can i install and play games on external hard drives?

[king0fhearts]

I just purchased a new laptop with a hard drive that is filling up quicker than expected. So i was wondering that if i bought an external hard drive, will i be able to run programms installed on the hard drive? or are external hard drive used only for storing media files, video, doc files, ect?

 

[b1gapl]

No it's not only for storing. Yes you can play games and run programs off it.

 

[king0fhearts]

Thnx for the reply . Im new to these things so pardon the newbie question hehe

 

[aliasaid]

i wouldn't though.. especially if the interface is slow.. if you have usb 1.1 then that would be a big bottleneck.. usb 2.0.. i'm not too sure if its still fast enough... just store all the media and stuff on the external, and leave the internal hd for appz and games

 

[Trifid]

USB 2.0 is 480Mb/s (not sure if that is bits or bytes.) but that is still 60MB/s which is enough. The problem is speed of these drives are not great, but you can get 7200rpm ones that need external power sources. (That laptop not so portable now. )

 

[Jorsoft]

USB 2.0 is fine for gaming off of I used to do it all the time myself. Load times will be a bit longer but fps doesn't suffer at all.

 

[mophead740]

i dont no if thats right, because im sure games like oblivion ect will need intyernal drives to run at full speed
i think it would be a bottleneck
nut not a huge one

btw - trifid, that is in bits not bytes

 

[Trifid]

OK, in bits it still equals 60Mbytes, which is enough bandwidth for a 7.2k drive. It will how ever bottle neck the peak transfer speeds, meaning slower loading times. Textures may also be slightly slower to load in large enviroments.

 

[Jorsoft]

i dont no if thats right, because im sure games like oblivion ect will need intyernal drives to run at full speed
i think it would be a bottleneck
nut not a huge one

btw - trifid, that is in bits not bytes

I hadn't tried Oblivion, but Doom3 and Quake4 ran at identical fps as my internal, just load times were longer. Benchmarks were exactly the same as was in game performance. Games don't access your hd unless they're loading something, everything else goes into system memory so as long as you've got enough of that (I had 1gb at the time) You'll be just fine.