External USB hard-drive.

Carlimited

I am running out of room on my "C" drive (but refuse to stop buying games LOL). I already have another internal drive, which I store music, pictures, and other files that I don't want to add to my "C" drive (so that I keep it from fragmenting too much). Therefore, my "C" drive of course holds my Windows folder (and all the other stuff that the machine needs to run), and my "D" drive holds pictures/music,etc. If I add a USB external hard-drive, will I be able to add games to the new drive simply by just changing the letter "C" to the letter of the external drive? Will Windows (and the registry) know where to look? Since games need to access the Windows folder sometimes (DirectX and so forth), will there be a lag? Will it even work, or is an external drive used mainly for files that are just data files? I don't really want to upgrade this computer, since I plan on buying a new machine once SOME of the bugs are ironed out of Vista (in a year or so). Any suggestions would be nice. Thanks!

krayZpaving

Yes, it will work. Transfer rates across USB aren't as fast as having another internal hard disk though. It won't perform quite as well as if you had the files on your C: or drive (as you describe them currently).
What I do is have my games, programs, etc, on my internal hard disk and music, video files, etc, on an external USB hard disk. That also means I can bring the music/video with me when travelling.

Ruu_Old

I don't think it will work with all games to simply drag over the old folder (if that is what you are talking about doing, sorry if I am confused), maybe you can reinstall the games on the external drive and copy over your save game files or something.

Carlimited

Ruu wrote:

I don't think it will work with all games to simply drag over the old folder (if that is what you are talking about doing, sorry if I am confused), maybe you can reinstall the games on the external drive and copy over your save game files or something.

Actually, I would probably uninstall them from the "C" drive, and then re-install them on the new drive. Is it a simple as just changing the first letter? I assume that I will always have to change that letter, since the default pathway is always to "C", right?

Conar

I would suggest putting your photo's and music on your new external drive...as mentioned earlier you can bring them to work etc.

Put the games on your second internal drive.
Its better practice to have you applications/games on a seperate drive to your OS drive for paging reasons etc.

Yes you will need to uninstall them and reinstall on the new drive.

I would definitely recommend NOT putting games on a USB drive as new games are quite large and you would seriously slow down loading times etc.