External Hard Drive Gaming

As you can tell from my sig, my laptop doesn't have a huge hard drive, but I have become addicted to computer gaming. What I want to do is get an external hard drive for all of my gaming. My plan is to install all of my games on that so I can free up space on my C drive for other things like music and pictures and stuff, plus at some point I want to get an external hard drive to back up my system. I do have a few questions though.

1. You can install games on an external hard drive right?

2. What size/company would you guys recommended?

@ this point my game collection is as follows:

Arkham Asylum
Prince of Persia
Incredible Hulk
Medal of Honor 10th Anniversary Collection
Battlefield 2
Ghost Recon: Advance Warfighter
The Sims 2 Double Deluxe
The Movies
Dragon Age: Origins
A game collection thing of 100,000 Games
Lord of the Rings Battle for Middle Earth II
A collection of Roms for the NES, SNES, Atari, Sega Genesis, and N64

(and I don't plan to let my collection stop here. There are a lot more I wanna get)

So what would you guys recommend.

 

Yes, you can install games in an external hard drive, I've done it before. But you must understand still a few files are installed on the your C drive of the laptop. What I mean to say is that you cannot take your drive and play on another computer directly.

As for the size I'd recommend like 320GB or greater, you don't want to run short on space suddenly.

I hope this helps.

 

You are better of imaging your current laptop hard drive, buying a new 640GB one, restoring the image to that new Drive and then using the old one for your music or other files.

 

Load times will be ridiculous for some games unless you're going the external HDD with firewire or ESATA. USB is ridiculously slow compared to them.

 

My lappy has one usb port that doubles as an eSATA port and I only intend to play the games on my laptop. I just wanna save the bulk of the space that games take up.

 

You can save lots of space with no performance hit by using the built in Native NTFS file compression.

 

What's that.

 

Yes, installing games on your External Drive does work.

I have a Seagate External Hard drive, that connects via USB, and I have installed numerous games on it (one major one being Crysis).

It ran as fine as if I had installed it on my C: drive. The only thing is, the load times between levels where slightly longer.

But I have never put an open world game on it (like GTA IV or Just Cause 2). I only put load level games only (meaning it loads a level, you play it and beat it, and the game loads the next level).

Hope that helped.

 

^^^^^^

What he said.

No point on spending the money on an external one when you can put a much larger one internally, and use your existing one in an enclosure.

 

Windows XP, Vista and 7, when using the default NTFS file system have a built in form of disk compression. I tend to enable it on new disks and it works transparently in the background saving a lot of space. I do a lot of gaming and performance is no different.

Enabling it on new disks wil save time but you can enable it on older ones if they have enough space but I wouldn't recommend it if you are running out.

 

I have a 640GB internal HDD and a Western Digital 750GB external USB 2.0 HDD...

Steam is installed to the external HDD and has 60 or so games...

And then I have several (um, meaning a lot...see signature) games installed from CD/DVD on the external...I tend to install games that are better played with a gamepad or joystick or external mouse on the external HDD...

That leaves me with adventure, turn-based strategy, RPG and emulator games on my internal drive, which are easier to play with the touchpad, along with my MS Office suite, some electronic encyclopedias and my mp3 collection...

I also copied over all the icons of games installed on the external HDD to the internal HDD...that way when the external HDD is removed, all my shortcuts are pointing to icons on the internal HDD and the shortcuts still look pretty...yep, I'm that anal retentive...

Between all the games on the list in my signature, I still have over 200GB of space left on the 640GB internal + 750GB external...I try to keep over 60GB free space on the internal drive for video editing/DVD authoring...

 

All I can say is you have a lot if games lol. What I was think of was going for an external tb but I heard from someone they tend to be glitchy. Is there any truth to that?

 

I have owned multiple Western Digital external HDDs...only one failed...I have had more problems with internal HDDs (heat related?) than with external HDDs...

Toshiba or Seagate may be even more reliable than WD...

And every time that I've almost filled up an external HDD, the next generation, higher capacity HDDs are released and even manage to come down in price a little before I get that real strong itch to buy (I used to use two external HDDs, but I could never remember what game was on what HDD so I gave up on the multiple external HDDs...the 3x5 card taped to the drive wasn't quite elegant enough...)

 

LOL. I did something similar. I own 4 WD drives, 120GB, 160GB, 400GB, 500GB. I use my 400GB to store my Steam game backups, and my 500GB for everything else. 120GB and 160GB are more just if I need to transfer files temporarily.

 

So a 1 TB isn't glitchy and could work quite nicely?

 

The only thing that could be "glitchy" is if your USB port doesn't supply appropriate power for the drive. As long as your USB supplies the USB 2.0 500mA power, you should be fine. Be sure to format it as NTFS so that your data will be safer should you have an issue.

 

Does it help if my one USB port doubles as an eSATA?