Installing game on external hard drive

[aye29]

How big of a performance drop would I suffer if I installed and ran a game from an external UBS 2.0 hard drive instead of an internal 5400rpm laptop hard drive? The 40Gb HDD in my laptop is filling up fast and I have a 200Gb Western Digital Caviar in an external enclosure with free space. Would it make any difference if I connected the external drive enclosure using a Firewre 400 cable instead of USB 2.0?

 

[horris1st]

It will be a bit slower than your original hard drive, i would not use it for gaming, i would only use it for backing up files/using it as storage for photos etc. Gaming requires a very fast hard drive, obviously depending on what game it is, i would say that the performance of a game will be slower with that hard drive, although you dont have a very fast hard drive at the moment. I would look at 7200/10000 RPM hard drives and get a bigger one. Thats your best bet.

 

[Senseis]

Yes, I would use firewire it is faster and try it and see it forself install one game and try it out.