Gaming on an external hard drive

Hey guys, i was wondering if anyone has gone down the route of buying the M11x with a small solid state hdd like 50gb or somthing then gone and got an external hard drive to install all there games on.

Is it possible for example to install crysis on an external hard drive and just connect it up to your laptop and play, with out installing anything on the internal memory ?

Thanks

 

While I can't really answer your question, as I have not done so, I don't think that the result would be quite what you're hoping for.

Unfortunately, one thing that we lack is a fast connection to an external hard drive, as USB2.0/Firewire are nowhere near the speeds of USB3.0/eSATA. As a result, your load times would be terrible. I'm not sure how much this would affect you in game, but starting the game or loading levels would be painful.

 

I have gamed from an external drive and would not recommend it. As capielloa mentioned, the transfer rate is weak, which leads to sluggish performance.

If you go SSD, be sure to load the games on the internal SSD hard drive and then save all other files (docs, movies, music, other media/files) on the external, assuming you need the space. I will say, however, that I went with Dell/Aliensware's 500gb 7200rpm harddrive, and it's great! Some folks have used the Seagate Momentus XT 500gb with mixed results. This internal drive, in theory, combines the performance of SSD and the capcity of a non-SSD drive. Several flash gigs are allocated for opening commonly used programs and files, resulting in increased performance. Meanwhile, the rest of the drive is your standard non-SSD high capacity harddrive. There are plenty of posts about the drive, and I'm sure others can provide further information.

I hope that helps!

 

Also, I should mention that some games are not optimized for being installed in non-default locations. I know for certain that Borderlands (non-Steam version) is one of these games - patching the game is nearly impossible if installed in a non-default location (i.e. installed on the external).

 

You'd have to go eSATA or USB 3.0 as 2.0 is limited by the bus speed or something. Personally, I wouldn't recommend doing this.

 

Get a 90gb or 120gb SSD drive, install only OS, Programs and Games on SSD, buy a separate 500gb or 1TB external HD for Videos/Music/Photos etc...

 

so if we do get a M11x r3 released with an esata or a usb 3 next week this might be an option ?

thanks for all the reply's though guys..

 

Yep external drives are too slow to run games at peek performance.

Dont flame me, but this is what i do with limited space on internal HDD.

Say my internal drive is full. Say I don't have the room to install a new game i bought. I will copy over the game files from the internal HDD to the External HDD, flash drive ect.... I then delete the Game file (don't unistall) on the Internal HDD and install the new game. When you want to Play your old game just take your media and copy the file back onto your Internal HDD. I have done this many times and you know what a pain it is to re download something like wow. If you do a program uninstall or you HDD crashes just start installing and let the installer make the directory, write the registry files and then stop it when the game data starts downloading. then copy and enjoy the hours of game play instead of watching a progress bar for hours.

 

Depends on which games you're going to play.

I run Neverwinternights and Morrowind perfectly from external drive.
Don't know about recent games, but older games work fine.

Why there's no eSata on the m11x is a shame, would definately make it more interesting.