gaming and external hard drives

Mal-Adjusted

maybe a silly question but is it possible to install and play a game off of an external hard drive or would it have to be on the C drive?

i'm conscious of filling up my hard drive but don't fancy constantly having to uninstall/re-installall the time.

jos22

yes just create a steam library on one and install games on it,

Digital Solitude

Yeah you can do that. Might be handier to add another hard drive, for disconnect, losing the external or speed issues.

You could also keep the library on your C drive, and keep backups of your games on the external drive

TheDoc

Depends on the external drive. You might well suffer performance issues unless you have a really good external hard drive, as the read/write speeds and transfer speeds across USB can be slow.

I personally try to avoid this.

I have a 120GB SSD that is my "Blizzard Drive". Stores Blizz games like WoW, Diablo etc. Blizzard games are plug and play (in that I can put that stuff onto an external, load onto another pc, and it will run immediately without an install) so I keep them to a seperate SSD and backup to my NAS once a month.

I've a 256GB SSD for my C drive that holds my programmes, OS and Steam library. I keep my Steam library slim, only keeping games I'm currently playing installed ( 250mb UPC helps with this I guess)

I'd say you are probably best just buying a new HDD. While storage prices crept up the last few years, SSD prices have come down and are always on sale. HDD prices arn't too bad either, with a 1TB drive costing maybe €50-60 quid.

Shouldn't really be any excuses anymore for running out of space, unless it's an SSD filling up.

My 256GB SSD is creeping towards capacity, and when I do a fresh Windows 10 install this summer going to look at what I'm doing with my storage in my PC.

Going to keep my C drive with just OS and Steam (256GB SSD)
D drive with Blizzard stuff and maybe put Origins games on there ( 128GB SSD)
And normal programmes and anyting else onto my E drive (1TB HDD)

As prices continue to plummit on SSD's, will probably upgrade the D drive, and I guess the goal for maybe next years upgrades is to have two 512GB's running as my C and D

Mal-Adjusted

Sorry, i should have mentioned, I do most of my gaming on my laptop. (my old one died and i needed a new laptop more than a serious gaming rig) so no tower to just add extra hard drives. at the time, i never thought i'd fill up 500 gb.

Digital Solitude

1tb Laptop drive is about €80 to upgrade if you wanted, but in that case an external drive is a good bet

ScumLord

You're going to be restricted by whatever ports are available on your laptop. I would guess it won't have a sata port, if it had you may not notice any extended loading times. If you're on USB 3 you might not be too bad either. But if you have older USB ports you could be looking at long loading times.

Would the drive letter become an issue if the laptop doesn't assign the same letter each time it's plugged in?

A bigger internal drive would be cheaper and faster.

jos22

ScumLord wrote: »

You're going to be restricted by whatever ports are available on your laptop. I would guess it won't have a sata port, if it had you may not notice any extended loading times. If you're on USB 3 you might not be too bad either. But if you have older USB ports you could be looking at long loading times.

Would the drive letter become an issue if the laptop doesn't assign the same letter each time it's plugged in?

A bigger internal drive would be cheaper and faster.

the drive letter change would mean you just need to point steam to the right HDD again and it would find the files and load up your library again

Turtwig

It's quite simple: store your games and back-up libraries on external hard drives. Store the games you're going to play on an internal SSD.