Can u play games on external eSATA drive?

Hey all,
I'm wondering if I buy an external hard drive for my G1S, can I install and play games on it as if it were the internal drive ? Is the performance just as good or even better ?

specifically, this is the 500GB 7200rpm eSATA drive I was looking at:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822101030

thanks,
Mike

 

Yes. You can play games or use the drive in any way that you could an internal. But mind you that you won't have as good of game play because the transfer speeds aren't as quick as an internal.

This isn't because of the external drives speed, but rather the cap on what a laptop will allow an external to transfer information at.

Hope this helps!

 

For Me, an Esata drive is just as fast as my internal drive. I say go for it.

 

Same here. I tested it on my Asus M50 and the transfer rates were almost identical

Internal drive


eSATA

 

E-SATA bandwidth is the same as SATA II I think so the link to the computer is just as fast, so as long as the drive is just as fast it will be identical to your internal drive.

Since your limited to 2.5" drives internally prety much anything you hook up will be just as fast. But you can also now use a 3.5" drive and have faster speeds

The catch that nobody mentioned is that you need more than just the game data on the hard drive, you would still have to install the game from your laptop onto the drive due to all the smaller parts of the installation like the registry entries and things. So that means no installing you fav games to an external drive and just moving that drive from computer to computer to play them.

Although that is semi possible if you install the game onto the external drive from each computer it wont work with every game.

 

That's fine, I'm not interested in moving to different computers... I'm just nearly out of disk space. Thanks all for your replies !

 

If you decide to buy a Seagate Barracuda (and I think any of their Internal 3.5" drives) for an external, be sure you remove their 1.5gB/s jumper.

 

I tried something similar to this - and it worked very well. I continue to enjoy old SWAT 4, so I installed it on desktop and downloaded a ... ahem ... special executable which allows the game to run on a system which is not equipped with an optical drive . Then - I just burned the whole game folder to a DVD. From now on, whenever I get a new system I just copy the contents of the DVD to say the D: partition. Then I drag out a shortcut to the game executable and away I go (which is really all the registry entries on a "normal" install do anyway - they point the start menu shortcut to the executable). Lest I be accused of cheating, I have three copies of SWAT 4/Stetchkov - its just a lot less wear and tear on my CD/DVD drives to run it sans CD.

 

I don't think using a no-CD executable when you own the game is bad practice, although the game companies would probably not agree with me. Having to always put that disk in the drive is a dumb form of DRM. Plus, you're technically not allowed to make copies so if you scratch it by always putting it in and out, you have no backup.