• Playing games on an external hard disk drive
    20 replies, posted
I'm just wondering, does games played on an external hard disk drive that uses two USB 2.0 connectors to power itself up runs slower than those on internal hard disk? What about External Hard Disk Drives that uses external power source? Do they run slow too?
The games themselves won't run any slower but it'll take longer to load maps ect.
^ That. I have my games installed to my 500gb internal, and moved all movies, music, and assorted crap onto my 1tb external.
[QUOTE=FINLEY;21346344]The games themselves won't run any slower but it'll take longer to load maps ect.[/QUOTE] Like stated here, the games will run fine, loading will just take longer as its on a slower and slightly limited connection.
Any game that streams the map (Oblivion, Just Cause 2, GTAIV, many others) will run extremely slow. There's also the possibility of heat issues. It's strongly recommended that you don't run games from an external drive and just install another internal one should you need the space. eSATA drives are an exception to the speed issue, but it will still most likely run too hot on passive cooling alone.
If you want to install games onto an external with steam just install steam and replace the drive letter with whatever the external is.
Just thought I would point out that I have Just Cause 2 running from my external and it's flawless, no long load times, and extremely good FPS in-game. And that's a taxing open-world game, to be sure.
[QUOTE=Tickle;21364428]Just thought I would point out that I have Just Cause 2 running from my external and it's flawless, no long load times, and extremely good FPS in-game. And that's a taxing open-world game, to be sure.[/QUOTE] Is it eSATA though?
So does this means graphic intensive games runs slower on external drives? What about older games like counterstrike and battlefield 1942?
[QUOTE=BCell;21365443]So does this means graphic intensive games runs slower on external drives? What about older games like counterstrike and battlefield 1942?[/QUOTE] just need to check something, you're not blind are you? you know how to read English? no nasty habits of making threads then not reading them?
My Ubuntu install is on an external drive and it plays Garry's Mod and CS:S through Wine decently from the same drive. It only affects load times, as others have said.
I had my entire Steam collection on a 500GB USB2 drive, it worked like a charm. Even Oblivion and Fallout 3 ran pretty well.
i was wondering the exact same thing, thanks for the thread.
[QUOTE=BCell;21365443]So does this means graphic intensive games runs slower on external drives? What about older games like counterstrike and battlefield 1942?[/QUOTE] No, it means it will run fine, because the maps will have to be loaded into your Ram anyway, it'll just take longer to load them into RAM, games like GTAIV don't load the entire map into RAM at once, which means every time you get near the edge of what's loaded, your External disk will start spinning up again and you'll have to wait an age to get the next little bit of map, so don't use those games on the disk, otherwise it's fine.
The external drive is slower because it needs 12V+5V(internal hard drives and most external hard drives use this kind of voltage). One USB port only delivers 5V of power. Even if you connect the drive into two USB ports, you still don't have enough power for the maximum performance of the disk
I run plenty of games off my external USB2.0 hard drive, and they all work fine, including Just Cause 2. I've never noticed any issues with it. Although my External is just a desktop harddrive in an external enclosure, and I have to plug it into a wall. Not sure if that makes a difference.
[QUOTE=QuAtT;21368049]The external drive is slower because it needs 12V+5V(internal hard drives and most external hard drives use this kind of voltage). One USB port only delivers 5V of power. Even if you connect the drive into two USB ports, you still don't have enough power for the maximum performance of the disk[/QUOTE] Speed isn't associated with the voltage, if the enclosure is only using 5V USB as power then it is using a 2.5" laptop hard drive which only requires 5V. The speed is limited by the USB connection.
You can the speed difference would be almost unnoticeable. With GTA 4 and an external drive yes the game's map is streamed from the drive but it doesn't load when you come to the edge of the current space it loads in front of your character. More then one area is loaded at a time when you enter another area the direction you're traveling in would load an area in that direction passively and not all at once. This can cause problems. 1. When you are traveling faster in the game then areas are being loaded you will experience an empty see through plain wile it's loaded, but your fps won't be effected because of the gradual load so you'll be running around hitting things you can't see. 2. If your harddrive is really bad then you will rarely actually see the world if you're traveling. It'll be a see through mess. You will however still be able to move freely wile it's loading. This is the way GTA series has been since SA. SA was really noticeable to me because I'd fly low to the ground as fast as possible with the jet and crash into things before their visible model was loaded. In GTA 4 It's still visible when driving extremely fast for long distances. This is why there is just enough traffic to annoy the player. This is also why there isn't any flyable jets the engine can't load the world fast enough so you don't crash into invisible objects. [editline]03:30PM[/editline] In normal games that load the whole map in one go it'd just take a couple of seconds more to finish putting that shit into the ram. Apart from that the game would run fine.
USB 3.0 a go-go. cant wait for it.
USB 3.0 is already out, isn't it? I've seen it on a couple mobo's and a couple devices down at my local computer store
Since the game is probably optimized for consoles, as most are these days, it's loading (Usually) off a DVD, which I think is pretty slow compared to a USB 2.0 hard drive.
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