is an external hardrive fast enough for gaming?

[wannabeapilot]

ok well my 80 gig hard drive is running out of space quickly so i was planning on getting an external one

but i need to know if i hook it up through usb will it be fast enough for playing games?

p.s i also have a firewire and express card slot

 

[bbz_Ghost]

Why don't you get a new drive, like a 250GB external, then use some drive copying software to move everything from the internal 80 to the external 250, then remove the 250 from the external case, remove the 80 internal, replace it with the 250, then you'd have a 250 in your machine and the 80 now becomes a spare for extra storage space in the external?

If you've got a laptop, obviously this might not work. But then again, there are 200GB laptop drives nowadays... soooooo...

External drives are just like internal ones with respect to gaming: the load times, and that's it. Once the game is loaded, the only thing you worry about with respect to the games is loading additional levels, etc. Most external drives can easily do 30-40MB per second so... it's really a non-issue.

EDIT:
Duh, you said Express Card so yes, you have a laptop. You can still do the swap, it's not that difficult. Just find a large capacity laptop drive to swap for, or... since that's a fairly pricey swap, perhaps just getting an external USB 2.0 drive would be best, then installing all your games on that. Just give it a shot and experiment, if you find a game that does seem to suffer on the external, do some moving around so you can install it on the internal.