Gaming on external drive

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Soldato
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I've just bought a 500Gb WD external hard drive to suppliment the measly 40Gb my laptop has, and I'm now looking to move as much as possible onto the external, leaving the internal for the more taxing games.
I know that the internal drive will access and read/write faster than the external, so I assume that installing to the external will increase loading times, and possible cause some stutering in game?

Is it possible to draw a rough line where games will play find on the external drive, and where games won't? Say, games released in 2006 onwarrds will stutter too much, or something?

At the moment, I'm running NWN2 on the internal drive (Just about, I'm actually nderr the minimum specs T_T), and I'm looking at putting Galactic civilisations 2 and Rome Total war onto the external.
Also, what about steam games? Would they be capable of running on an external drive, or should I keep them internal?

Thanks :)
 
It all depends on the connection used to the laptop. (What does that external disk provide?) e-Sata will in fact likely be faster than on your internal laptop disk, as the connection used is essentially then no different to what is (likely) used internally, and the external disk is likely to be faster than the internal laptop disk. Firewire will be next fastest and USB2.0 the slowest of the 3. For the slower connections (Firewire and USB) it's impossible to say using a date cutoff which games will not work acceptably, as it all will depend on how frequently they use the disk, and how much data they transfer.
 
Its only a usb2.0
Thanks for the answers, I can put up with longer loading times, so I'll just install what I can and see how it runs. Thanks :)
 
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