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Question

External Hard drive for Gaming

Jul 24, 2015 10:49AM PDT

My parents bought me a Laptop this year that is a mix of both a school laptop and a gaming one. When I started buying games on steam I started to run out of room on my hard drive. I was wondering how badly the a usb port would suffer if i played games from a external hard drive.

Discussion is locked

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Clarification Request
How big is that hard drive?
Jul 24, 2015 10:59AM PDT

It sounds strange that a game would eat up all your hard drive's space? Is your C: drive partitioned? Maybe you just need to repartition or delete some files from C:. However, you can buy an external USB 3 1TB hard drive for around $60 and it will have good performance IF your laptop has USB 3.

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Responce
Jul 24, 2015 11:27AM PDT

Its not one game its quite a few and i have two drives one ssd thats for the core of the computer and one terabite harddrive thats almost full. I want to know will it kill my ports if i use it for gaming.

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"Kill my ports"? What's that mean???
Jul 24, 2015 11:35AM PDT

I've never heard such a term, and I've been working with computers for a long long long time.

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(NT) responce
Jul 24, 2015 11:36AM PDT
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responce
Jul 24, 2015 11:37AM PDT

sorry wrong button i mean short the port meaning overload it or due to so much data going across the one port due to gaming being demanding on the hard drive. Will it decrease the life of the port its plugged into?
thats what i want to know.

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possible
Jul 24, 2015 11:42AM PDT

But that's dependent on the motheboard hardware and so nobody can adequately answer that for sure.

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Answer
Jul 24, 2015 11:44AM PDT

Thanks that helps i have the newest i7 so i should be good and all the other parts on the laptop are also new so it should be fine. Thanks for helping me.

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Short answer, no it won't.
Jul 24, 2015 11:43AM PDT

The only things to consider are (1) if you unplug/replug something enough, there will be some wear and tear that can eventually make the port difficult to use due to not getting a good connection. (2) If you use USB 2, you won't get anywhere near the performance you get with an internal drive. However if you use USB 3, that shouldn't be much of a problem.

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Usage
Jul 24, 2015 11:50AM PDT

The ports are all USB 3.0 and the laptop doesn't really go anywhere so it wont be unplugged often. And well I'm guessing ports will be worn out like anything used a lot. I'm more so worried about the port being completely useless in using for other things besides the external Hard Drive. so unless it will cause the port to "burn out" or "fry" then I'm not too worried about using the external drive.

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Answer
ANSWER
Jul 27, 2015 1:44AM PDT

Hi there.

It's possible to install some games on the external drive, but I won't recommend to do it since you may experience some problems with the OS due to the registry keys of the games. Even if you decide to do so, keep in mind that the game would take longer to load and it would be slower to load maps/levels compared to SATA since the USB 3.0 bandwidth is not as fast as the one of the internal SATA ports. There's no sure way to say how fast exactly it will be, but basically the maximum bandwidth of USB 3.0 is 4.8 Gb/s, or around 600 MB/s, which is quite slow for gaming and may cause lag spikes.

Lastly about moving the Steam, you can take a look at this Steam KB article where they do not recommend to move the Steam installation to an external drive because of potential performance issues you may experience:

https://support.steampowered.com/kb_article.php?ref=7418-YUBN-8129

Hope this helps.

Cheers! Happy