Is it possible to run games off of an external hard drive?

I'm noticing modern games are getting bigger and bigger and with my little 250 gb hd I'm having to remove older games to fit new ones on so I'm wondering can u run games from an external hard drive connected to esata and what would be a good portable external hd for such a task? Preferebly with a low failure rate as I also want to back up my music library on it.

The local walmart has SeaGate FreeAgent Go portable drives on sale for 60 but I'm noticing that they got horrible reviews on amazon. Any insite is appreciated.

 

Its perfectly possible. Just expect some moderately increased load times.

 

Any drive in particular u would reccomend

 

We discuss it here:
http://forum.notebookreview.com/gam...-cards/476615-external-hard-drive-gaming.html

But yea with usb 2.0 or esata running games off an external is fine. I do it all the time on my laptop and it actual improve some of my gaming because the hd in my laptop was slow. But if you are running esata and a 7200rpm HD it would be just fine.

 

If your going to be gaming, you should get one that is 7200rpm. If your laptop has an e-SATA port, get an external HDD with e-SATA. The load times shouldn't be much longer.

 

Note that a 5400 RPM drive is going to be bottlenecked by USB 2.0, so if you buy a USB 2.0 external hard drive, there's no point in getting a 7200 RPM drive. IIRC, FireWire (aka IEEE 1394/iLink) will also be a bottleneck on most 5400 RPM drives, although not as much of a bottleneck. It's only really if you have eSATA that a 7200 RPM external drive would make any difference. The only reason I have a 7200 RPM external drive myself is that it used to be my internal drive, and I made my upgraded drive my new interior one.

Personally, I wouldn't buy a Seagate at this point as their reliability hasn't been as good as Western Digital/Hitachi/Samsung over the past year or two. There's a chance of a lemon no matter who you go with, but Seagate is the least safe option. Also be aware that an external drive may have a different internal drive than the brand on the external one - Seagateat one point sold external drives that actually had Samsung drives in them, because Samsung had beat them to a higher capacity (640 GB on 2.5-inch IIRC). Buffalo, LaCie, and the like may have any of the major manufacturer's drives in them.

 

Wait, I hadn't thought of this. Why don't you just replace your internal 250GB drive, with a 500GB 7200rpm model? It would be cheaper. And you could put your old 250GB in an external case or sell it.

 

I had a western digital 320GM 7200RPM external hard drive and i ran games off of it fine... note, if they were intensive games, i would copy them to my internal just so they would be faster but other than the longer load times and not so great online play... it worked fine. If you wanna play online, safer to have it on your internal

 

I used to do this, but trying to install free roaming games in the internat HDD, and loading-screen games on the external.

Now I have 500GB, so I might not need to go to the external anymore...

 

Yeah, go with a 7200RPM internal laptop hard drive, it's way more convenient than carrying an external drive around.

Newegg.com - Seagate Momentus XT ST95005620AS 500GB 7200 RPM 32MB Cache 2.5" SATA 3.0Gb/s with NCQ Solid State Hybrid Drive -Bare Drive

 

Yes, the upgraded internal will do wonders and be better than just buying an external... Do that if you can.

 

Its totally possible there is nothing different from an external hard drive than an internal one except.... its external

However let me speak out about one important thing because somebody is going to try this and ask why it wont work.

You still have to install the game on that drive and the computer that installs it will be the only computer that can play that game.

You cant simply disconnect the hard drive, plug it into another computer and play the game (with exception of very few games that do not install anything to your system and are completely independent we call these portable programs)

If you want to share the game between more than one computer you can try to install the game on both computers to the exact same location on the drive. This works most of the time for most games but I have seen it not work all the time, as some games install unique keys or other things.

So what I am saying is even when installing a game to a external drive, in most cases SOME stuff installs to your system as well. Registry entries, Required files, etc...

 

Or make it a slave HAHAHA.....

 

I know there will still be a few files on my main drive and I'm fine with that. Any portable games I have that I found online I have on a flash drive what I'm basically trying to avoid is having my hard drive go from 20.5 GB free to like 7.0 GB free all because I wanted to install some new game lol.