External vs Internal speed question...

[monster.under.thebed]

If i was to get an external harddrive and just use it to put games on it (instead of having to reinstall them on other computers) would they load just as fast from an external hdd?

also, could i play games on an external hdd from any computer just as long as it has capable hardware?


thanks

 

[Gorankar]

External usb drives are generaly far slower than modern internal drives.. Well the interface is slower anyway.. Yes you could install your games on an external drive and have them work, but, No they would not be portable to other computers in that way.. The install program for most games makes changes to your registry and to the games own config files that would generaly preclude you from just unplugging the drive and hooking it up to another computer..

 

[monster.under.thebed]

External usb drives are generaly far slower than modern internal drives.. Well the interface is slower anyway.. Yes you could install your games on an external drive and have them work, but, No they would not be portable to other computers in that way.. The install program for most games makes changes to your registry and to the games own config files that would generaly preclude you from just unplugging the drive and hooking it up to another computer..

oh, but wouldnt that be cool if you could? *inventors* ...but thanks so much for the detailed reply!

 

[drizzt81]

you could bring the installer on the external hdd. An eSATA disk ought to be as fast as its internal counterpart. USB/ Firewire400 drives are certainly interface limited.

 

[JBavousett]

Actually, you kind of can do this...you need to do two things though. The external drive needs to have the same drive letter on each PC you use it on, and you will need to install the game on each PC you're going to play them on...just make sure that you use that external drive and the same folder for the install location each time.

 

[zandor]

First things first, it will be slower to load. The reduction in speed could be anything from about half to too small to notice though. If it's a seek-heavy game you might not notice much. If it's doing a long sequential read of some big data file it'll be slower.
A good number of games won't have a fit if you run them on a different machine than the one they were installed on. However, it *will* be hit and miss, and I have no clue on the frequency of either. Some will bitch (or just crash without notice) about the registry, some will bitch about drive letters (though you can work around that), and some will just work. You may also have other problems, like the game bitching about a different vid card or something. I vaguely recall some game (forgot which) that spent several minutes "converting textures" after I did a vid card upgrade. I'm thinking that game would be really annoying on a USB/Firewire drive. No clue if it'll puke over missing registry entries though.
It really depends on how the game developers do things. A lot of games just skip the registry and use config files.
As for what will work and what won't, I only have evidence on one game. Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines doesn't depend on the registry. I don't know if it cares about drive letters. Back when I was playing it I was using XP64 as my main OS, and it wouldn't install on XP64. So I installed it on XP 32-bit, then ran it on XP64 and it worked just fine. Apparently the installer has some brain-damaged OS version checking code.