Running games off an external hard drive

[Zombiedude101]

Can it be done? Reason being is I'm really low on storage space and I'm thinking of buying a 500GB external hard drive to install games on. Specs:

i3 550 3.2 Ghz
GTX 560 (Non Ti) 1GB GDDR5
8GB DDR3 RAM

Just to note I don't want to be getting an internal hard drive as I dare not open up my PC and I can't afford to get someone to do the upgrade.

 

[Cerberus]

Installing a hard drive is the easiest thing you could possibly do to a computer.

 

[Kamendo]

yes it can be done with no problem. my dad does it.

ps gtx 560 non ti lol! ti is a lot better

 

[Ves]

I do it too. If you need help, contact me on steam and I'll walk you through it.

 

[Zombiedude101]

I'm being serious, I am scared that if I open up my PC I will fuck something up (I haven't really a gentle touch and knowing me I'll fry the motherboard with a static charge). Is it possible to run games off an external Hard Drive?

 

[posepsi]

It depends a lot on the game, as well as the hard-drive. Some will experience slight to moderate slow-down due to the increased time it takes to transfer the date from USB. I do not think you can do it with Steam games, though. Even if you do experience slow performance it is still a nice thing to have, as you can swap games you aren't playing anymore onto the external, and bring new ones onto your main HD fairly easily.

I do not recommend getting a 500gb drive, though. Go for a 1tb or larger they are quite cheap now, around 80 bucks when I got mine a few months back. You should have room for pretty much all the movies, games, and music you can (reasonably) place on it.

Source: i used to play most my games off of an external HD

 

[RyKay]

I have to say yes. I have a 1T harddrive hooked up to a USB docking bay that I installed steam to. All my games run fine and I haven't experienced a slow down of anything.

 

[Zombiedude101]

I mean, I hear cases such as this one where you can run games off of portable hard drives with little to no issues (Guild Wars for example, which is a considerably vast open gameworld).

 

[Servo Ten]

Simple storage solution: leave your games on your hard drive. Transfer all other file crap to the external.

 

[blooregardo]

I use a macbook, so I have a small windows partition set aside for games. Gmod being the memory-intensive game it is, I used to have to run it off of an external drive in order to play it before it was ported to Mac OS X. It worked fine for me on gmod, but when I tried to run newer games like Deus Ex HR it'd occasionally crash while being run from an external drive ( I know that was the problem because it worked fine when I ran it from the windows partition. I'm not sure if that's just because of the nature of my external drive or not.
It'll most likely work.