Gaming on an external (NP5793)

I've read a bit about installing games onto an external drive and if it will work. The concensus seems to be that it won't really work with USB but will work fine with eSATA. I find myself saying **** it, knowing the 5796 has the eSATA and the 5793 doesn't. Thing is my 320 GB drive is getting full and I would love the option to install many more games. Is there anything else I can do besides uninstalling games I have now to free up space, or buying a 500GB and installing that in place of my 320 GB? You think firewire might work?

 

Not so sure about using an external to play games. Getting a new drive would be your best bet I suppose.

 

Not sure about games, but I used to run Photoshop 7 from a external, and I watch all my movies etc from externals so maybe? IDK?

try it

 

I have an external hard drive and play games off of it. It will work. And I haven't noticed much if any performance decrease.

I am running a 2.26 Centrino with 2GB RAM and a Go6600. I do not think the RAM or processor would help with speed from an external hard drive. Perhaps my GPU is so slow that any decrease from the external hard drive would not be noticed.

 

It'll probably slow down your loading times, like loading of maps etc. But it won't decrease your FPS...not by much I think.

 

I also watch movies, play games from my external. No problemo, using USB 2.0. Im not sure firewire would be faster then USB for the 5793, because I think its got firewire 400 (400 mbit/sec) and USB 2.0 has 480 mbit/sec.

Edit: Hold on, maybe thats wrong, does anyone know if the firewire in the 5793 is IEEE 1394a or IEEE 1394b? *b is actually 800mbit/sec (100 megabytes/sec)

 

USB 3.0 will be enough lol. Too bad its not out yet.

 

I have an Esata expresscard and a 750 GB Seagate enterprise desktop drive and it has an average sustained read speed of ~92 MB/s in HDTach. I haven't tried launching a game from it, but its more than fast enough. (main triple laptop drive RAID0 averages ~107MB/s.)
Esata pwns the pants off of firewire.
Here is the card I have.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839228001 (if you buy that card, you need the newest drivers directly from Jmicron, I can link them if you buy it)
You will need an adapter cable like this if you wanna use a regular SATA cable.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812203027

That card can also do RAID0 so you could install 2x1.5 TB drives in your laptop and have an average read of about 180MB/s I would guess.
Here is the drive I bought. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822148295 (32MB cache = win)
I know newegg has deactivated some of these items but I'm too lazy to bother replacing the links I pulled out of my order history.
Newegg probably still sells those adapters, and I know seagate hasn't discontinued that line. (which is newer anyway)

You shouldn't have any problems launching games from something like that.
You could have all of the game's shortcuts in a folder on the drive, and have a shortcut to the folder on the desktop. This shortcut wouldn't work if the drive wasn't plugged in, so you wouldn't accidentally run the games.

 

The 5793 has an express card slot right?
Why don't you get something like this:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16839150001
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817153071

Then you can add either a 2.5" or 3.5" HDD and install games on it. Should work with any laptop that has an expresscard slot. I have a 3.5" 7200rpm drive that I slotted onto the BlacX and it plays games just fine via the Expresscard/eSata interface. The nice thing too about it is the HDD is not in my laptop case building up heat. If I need something on the go I'll just copy whatever is on the external over to my internal drive.
edit: above poster posted something similar at the same time but I like the convenience and functionality of the BlacX

 

First of all USB is crap compared to Esata (or dual Esata RAID0) so that second product isn't as good.
As for the other Esata card, the one I got is cheaper and has more features. (RAID 0/1)
It also has better driver support and upgrades. They have added many new features, fixes, and stability improves to that card.

It can operate with desktop/laptop sata/Esata hard drives and optical drives.
Mine runs a blu ray drive just fine.
Here is one of the benchmarks I did with my card and the seagate enterprise 750 GB drive.

Here is the other one I did with newer drivers, it had crazy impossible burst speed, lol. http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v232/BillFleming/Seagate_ES2_750GB_bench_newcard_fir.png
I'm pretty sure that any other PCI-E 1x laptop express card can't beat mine as its limited by the bus speed and Sata 3G.

An esata to USB device would limit your speed to only a little faster than 1/3 of the speed you see in the graph.

Edit: You could also use a card like this to mirror your 320GB drive onto a 500 GB drive, then swap them out for more game space. hehe
You could keep the old drive as an external, maybe stick it in a USB case or something.

 

Ya thats true, not a bad idea. But the esata cards is a really cool idea. I think I might just go for a seagate 750 external and that card. Although it will be kinda pricey. :S

Can one of you guys who has an esata drive just try running some games and letting me know how they work out? THX!

EDIT: I just realized morphy has tried it and he said it works so looks like its a good solution. But I wonder if it might work on my notebook firewire port and a seagate external.