USB 2.0 EXTERNAL HARD DRIVE FOR GAMES

[Khan Baba]

Hey there just a quick question. I found a USB 2.0 external hard drive is my house the other day. I'm just wondering if it is able to run games like insurgency,warframe and csgo?
Thanks.

[DirtyFishy]

Yes but I wouldn't recommend it.

[Stephanie J]

Ursprungligen skrivet av Steam:

External Hard Drives
External hard drives are not recommended for use with Steam or Steam's games. Aside from many potential performance issues, external hard drives may connect or disconnect from the computer at inopportune times as part of their normal operations. If you encounter this issue with an external drive, install Steam and your games to an internal drive instead.

[Satoru]

1) You 'can' do this
2) Steam does not officially support installing libraries on external drives
3) usb 2.0 is VERY slow. You will in the best case scenario, exeperience very long load times
4) USB and external drives will tend to 'disconnect' from the host on occasion. If the steam client detects on of these blips, it will declare the entire library uninstalled. This means you will likely frequenly see many games as 'uninstalled 'on your system
5) Remember how usb 2.0 is very slow, even re-verifying the game so it doesn't have ot redownload will take FOREVER

[Levi]

Ursprungligen skrivet av HardKore47:

Hey there just a quick question. I found a USB 2.0 external hard drive is my house the other day. I'm just wondering if it is able to run games like insurgency,warframe and csgo?
Thanks.

The question i'd have for you is, why would someone want to do that?

The main drive is recommended.

[tacoshy]

I As a hardware tech can easily recommend eHDD's unlike steam but because I know how to utilize it as good as any other interal drive. But you need a 3.5" 7200RPM HD D + USB 3.0 or 3.1 encasing. USB 2 has a transfer rate of ~40MB/s while a self build eHDD can easily go up 200MB/s.

[Hannibal]

If I were you buy a cheap usb 3.1 pci card, swap the hard drive from the usb 2.0 enclosure to a usb 3.0 enclosure. Games will run fine, within reason. Dont expect like the latest AAA titles to run smmothly but anything early to pre 2017 to do okay. Load times will take longer but once running the game will run fine. So basically what tacoshy said ;). Ive 6 usb 3.0 drives running pre 2017 games fine. 4 normal sata drives run all the current stuff. Youtube will show you how to open the usb drives. Amazon sells the external empty enclosures for 28.00.