how good will gaming work form a 3.5" external drive?

Frippo · 28 Aug 2009 at 13:37

Was mainly wondering about if usb2 would be sufficient or would I notice a big performance drop? Would this be mostly during load times then as the data would later be available in the ram or would there be stuttering? The games in questions are mostly a few years old and RTS kind of games, so not so much games with very high requirements. Would one run into any other issues with the drive being external? (will be booted from drive)

AbsenceJam · 28 Aug 2009 at 13:53

It'll just be load times that suffer, with those kinds of games you won't notice it much.

siege2 · 28 Aug 2009 at 14:23

as long as there is system memory to hold the games instead off having to page to HD to extend the main memory, then should be ok

ps try turning off page file to see if system can run ok ..

Frippo · 29 Aug 2009 at 19:03

Thanks, thats what I thought. Just to be on the safe side I wanted to ask games like AOE 3 wouldnt be any problems at all then?

iraiguana · 30 Aug 2009 at 09:20

Is e-sata an option for the external drive? You will notice it a fair bit on transfer I would imagine.

Frippo · 30 Aug 2009 at 15:55

No unfortunately not (not on pc, but can get it on the external drive to be future proof), I'm aware that its supposed to be as fast as regular sata.

Ultim8 · 30 Aug 2009 at 17:30

you can get a sata to e-sata cable which you can plug the sata end straight into the mobo or get a sata back panel