Hello Pale Ale (my favorite kind of beer, by the way),
Thank you for that. Yes, I can totally understand just keeping small ROM files on my internal HDD. However, from what I have seen, some ROMs can be 15+ GBs. And since, as you say, Launchbox is a way for people to show off their libraries, I imagine some people have many (hundreds perhaps) of 2~3 GB (or higher) files. Keeping them all on the internal HDD, especially when you're only ever really going to play a small fraction of the ROMs seems crazy to me. Of course, that is just me, and if I had the space I could definitely understand wanting to have everything there to show off.
My laptop has 300GB of space on the C drive and ~1TB on the D drive. I thought, when I bought this thing, that it would be enough and that there was no way I could ever need more space. Well, somehow, even without ROMs, I have managed to take up a rather large chunk of that disc space! Perhaps it is all of my Steam games...
I like your idea of running Launchbox from an external HDD, though. It is nice to know that is an option. I am not much of a computer person, but I don't know if certain programs/software packages would perform better when on an internal HDD (or even if it makes a difference. A cursory query seems to indicate that it does, but I don't know to what extent/degree). I will look at purchasing an external HDD that would be dedicated to this. I imagine 2TB would be more than enough.
Thanks again for the help!