Games on which harddrive?

[mousepad]

Ok, I just bought an external case usb 2.0 for my 120 gb hdd so I could hook it up to my laptop. Now should I run the games on my laptop 80gig 4200 rpm drive or run it through to my 120 7200 rpm? Now I would totally pick my 120 due to the rpm speeds but would there be a downgrade in speed due to the hard drive going through the usb2.0?

 

[mack]

Put the games on the 7200 RPM. I'm not sure how fast USB 2.0 is, I think it's pretty fast. My 7200 RPM HDD only reads at about 40-50MBps.

 

[Nitestick]

i think you should run them from the laptop hdd. i have never used a usb hdd but i have had some pretty woeful transfer speeds on usb devices

 

[mousepad]

That's what I was thinking, I wasn't sure if the usb 2.0 would cause latency issues or not.

 

[senseless]

You arent going to get latency issues period because games preload most of the files they need. The only latency problem you might encounter is a bigger or smaller initial load time. Depending on how fast your usb controller is vs the throughput of a slow 4500rpm drive. You can download sisoftsandra from guru3d.com and benchmark both drives.. I'd use whichever is faster (less load = more gaming).

 

[mousepad]

So basically the rpms only affect the speed of loading up the game rather than actual game play?

 

[FadingTheory]

Yes. What your playing is stored in RAM. The HD dumps the info into RAM before you ever see it.