Oblivion on External Hard Drive

I am considering getting the two expansions for Oblivion, but I do not really want to eat up another 9.2 gigs of my internal hard drive. (By all means, correct me if I'm wrong about the hard drive space requirement.)
My question is: Would it be reasonable to reinstall Oblivion onto my external hard drive? (5400rpm internal, 7200rpm USB2.0 external) Would performance be noticeably affected?

 

LOL, horrid idea.

It would eat your performance alive.

If anything, put your crap on your external. Maybe a 2d game, or a crap 3d game, but any real game would suffer horribly.

 

It would not hurt to try though!!!

Let us know!!!

 

As Zellio said, but in a nicer way. I would not suggest it, for the game to get through all of the hardware it has to go through to run it has to be quick if you want to get reasonable framerates. It would have to do pretty much twice the work if it was on an external. Hope it helps, Peace.

 

Thanks for your input everybody.
I had initially considered this possibility because I've been running Marvel: Ultimate Alliance off the external with no problems, but I realize that Oblivion is a much more demanding game...
Although I'm tempted to just try it out, I think I'll just readjust my partitions and stick with the internal...

I'd still appreciate any input from anybody else!

 

May be try first the original Oblivion (so you don't have to buy yet the expansions). Anyway, USB 2 data transfer should be 6 times slower than the internal HD transfer. Game performance will probably also depends of how much RAM you have, if you are running it from USB.

 

Thanks, conejeitor. Interesting to hear a number put on it.
I have 2GB DDR2 667MHz RAM.

 

Ps dont buy the knights of the nine expansion youll be disapointed. most of whats on the disk you can download from bethesda for free.

And the single quest line it adds ( a line of quest like the thieves guild etc) is really boring.


Do get shivering isles though thats really nice.

 

Oh, I didn't know that the downloadable content from Knights of the Nine was free... I thought you had to purchase it via http://obliviondownloads.com/StoreCatalog_ProductList.aspx?SubCategoryId=1
Thanks for the heads up!
... but where might I find the free downloads?

 

Since Oblivion accesses the hard drive quite frequently for textures and so on, yes you will see some performance decrease, and a lot more in-game stuttering. Going through USB uses up CPU power, and it's slower than accessing your internal hard drive.

Now if you were using an eSATA external hard drive, that would be a different story.

 

That makes sense...! Thanks for the tips!
Marvel: Ultimate Alliance isn't too graphics-intensive, I suppose (certainly less so than Oblivion), so I guess I really shouldn't have considered that Oblivion would perform just as well.

I'm definitely going to stick with the internal. Case closed.

 

I meant LITERALLY put his crap on the external. Anything that is a crap game or has bad graphics, put on the external.

It will save up enough room on the internal for more games.

 

Deffinently put your media on your external, then you games on your internal. Your games will suffer so badly.

 

Duly noted, Zellio.

However... I'm embarrassed to say this, but I have come to realize that the required space was more like about 1 gb rather than 9.2 gb (4.6 for each expansion). Gamespot's system requirements for the expansions seem to refer to the requirements for the original Oblivion... So afterall, I actually have plenty of room to accommodate them.

Sorry for wasting your time everybody! but thanks for the insights!