USB HDD-Play games off of?

[A1111]

I just bulit an external USB HDD from a 2.5 WD2500BEKT. I'm wondering If I could use this to install my games to. My PC's hard drive is quite small (80GB), so I need something else to put my games on.

It uses USB 2.0, and it's a 7200RPM drive, but I'm not sure if it'll perform well enough.

Thoughts?

 

[PP Mguire]

I do it all the time with a dual HD dock. Sometimes when i go back and forth between multiple large games (for instance, no way GTA4 can be on a 64gb SSD with anything else) i use a 40gb drive in my USB dock.

Simple answer, yes it should be fine. In some heavy loading games it might be a tad slow but other than that should be fine.

 

[A1111]

ok cool. Thanks

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Just a note, most games put entries into your system registry, and sometimes install .dll files in system32 (I have seen new games force files to be installed in there lately)

So even if the game is installed on an external drive, if you ever reformat your PC, back the external drive up, and reinstall the games so everything points to the proper external drive, then put the backup back on so you don't loose save progress. Also, a lot of games now, also, even if installed on an external drive, still store game data in your user profile, thats usualy on win7/vista systems.

 

[Harper]

You are going to be finding your loading times being slow. Back in the day of Zip Drives and 3Gb hard drive, i remember installing games on zip disk. It was good that I was able to save space on my 3Gb hard drive, but the load times were longer.

Honestly, you are just better off puchasing a larger hard drive.

 

[Oreo]

Mirroring what others have said, it'll be slow.

U might be better getting a PCI-E USB 3.0 interface and get a USB 3.0 external HDD.

Whatever you do dont try to run an O/S or game off a USB flash drive, like my friend did, they only have so many read rights they can go through - and as my friend then discovered, it wasn't many. The drive failed after about of a week of usage.

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Some of them are far superior than others, everything has a maximum, but yea, some of the newer flash drives have just as many read/writes as an SSD does.

 

[A1111]

Well my PC isn't that powerful to begin with, so I haven't noticed a difference in performance with the games I play so far.

Besides load times, can this also effect framerate?

 

[C0RR0SIVE]

Framerate would only be affected when the game has to pull information from that drive, but it shouldn't be very easy to notice