external harddrives and games

Hey, i'm just gonna shoot this out here. I wanna buy an external harddrive to back up a lot of music and I wanna be able to load up my games onto the drive to keep my lappy clean. Would running games off of an external be practical, and if so, would USB 2.0 be fast enough to run some heavy games or should i look to firewire.

 

I just have a IOmega 320gb USB2.0 hardrive and everything seems just fine. Sometimes, it can go faster than the internal hardrive, but other times it goes slower.

 

Games might load slower from an external hard disk drive.

 

Depends what speed of firewire you would go for - 400 Mbps for FireWire (S400) and up to 480 Mbps for USB 2.0. The 2 other versions of firewire i know are 800Mbps and 1,600Mbps (S800 and S1600). Obviously the later 2 are much quicker for data transfers so if speed is the major factor you are after id say go for those if you can find an external hdd with it on.

 

For the Firewire 400 vs USB2 480, the Firewire seems to win because of it's different protocol.

 

is it possible to install games into an external hard drive? Say if I wanted to install FEAR on my external hard drive (320gb USB2.0) how would I do that?

 

You tell the game to be installed to the external drive.Though this might not be practical due to the fact that some games are sensitive to the drive letter so you will have to make sure that the same drive will have that letter for that particular game.

 

Yeah, oh boy the problems I encountered when patching games or installing mods when I had all my games on D:\ partition!

 

I installed all my games to external disks and have no issues whatsoever. During setup just use different letter. That is it. Registry holds the info for the future upgrades and things.

Games and programs that cannot be set and installed properly into any other place than Program Files are bad written software.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

so what do yall think, firewire or USB 2.0

 

All my disks are USB 2.0. One can bring 13 MB/s and one can 35 MB/s (tested with the same 2,5" disk). The problem with the slower is the controller (some VIA chip). So I could recommend USB 2.0, but check for the performance first - since some cheap external disks have awful performance despite the 2.0 interface (or High-speed sticker). 5400 rpm 2,5" disk can bring up to 35MB/s top, 30 on avg. 7200 can go up to 45. 3,5" disks can be even faster, but usually bring the powercord with them (I hate it), but they are much cheaper per size. Both USB 2.0 and Firewire interfaces are way faster than any disk today.

I have no experience with firewire disks, so are they more expensive? Hot plug enabled? Can you just switch them off while working? Can you put your comp to sleep? Can it wake afterwards? Can you change the caching settings? Can it be optimized for removal or performance? Can you turn on the advanced cache in Vista? Can it fall down from 1 meter high and still be working? And finally is firewire disk faster than usb 2.0 disk? Well inside is just an ordinary disk on a firewire controller. So the answer depends on the controller performance - not only the disk.

All these stuff should be considered when you are getting an external disk.

Cheers,

Ivan

 

Running games from a USB or Firewire/1394 drive is gonna be slow, considering HDD performance is often a bottleneck for internal drives.

If your laptop has an eSATA port (which is unlikely), or a spare expressCard port (you can get cards which add an eSATA port) then you may want to look into an eSATA drive, as they should provide similar performance to an internal hard drive. Disadvantages are that eSATA drives are much less common, will likely be more expensive, and always need an external power supply.

 

Ivan, what type of external HD do you use exactly??

Thanks,
The Old Man