External HD ok for gaming?

Hi,

i dont have any complaints on speed on my current hard drive which is 7200rpm.

However the 80gb definately wont support many games at once these days, plus i have the Linux partition and my media stuff.

I'm planning to buy a 1TB or so hard drive and an external case for it. In that case, i would just keep the OS on the inside hard drive and keep some important college and everyday data on it aswell. I'd keep all the games and "home only" stuff on the external one.

My question is, being the hard drive connected by USB, does it offer suitable performance for gaming and reasonable (don't have to be the fastest, but just reasonable) loading times?
Will the external hard drive speed matter or will the USB connection be the bottleneck?

I might even be interested on putting Windows on the external and leave the whole internal HD for Linux, as Windows is only useful to me for gaming anyway. Anyone tried that?

I read something about Firewire and its better performance. Is it possible to have both connections like USB and Firewire connections on a case? (i'm not sure everybody has a Firewire port so if i went that way for performance, it would be nice to have USB for compatibility aswell).

Thanks in advance

 

If you can do with 500GBs, then I recommend you upgrade your internal HDD to a 500GB ( if supported). That’ll be both faster and convenient.

USB 2.0 has a maximum bandwidth of 480Mbps (actual speed is lower) but still quite alright; not the fastest, but certainly tolerable. Especially for the old games. Since you have an 80GB internal disk, your notebook must be somewhat old, therefore the games you can run on it should be old too. So I wouldn't worry about it

AFAIK, you cannot run a fully fledged Windows operating system from a USB drive. Even if you could, running an OS over USB will greatly hinder the performance.

FireWire (IEEE 1394b) 800 has a bandwidth of 786 Mbps, and yes you can find enclosures with both Firewire and USB.

 

^^^
What He Said.

 

I have an External 250GB HD, and have my games installed on it, as well as Steam.

I have:

Call of Duty: World at War
Unreal Tournament 2003
Left 4 Dead
The Orange Box
F.E.A.R
Saints Row 2
Crysis
Crysis Warhead
Battlefield 1942

All of these games are installed on my External HD, and runs Flawlessly!

 

I would recommend an e-sata express card adapter, then an external hard drive with an e-sata connector. That way, you'll get maximum speed/performance just as if the hard drive was internal.

 

Hi, thanks for the replies!

Well yeah this notebook has got some age but i can still have fun with new games as it still got reasonable specs i guess. I dont demand full graphics, i'm currently enjoying Fallout 3 at med/high over native resolution. Plus, when i bought it, I took 7200rpm as a good deal over storage space.

Thanks for the answers, i guess i'll just discard the idea of putting the whole windows to external and put both systems on internal drive.

The thing with instead of using external swap my internal one is the bang for buck... In the shop i would be willing to buy, a 1TB desktop drive would cost R$ 405,00 (~USD 180) and a 400GB notebook drive would cost R$ 480 (~USD 210). @Brazil. Samsung for both and probably not the highest performance anyway. For the same price range, i would be getting twice the storage space...