Running Armory from USB 3.0 Hard Drive

[ZXSpectrum]

Hi all,

As my main hard drive is only an 80gb SSD, I put Armory on a USB hard drive. The Synchronizing with network part, how long should that take? I haven't timed mine but it seems to take quite a while to start. Any performance tricks or tips I'm missing? I can copy files to/from Windows at 50+ meg a sec. How would you start bitcoind with the Armory options to watch what it was doing more? Like I can't just run bitcoind because I have custom path settings etc it would start looking at my C drive.

Thanks in advance.

[ForgottenPassword]

IIRC while your hard drive IO speed is a factor, the main bottleneck when syncing the blockchain is your CPU. I don't think an external HDD will impact initial sync time too much. Armory sync isn't too bad now that it uses the blockchain torrent.

To get some information from bitcoind (such as the synchronized block height) try running bitcoin-cli getinfo from a terminal.

[picobit]

Try downloading the initial block chain with bittorrent.  On a windows machine, Armory should be able to do that for you.  It cuts down the time to sync bitcoind from many days to half a day or so.