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Author Topic: Will games slow down in performance if you run it from an external drive?  (Read 3649 times)

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Offline Alfonse

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Recently, I just purchased a 1 terabyte Western Digital external HDD because I am in desperate need for space on my laptop. I was thinking, what would happen if I decide to install games on it and run it directly off the HDD? Would performance take a hit?

Additionally, any tips of taking care of this black brick to prevent any data loss or whatever?
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Offline ShinMasaki

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Well, I run a few games from an external myself. All of them are low requirement games like visual novels, the sims (original) and a couple doujin games (suzumiya haruhi no gekidou is teh lols) but I see no drop in performance for them. I suppose if you are playing a faster game you would see a difference due to the necessity of the data transfer vs it being directly on the computer itself. I just transferred all my media (pics, doujins, music, videos, etc) to my external freeing up tons of space on my computer itself for my more system heavy games.
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Offline LoliSauce

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Well, with usb2 and everything, it shouldn't really affect it that much. 

Anyway, slightly off topic, Western Digital are known for being exceptionally unreliable harddrives at exceptionally cheap price.  I hope you've gotten a warranty or something on it.
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Offline Draku

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Anyway, slightly off topic, Western Digital are known for being exceptionally unreliable harddrives at exceptionally cheap price.  I hope you've gotten a warranty or something on it.
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also yeah, if you run low-requirement games there's not much of a difference but loading times on the more recent games and more recent games in general will run slower.

Offline Alfonse

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Well, with usb2 and everything, it shouldn't really affect it that much. 

Anyway, slightly off topic, Western Digital are known for being exceptionally unreliable harddrives at exceptionally cheap price.  I hope you've gotten a warranty or something on it.

Three years.  :mystery:
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Offline Sh1k1

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Yeah, WD tends to let you down at the worst of moments. And yeah, as long as you're plugging the drive to an USB2 port (or even better yet, a FireWire port) none of your games should hit a performance snag.
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Offline abitofBaileys

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I've had two external HDDs of Western Digital and both of them didn't survive for more than 8 months. This may be because the ones I had got the power from within the USB port. Though, there are ones with an external power supply.

And I wasn't overusing them, really.

Offline Tempered

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well so far my 80gb USB powered WD is going on a year and a half and my 150gb one is at 6 months. Though I do fear for an untimely death from my 80gb sooner or later because the only way I can access the files is by using autorun.
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Offline llama_egg

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My WD HDD is still running well and I've had it for over a year. Also, if you have the room, just open up the case and hook up the HDD internally  :psyduck:
« Last Edit: March 05, 2009, 03:17:19 AM by llama_egg »

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I've had worse luck with Seagate (INSTANT DRIVE DEATH) than WD. :psyduck:
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Offline Sh1k1

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well so far my 80gb USB powered WD is going on a year and a half and my 150gb one is at 6 months. Though I do fear for an untimely death from my 80gb sooner or later because the only way I can access the files is by using autorun.
Your drive is probably infected by some kind of crap that doesn't let you enter the drive normally. Run an antivirus on it; I can almost guarantee you'll find a virus lodged inside the Autorun.inf file located in the drive root. (You can open it with a text editor, you know. :P)
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Offline NinjaNero

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If you are running IDE on your computer then USB2 on the external should be fine, firewire should be superior.The options are best in top to bottom order
SCSI
Sata
eSata
Firewire
USB2
IDE
USB1
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Offline Alfonse

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Another question - can anyone recommend a utility for backing up my computer's hard disk on an external drive? I might need a reformat soon.
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Offline NinjaNero

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Another question - can anyone recommend a utility for backing up my computer's hard disk on an external drive? I might need a reformat soon.
Personally i just copy documents and settings and any saves and other folders you created, if your worried get robocopy..
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