Do games work from external HDDs

[Paul R]

My friend gave me a game installed on an external HDD, is it supposed to work on my PC even though it's was not installed on the HDD using my PC? 

[vanished]

They can run from it yes, but in most cases you will have to install it to that location.  If you install it on one machine and then just take that drive to another, it probably won't work since the installer lays down files in places other than the drive itself that are needed for operation.  Of course there are exceptions but this is generally the case.

 

If you were to install it to that drive on one machine and then take it to another where you installed it to the same drive again, it would then work on both machines, even though you only have one copy of the game files.

[Paul R]

Can you please explain the last paragraph of your answer briefly?

[Mira Yurizaki]

If the game needs a DRM platform to run, like Steam, UPlay, or Origin, then it needs the DRM platform installed before you can run it (assuming you also have access to an account that owns the game)

 

Otherwise, depending on what other DRM scheme it's using, it likely doesn't need to be installed per se.

[ILiketoMobit]

I tried running the original titanfall on an external drive. It sometimes worked without installing.

[Stefan Payne]

9 hours ago, Paul R said:

My friend gave me a game installed on an external HDD, is it supposed to work on my PC even though it's was not installed on the HDD using my PC? 

If it is a steam game and a stream libary folder, yeah, should work, if you have a license for the Game in your Steam Account.

And possibly Games bought/downloaded from Gog.com.

 

Besides that, most games needs to be installed for whatever reason and don't work...

[LogicalDrm]

Loading times will be looong as drives are usually slow and USB connection is not that fast either. But if game is from Steam etc. and you have bought it, you certainly can play it. Or if you have rights for it from family share or something like that.

[Stefan Payne]

6 hours ago, LoGiCalDrm said:

Loading times will be looong as drives are usually slow and USB connection is not that fast either.

Ähm, USB3.0 is like 150MB/sec or so. That's not that slow.

So its not slower than Internal S-ATA.
With USB 2.0 you might be right though.

[LogicalDrm]

13 hours ago, Stefan Payne said:

Ähm, USB3.0 is like 150MB/sec or so. That's not that slow.

So its not slower than Internal S-ATA.
With USB 2.0 you might be right though.

I did some testing with drives I have. Now, I'm not sure whether external HDD I got is 7200rpm or 5400rpm. Its USB3, and I don't have 2.5" 7200 HDD available for further testing. Just old 5400rpm SATA1. But with CrystalDiskMark that external HDD has real speeds close to SATA2. Not slow, but not fast either. Loading times with larger games will be noticeable. SATA3 is 50MB/s faster. SSD on USB3 is twice the speed of HDD. (Got interesting reading from Samsung 840 EVO on SATA3. Nearing to theoretical max speed...)

[Stefan Payne]

Yeah, Transfer Speed of USB3.0 isn't an issue at all.

 

It takes a bit more CPU though, sadly.

Firewire was better in this regard. 

[vanished]

On 5/4/2018 at 8:14 AM, LoGiCalDrm said:

Loading times will be looong as drives are usually slow and USB connection is not that fast either. But if game is from Steam etc. and you have bought it, you certainly can play it. Or if you have rights for it from family share or something like that.

USB 2.0 was 480 Mbit/s, but due to overhead you were lucky to see much past half that in the real world, so I usually consider 30 MB/s the top, even if it's possible to get up to maybe 36 on a good day.  So yes, definitely not enough.

 

However, USB 3.0 is 5 Gbit/s or more (there and 10 and 20 Gbit/s versions).  Even if we consider the 5 Gbit/s version, and even if it also is ~50% wasted on overhead (which I believe is no longer an issue), that's still over 300 MB/s - well beyond what any HDD I'm aware of will do.  I don't suspect you'll find any bottleneck there for that reason.

[Stefan Payne]

8 hours ago, Ryan_Vickers said:

USB 2.0 was 480 Mbit/s, but due to overhead you were lucky to see much past half that in the real world, so I usually consider 30 MB/s the top, even if it's possible to get up to maybe 36 on a good day.  So yes, definitely not enough

Whoa, 30MB/sec over USB2.0??
How did you get that??
 

25MB/sec, maybe 27 is the most I coud get out of my shit

[vanished]

Just now, Stefan Payne said:

Whoa, 30MB/sec over USB2.0??
How did you get that??
 

25MB/sec, maybe 27 is the most I coud get out of my shit

depends on the device, storage, controller, etc.  It's somewhere in that ballpark, but I have (rarely) seen slightly over 30 sustained for long enough to know it wasn't a fluke in reading or something like that.