External Hard Drive Help

[Braaterz]

So I have a pc game that I want to be able to play on my laptop, however I don't want to install on my laptop's hard drive because it will slow it down considerably which would be inconvenient for school purposes (which is what my laptop is for in the first place) so I wanted to ask before I go spend $150 on an external hard drive if it is possible to install a game onto an external hard drive so i can access it from there and not have it take up any space on my computers hard drive...thanks to anyone who can help

[OcR Envy]

Hmmn good question. It all depends on the game really. Try to install the game and see if it gives you the option to choose the installation directory. If it does then the answer is yes. If it doesn't then the answer is no.

[OcR ROCKETR]

I'm almost positive that you can...but here's the problem. The game is going to run a lot slower than usual unless you were able to get an external hard drive that has eSATA which uses the same interface as your internal hard drive.

USB and FireWire are considerably slower than the SATA interface. USB 2.0 runs at a spec'd 480 Mbps with FireWire at 400 Mbps. SATA 2 on the other hand can run up to 3.0 Gbps. Now, with all of that realized, we know that you don't get up to that speed, but it's still a considerable difference.

If the price is not really an issue then I'd try to find a little more expensive eSATA drive.

[Braaterz]

game speed wouldn't be a huge issue for me, but the one i was looking at says it has dual eSata and USB 2.0 interfaces...another question since I have no idea what eSata is haha...is the hook-up any different to connect it to my computer or would a standard laptop have the necessary hook-up points

[TheTrojanBunny]

Well, you could just have an internal HD, which would be cheaper, put it into a USB Enclosure, and have that with a USB or Firewire cord that goes into your laptop. But as for speeds....I don't really know...I just know how to set one of these up...

[OcR ROCKETR]

The speed on USB and FireWire usually aren't sufficient for a task such as gaming. They just don't have the bandwidth for it.

The only problem with eSATA for you with the laptop is that you more than likely won't have the proper "hook-up" for it. If you had a desktop then you could just buy a PCI Express card, but I'm not exactly sure what you could do on a laptop...