Computers & Networking

[gentnerdunn]

Hey, this is for anyone to answer lol. But I have an external hardrive for my computer. And the computer itself is a little slow. I was wondering if I were to buy a computer game of some kind, could I download it to the external hardrive and play it from there no problem?

[ABomb]

I do not believe you can. BUT if you can, your computer will still run slowly. The speed is a matter of different things including, RAM, processor speed, and graphics card.

[Nokia]

You should have no problem doing that, but unless you're running out of space on your internal drives, why? Doing this won't make it run any faster, and could actually slow it down.

[Neihn Valued Contributor]

It is generally not recommend to install and play games from a external hard drive. Applications are perfectly fine because they dont require the interactive use of the hard drive that most games require. In most cases it slows the games down. Specially ones that constantly read or write to the hard drive. Loading times are usually longer and you may even notice occasional freezing from your hard drive not being able to keep up. If at all possible I would look at adding a second internal hard drive.

[asandwhich]

What they said and sometimes the software needs to be installed on a NTFS formatted drive while many external drives run a FAT system. I would check first. Most external hard drives are used for backup and therefor don't have very high speeds. Im going to have to say your computer has a faster hard drive speed, so you'd be better off playing on the internal hdd.

[CrimsonRain]

Technically, you can but it is not recommended and necessary. A slow computer doesn't always means it's the hard drive's fault. Maybe your RAM is a bit low. Maybe you have too many programs running in the background. Your hard drive could be failing or heavily fragmented. It's unnecessary because your hard drive only stores the games/applications and accesses it when you execute the program. When it's up and running, however, it is run from your RAM.

[Entropy]

Pretty much any internal hard drive newer than 2002 or so will be able to outperform a USB2 external hard drive.

eSATA might be a different story, but you're better off just getting a nice 7200 RPM internal hard drive in that case.

As others have said, hard drive speed is unlikely to be the root cause of your problems anyway.  A faster hard drive will improve level load times (FPSes and such) and zone load times (MMORPGs) , but that is about it.