Installing games on an external HDD?

drbx19

drbx19

drbx19

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4 Apr 2011
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151
What do you think of this idea?

I know an internal drive would be better, but I am reluctant to buy one of these because of the price...

External drives are so much cheaper.

For about £60-80 I can get a good quality 1TB external, but for an internet 1TB I'd have to be paying about £100..
 
Quite often the drives used in external enclosures are slow, and older technology.

Also, the interface chipsets from SATA to (usually) USB2 aren't always particularly quick.

You won't get anywhere near the throughput or response times from an external drive as you will when it's plugged in internally.
 
You could always crack open the external, remove the drive and put it in your PC. May only be a 5400rpm drive though.
 
I did this when i was using my gaming laptop and had limited internal hard drive space. So as someone who has done this, and is not merely theorising, I can tell you it worked fine, with the vast majority of games.

You may find loading screens take longer. Some games also write a lot to the hard drive so they may feel a bit stuttery at times- but they were very much the exception for me. When that did happen, I reinstalled that game on the internal hard drive and kept the rest on the external.

As an alternative: check reviews or specs to find out what interface the external drives are using. If SATA and not IDE, just buy the external drive, remove the enclosure, and put it in your computer.
 
For a while i ran steam on an external hard drive. Worked fine but very slow loading. Didnt bother me much.
 
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