hope that some members of the community may find this tip useful.
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Topic: Running Red Core and Blue Edge from a USB SSD Thumb Drive (Read 279 times)
