gaming from external HDD

I want to ask. my brother has an older Acer (1,6GHz CPU T5500, 2,5GB Ram, 100GB HDD, ati radeon x1450). if he buys and external HDD, lets say Western Digital Passport 400GB with 8MB cache and connects it with USB 2.0. can he install the games onto the WD HDD and then play them on the laptop? is it going to be slower since its external HDD or will there be no problem?
thanks!

 

There should be no problem I suppose. It may be slower on games that read quite a lot of data though... but for things like Warcraft III and such it's fine.

 

im more interested in games like Mirrors Edge, Shaun white snowboarding, Rainbow 6 Vegas 2....which all have good amount of maps I guess to load....
?

 

It won't work for newer games, USB is too slow for this. I tried this a couple of years ago with a Passport I connected to my d610 and the new titles did not work. (This was in 2006!)

 

usb is too slow... but firewire or esata should be fine. be aware though that alot of new games will only be playable on the laptop from which the game was installed (u cant move the external hd from computer to computer and expect all the games to work).

 

yeah and it won't be slow at all that's how all i play most my games call of duty 4, sins, oblivion, civ 4 all run fine from my portable hard drive so your fine all you have to do is create a folder on the ex. hard drive and for me it's not slow AT ALL.

and don't believe them when they say it won't work for newer games IT WILL WORK with newer games fallout 3, bioshock, crysis, etc. so your fine with any game no problem

 

I never had a problem running games from my USB or FW external HDDs.

 

As long it's a hard drive, and not a pen drive, you'll be fine. My friend plays all of his games off of his USB hard drive (CoD4, BF2, KOTOR, AOE3)

I tried playing a few games off my pen drive, most of them took WAY too long to load, or they just wouldn't work. Halo 1 worked pretty amazingly though.

 

Most of the games don’t require continues HDD access while playing the it, maps and worlds will be loaded at the beginning of a level or at different stages, once leaded they will be in memory (RAM + Page file). Load times and perhaps sometimes at few places in game (i.e Entering a new scene, opening up a new option window etc.) may lag a little, but external disk will not have a direct impact on the frame rate 90% of the time.

Games like Mirrors Edge and Rainbow 6 Vegas 2 are * relatively* new graphic intensive games; but X1450 is not a very good card, therefore an external HDD should be the least of your concerns.

 

thank you all for your very helpfull comments!! that cleared it up for a lot! rep to all.....
to PhoenixFx: I am aware that X1450 is not very strong, but fortunately I have been able to find good drivers and so I can play Vegas 2 or Mirrors edge, even though not on the best resolution/graphic settings....but still its a good game experience