PC games on external hard drive

Den_M · 21-10-2007 8:27pm #1

I need to buy an external hard drive soon and I'm wondering if games can be installed on them and run exactly the same as on internal hard drives. Is there any access or speed issues? Also, does it mean games can be run on different pc's just by connecting the hard drive? I've got a 320gb internal hd and I'm planning on buying a 500gb external hd. I love the idea of being able to bung all my music/games/video/docs onto the external one and feel the benefit on my pc. Komplett seems to have some 500gb external hd's from respectable brands for just over 100 quid.

bushy... · 21-10-2007 8:35pm

The copy-protection on the games might look for the original cd

Den_M · 21-10-2007 8:41pm

The games I'd be playing are ones I've bought. Doom3, Quake 4, FEAR etc, as long as loading and performance wouldnt suffer I wouldn't mind having to have the original CD at hand.

bushy... · 21-10-2007 8:47pm

They load faster ( ages since i tried it) , the cd drive has to do a bit of rootin around to find the start of the disc etc.

JPA · 21-10-2007 8:56pm

I'd think it would be quite affected by access speeds as it will be connected by usb or firewire compared to connected internally.

tman · 21-10-2007 8:57pm

My 500GB Seagate Freeagent external drive is a hell of a lot slower than my internal Seagate drives, I get around 20-25 MBPs write speeds on it compared to 70ish MBPs. It's fine for storing movies and music on, but I wouldn't consider using it for games tbh...
You may run into problems with missing registry keys and stuff if you try to run a game on another pc, but that's fairly unlikely... it should work fine.

L31mr0d · 21-10-2007 10:42pm

I think people are mistaking what the OP is talking about, he doesn't want to run images of his CDs from the external HDD, he wants to install them to there instead of in the program files folder on his c:/ drive.

To answer the OP, NO on both counts. It would not run as fast as playing them from the HDD and also, for most games, you won't be able to move the HDD between computers as certain registry values are installed along with the game files and these are always installed to the main boot partition which stores your OS (note: some games don't need these registry values, some will simply run from the exe)

I'd advise NOT using an external HDD for playing games, unless the drive is eSATA

Den_M · 21-10-2007 10:58pm

Thanks L31mr0d, I just bought a 500gb one a few mins ago from Dabs, will stick my music etc on there but will leave the games installed on my internal drive.

grimm2005 · 22-10-2007 1:28am

ive installed and played games from my external hd fine in the past with no noticable difference and also been able to play it on more than 1 comp. although i tend to install all my games on the internal drive. don't know why, just find it handier. once i put all my music/movies etc on the ex. hd theres plenty of room left for games on the internal one

PC games on external hard drive

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