Gaming on USB 3 external drive

[tfcbarreto]

Hi guys. 

I have a laptop with very limited storage, and I'm also very limited on a budget. I'm considering installing some games on the external hard drive that I have (USB3) Can I do it and what performance impact I can expect?

I'm a amateur photographer so the internal drive is occupied with editing software. Buying a new SSD or HDD is out of the question for the moment because I'm tour guide and due to current situation I became unemployed about one year ago. 

I game on my son's computer now and then but I would love to play with him on multiplayer.

I would like to install battlefield 5, RTS games, and so on...

[Electronics Wizardy]

Yea a usb external hdd will work fine for games, usb won't raelly affect speeds on a hdd much.

[GuiltySpark_]

It'll work, console people have been doing it for years. You'll suffer from longer load times and maybe some occasional hiccup's in gameplay as gamedata streams in and the nature of USB can sometimes interrupt that momentarily. 

 

Not ideal but you can do it.

[Chris Pratt]

Sure. This is actually pretty common. A lot of people put their Steam libraries on an external drive, so they can take their library from computer to computer. Linus does this constantly, especially when live on stream, so the audience doesn't have to wait for a game to download to test the build or whatever.

 

USB 3.0 is perfectly capable of utilizing an HDD at max speed (150MB/s), so at the worst, it's no different than running it off an internal HDD. If you get an external SSD, and you have USB 3.2 ports, you can get anywhere from 1000-2000MB/s, which is slower than an internal NVMe SSD, but still faster than an internal SATA SSD, and you can't really notice the difference between loads times in games between SATA and NVMe as it is.