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Portable Hard drive Q
I have pretty low memory on my comp like 80gb all together.... with bout 7 gigs of music and a couple of movies + few games n random docs I sit around 2-5 gb at all times I am really in the need for more memory.
My aunt is getting rid of her 250 gb portable hard drive and said that if I wanted it I could have it, and I was like cool (h) but any ways I was wondering if I install games like warcraft 3/ Cs Source/ Half life ect would there be any difference compared to playing them if they were installed on a pc?
If thats TLDR
Games on a portable hard drive would they work the same as if they were installed on my acctual pc?
Comments
They work fine off a portable hard drive.
The load times will be limited by the USB 2.0 speed but you probably won't notice a difference on your system because the demand of loading a game bounces back and forth between the CPU and the HD, if you have a sort of slow CPU then the HD has time to catch up anyway.
I do use a portable drive to play games on a laptop all the time and it works well.
If your PC is pretty old and only supports USB 1.0 then there's no chance though.. but USB 2.0 has been standard for quite a while
While you can do it, I'd recommend moving media to the external and keeping games on the internal. Load times will be effing terrible from an external HD unless it's using eSATA.
On another note, data space is cheap, you can get another 500gb drive from newegg for like 50$ now.
Now with 57.3% more flames!
If you're going to be playing older games like you mentioned it should work fine. However, expect some longer load times if you try to play some newer games. (They tend to be much MUCH larger) If you want to play newer games eventually, then I'd recommend installing a new drive. They can be bought fairly cheap and are easy enough to install yourself, even if you're new with computers.
Definitely recommend moving the media to the portable drive, though, and save the internal drive for the games.
www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx <----Check this here.
Those are good suggestions, but after thinking about it, it's possible that old 80GB hard drive wouldn't outperform a newer external drive.. That 80GB is ~8 years old and drives back then were only hitting ~30MB/s, that newer 250GB @ 5400rpm should be hitting 45MB/s (random read pattern not sequential~).
Also, the difference in game load time between a Raptor and a standard drive is like 3 seconds and that 3 seconds really comes from the improved access time rather than the improved throughput. I think the external drive would add on another 3-6 seconds over a modern drive (but likely faster than that old 80gb).. Obv it'd still be way slower at installing or copying vs a modern drive.
I dunno.. doesn't really matter anyway you're getting it for free and can test it out yourself