[Bad.boy!]

If I put a game on an external HDD, is it still playable? My pc lags at games like IV already and I don't want to make things worse.
I have a Lacie HDD, and for big files it copies things up to 25 mb/s

[nightwalker83]

It should be although, I have never done it before except for Steam games. I just use my external drives for backup.

[sivispacem]

The data transfer rate, even through USB 3.0, is nowhere near that of SATA. I wouldn't expect a great deal of stability running larger games from an external hard drive.

[Bad.boy!]

QUOTE (sivispacem @ Saturday, Jun 2 2012, 10:05)

The data transfer rate, even through USB 3.0, is nowhere near that of SATA. I wouldn't expect a great deal of stability running larger games from an external hard drive.

Smaller games should be ok then? Because I have about 30 gb left for max payne 3, if my pc runs it in the first place.
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Does anyone know what to do to prevent my laptop from overheating? If I play games outside games start to lag because the pc is just to hot. I can only play high spec game on a glass table, wood or anything else heats to fast up.

[Gareth Croke]

QUOTE (Bad.boy! @ Saturday, Jun 2 2012, 13:37)

Does anyone know what to do to prevent my laptop from overheating? If I play games outside games start to lag because the pc is just to hot. I can only play high spec game on a glass table, wood or anything else heats to fast up.

Laptop cooling options are very hard to sort out. There are mats/risers which you can get which have built in fans which can circulate cool air around the base of the laptop.

Something like this would do.

Just remember that most of them will need either use batteries, power through a cable or plugged into a spare USB slot.

As for internal fans this is extremely tricky if not impossible due to physical size restrictions within the case.

[Ryan]

QUOTE (Bad.boy! @ Saturday, Jun 2 2012, 09:37)

QUOTE (sivispacem @ Saturday, Jun 2 2012, 10:05) The data transfer rate, even through USB 3.0, is nowhere near that of SATA. I wouldn't expect a great deal of stability running larger games from an external hard drive. Because I have about 30 gb left for max payne 3, if my pc runs it in the first place.

If your laptop can barely handle GTA IV, don't even bother with MP3. You'll just be wasting your money. If you want to PC game, get a desktop.

As already mentioned, installing a game on an external drive isn't a good idea. Why not just buy a bigger hard drive?

[Bad.boy!]

I can also use my ps3 but the HDD is almost full too. BTW is it normal for a fat ps3 (5 years old) to sometimes crash on startup of games? GT5 is very buggy and doesn't work without the installation of 6gb. My ps3 isn't jailbroken.

[Wolf68k]

5 years of heavy enough use, any drive can start to cause problems.
I some how doubt that there is anyway within the PS3 to test the HDD, which is Sony's (and Microsoft's as well) silly mistake to not include a utility to do that.
If you can get the HDD out and some how connect it to your laptop there are a wide number of programs that you can use to test and scan the drive for issues.

[Stinky12]

QUOTE (sivispacem @ Saturday, Jun 2 2012, 08:05)

The data transfer rate, even through USB 3.0, is nowhere near that of SATA. I wouldn't expect a great deal of stability running larger games from an external hard drive.

USB 3.0 uses a different protocol than your standard USB 2.0. They're bidirectional and can achieve up to 5Gb/s,
that is faster than SATA II which tops out at 3Gb/s.
I was transfering 30GB of data from my notebook 5400 HDD to my desktop via USB 3. Average read was around 60MB/s and it took around 4 minutes to complete.
The average read of a SATA 3Gb/s is around 65MB/s so running a game on external USB 3.0 shouldn't be a problem.
The other option will be eSATA, but they take few more steps for it to work properly such as it's prefer that the eSATA port is self powered and you must enable HOT SWAP in the bios.

[Wolf68k]

Since all of the game data is loaded into the RAM before hand, in most games it doesn't matter how fast or slow the drive it. The worse that happens is that the game takes longer to load. The more RAM you have the more data that can be loaded without having to send anything to the pagefile and having to get more from the drive again.
With a game like GTA being more fluid there might be times where the game doesn't render details right away that are further in the back ground as compared to if the game was installed on an internal drive.