Playing POE with an External Hard Drive? Good or Bad idea?

[Chii Heartbeat]

Lategame when there's tons of enemies coming at me will I have an fps drop or gameplay issues?

I have a Western Digital My Passport.

[Grumpy]

Hard drives influence the loading times not the FPS

but your loading times will probably increase, especially on 2.0 USB

just curious, but why not make space on the internal disk?

[Chii Heartbeat]

The internal disk is full and steam loves to update poe with 10gb space occupied for a 3gb patch for example (in POE's case).

[The_Driver]

Originally posted by Chi:

The internal disk is full and steam loves to update poe with 10gb space occupied for a 3gb patch for example (in POE's case).

If that is what bothers you, switch to the standalone. A fresh installation of the standalone is around 1.5 GB smaller even.

Also:
Steams knowledge-base advises against installing games/libraries onto external drives due to some problems that might arise from it (as steam expects devices to be writable and external devices might disconenct etc).

[Chii Heartbeat]

I just installed POE on the external hard drive and it has fps problems when I click on enemies. I guess the game doesn't like external hard drives. It happens many times after the map was loaded. Weird, because I can play Elder Scrolls Online just fine on it.

[Tydo]

Mostly, don't run games off a regular external harddrive.
If it is on USB3, you might not see a big downgrade, but external hardrives are frequently lower performance 2.5" drives. On USB2 you should not do it.

A SSD in a USB3 external enclosure, hooked up to a UBS3 port (USB3 ports are blue, vs black for USB2) might be pretty good, specially if you have laptop and are unable/unwilling to replace the HDD in that with a SDD.
In that case you could be seeing a huge improvement over the internal HDD.

[Grumpy]

this

Originally posted by Chi:

The internal disk is full and steam loves to update poe with 10gb space occupied for a 3gb patch for example (in POE's case).

dont answer that question:

Originally posted by Grumpy:

just curious, but why not make space on the internal disk?

-----------

Originally posted by Chi:

I just installed POE on the external hard drive and it has fps problems when I click on enemies. I guess the game doesn't like external hard drives. It happens many times after the map was loaded. Weird, because I can play Elder Scrolls Online just fine on it.

what the rest of your hardware (CPU, GPU, RAM, OS)?

[Chii Heartbeat]

My USB port is blue if that helps, maybe it is 3.0 or not.
I can run the game just fine from an internal without fps drops.

[Tydo]

Originally posted by Grumpy:

Hard drives influence the loading times not the FPS

Come on, you have been here long enough to know better than trying to split hairs like that.
POE does a lot of on-demand loading, it is not like it caches the whole 12gig file when it starts up. It does not even just cache the whole maparea and all the mobs in it (and the effects used by you and them).
So, loading times do matter because the game pauses the rendering to wait for the needed assets to load, essentially giving you zero fps while that happens.
So, HDD or for that matter SDD does matter for FPS *until it has been loaded*, which is often in combat or when pulling a pack.

[HostileLogOut]

you should never play on a External drive.. it will BE SLOW. since USB 3 can't transfer that fast. and you will get laggy times.. since the drive is to slow.

[Manthexxx]

I just returned to POE on a normal hard drive (coming from SSD) and it's slow man. Can't imagine what external would be like. It takes about 3 minutes to load in all skill effects xD

[Lockness]

No, games should always be installed on an SSD and your main drive should always be an SSD as well. Old plater drives should be for archiving only.

[Lagwin1980]

Originally posted by Grumpy:

Hard drives influence the loading times not the FPS

but your loading times will probably increase, especially on 2.0 USB

just curious, but why not make space on the internal disk?

Yes but also no.

the main difrence is going to be load times, BUT this will manifest in game as stutter becuase not everyting that may be needed is loaded(which to most uninformed people look like the frame rates tanking)