LW has always had problems with external drives in my experience. That's why I gave up on the concept. Other p2p programs seem to be able to use external drives much more efficiently.

And yes, if your drive is offline when LW starts up then the library preferences will wipe clean all record of such drives & their files. LW in my experience seems to have problems reading from such drives & remembering them.

I share a lot of files, but they are on internal drives. I have four internal 1 GB drives so that's plenty. Plus a lot of ram & cpu power to cope with them.

Hello,
yes hashing it takes long time,
if you use for exemple ubuntu you have to mount internal hard drive at ubuntu
startup otherwise when you start limewire without mount the internal hard drive that contain shared folder , you have to wait the long hashing operation.
Hashing was more better (speed of hashing) with older version 4.12.x of limewire.

Olduser