Downside to playing games off portable HDD?

[jmc]

My SATA hard drive is pretty full....and I have a unused 320 GB USB 2.0 External HDD hooked up with nothing on it. I was considering installing games like crysis, bioshock, CoD2 on the portable and playing games off that. Is there going to be any downside to it at all?

[Vinen]

My SATA hard drive is pretty full....and I have a unused 320 GB USB 2.0 External HDD hooked up with nothing on it. I was considering installing games like crysis, bioshock, CoD2 on the portable and playing games off that. Is there going to be any downside to it at all?

Yes... there will be a significant loss in performance whenever there is disc access.

[jmc]

My SATA hard drive is pretty full....and I have a unused 320 GB USB 2.0 External HDD hooked up with nothing on it. I was considering installing games like crysis, bioshock, CoD2 on the portable and playing games off that. Is there going to be any downside to it at all?

Yes... there will be a significant loss in performance whenever there is disc access.

Ya, just looked up transfer speeds....

480mbps

vs

1.5gbps

Think i'll be picking up another internal drive soon lol

[Killgannon]

the moral of the story:

dont use external drives for real time apps (something thats going to be relying on accessing the HD to continue to produce what you want it to do... mainly games.. in fact games are the only example i can think of...)

[Zigma]

it won't be too bad imo.

[Shuemue]

Here's an idea, how about you try it and let us know what happens?

[Goodppls]

I had FFXI and WOW on a External HDD for my old laptop and they seemed to have ran normal, but I don't know how it would do with more demanding games.

[Avanarius]

I can actually run ffxi off my mp3 player fine, I'm sure it's not good for it but oh well, it works when I'm traveling.

[Mojo]

My brother installed WoW on to a flash drive and it works surprisingly well. You will experience performance loss, although how significant it is depends on the particular game. It's not something I would recommend doing.

[Edrick]

I was considering installing games like crysis, bioshock, CoD2

Yeah, those games will probably run horribly on an external drive. I can't remember which game I tried running off an external drive before, I think it was HL2 or something, and it ran horribly.

[GSDragoon]

http://www.dslreports.com/forum/r193228 ... II-vs-USB2

The USB speeds still seem slow to me. Maybe latter tonight I can test my external drive.

EDIT: Or this: http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1 ... 098,00.asp

[mootsfox]

My SATA hard drive is pretty full....and I have a unused 320 GB USB 2.0 External HDD hooked up with nothing on it. I was considering installing games like crysis, bioshock, CoD2 on the portable and playing games off that. Is there going to be any downside to it at all?

Yes... there will be a significant loss in performance whenever there is disc access.

Ya, just looked up transfer speeds....

480mbps

vs

1.5gbps

Think i'll be picking up another internal drive soon lol

SATAII is 3GB/s.

But thats bandwidth... Show me a drive that can read or write at ~350MB/s and uses the SATAII interface.

But yes, there will be a slight to moderate performance drop if you use an external (when not using eSATA) hard drive. How much of a drop depends on the game and your hardware.

[Pun]

I run FFXI off of my external hard drive. There are no noticeable differences on my system.

[levish]

I really want to try running ffxi or lotro off a SSD or ramdisk, hopefully this coming year they'll continue to nosedive in price to "reasonable" levels.

I think they require fast response times rather than sustained read/writes which would be the times where a usb or firewire bus would be a issue.

[mootsfox]

Why not try the iRam from Gigabyte?

[levish]

both ffxi and lotro folders are significantly larger than the 4gb the iram supports and it only works with sata 1 and ddr1.

i'd have one if they released a model that at least takes 4gb ddr2 chips

[Yangsing]

Is it alright to run mp3s and movies off of external HD's?

[Kurgan]

I don't think FFXI pushes the throughput limits of an external USB 2.0 hard drive. Other games might. It should be okay.

[Cjskater]

Is it alright to run mp3s and movies off of external HD's?

Definitely