External Hard drive for my games?? Thread

Yea so i am quickly running out of space for my PC games....i had only 80gb on this laptop, and was thinking of getting an external hardrive...Can someone help me on a few points:

How would this affect my steam games if i was to load some games onto the external hd..(bearing in mind my steam account is on the internal HD on my laptop)...not sure how that would work??

If i was to Install a game via a cd on this potential External HD, my games would still run as though i am installing on my primary HD would they??

How does all this work??

Thanks for any help...appreciated

rambo1234

Yes for all of the above. I have an external hard drive that I use for my PC. It's pretty useful for storing and transporting a large amount of files. You just have to install the files onto that particular drive, and you can run them however you like. For faster performance, and if your computer supports it, grab a Sata2 drive, because the transfer rate is twice as much than a regular Sata1 drive, and allows a boost in performance in your laptop in a few areas. It may, however, be a little slower loading on your games, but not in an unbearable form (more like 5-10 more seconds).

Do someone research on your laptop to see if it supports it. Then, you can Google the article on how to install an external hard drive onto your laptop. I am actually planning on grabbing a laptop, so an external hard drive saves you a ton of money than buying another laptop hard drive ever will (you can get a 250gb hard drive for the price of an 80gb laptop drive).

yea thanks ippo. I wanted to grab the external as its very useful and as previously mentioned.....am running out of HD space very quickly what with all the games loaded on! I think its just a USB connection...i saw a 250gb external HD for £99....which is great i thought. Ill have to see though...the 80gb hd was £60!!
So yes in re to my steam account...How will all of that work? IE...will i have to create another steam folder for all of the mods on the new HD? Just not sure how i would go about that?
Alternatively, i suppose i could just keep the internal hard drive for steam games..and have the external for CD rom based games...LOL....how sad does that sound???

LOL
thanks in advance for your responses...

rambo1234

Just install Steam directly onto your external hard drive, and the games will load from there. I installed FEAR and Age of Empires III on there, and it worked fine.

Anything you want to save space for, transfer to the external hard drive. I think the only difference is that you'll have to update your shortcuts and when you go to install mods, direct them to the EHD, and you'll be fine.

thanks dude. Ok so is there a way to save this thread for my own use at a later stage? Or just refer to my forum profile and the threads iv started will be there right?

I am using an USB HD myself ( but one with a real IDE inside not just a plain USB HD ). To avoid the problems I made a couple of partitions on the external HD and mounted them into the file system. So for example I have two partitions, one for "Valve" and one for "Games". I simpy moved all files from "Valve" into the new partition and mounted it into the folder "Valve". The same I did with "Games". Now everytime I hook on this external HD it does not show up as a drive but inside those folders ( really a pity that micro$oft required so many years to pull of something unix knows since ages ). Games moved without reinstalling anything and without hazzles.

Hope this helps. I would suggest buying an USB Closure Box and buying a 200G HD for it. This way you can extend or exchange without buying a new USB drive every time. Some closures out there also support SATA. I have only IDE but the difference in loading times is not really worth the fuzz in my opinion.

I have a USB enclosure for a laptop HDD (meaning its small, light and portable). Granted, the drive in there is only 12gb (its mainly just used for taking stuff to and from school, not storage), so that could be another option if you want smaller portability (enclosure just hooks up with USB2, cost about 70 bucks)

Bear in mind that the games may not work if you hooked the HDD up to a different computer due to some games requiring registry entries for things like serial keys.

you will get a bottle neck running games of a ext hdd wont you

Ehh, not sure. Hi-Speed USB is around 500Mbit/s, which is a pretty damn fast transfer rate.

USB2.0 runs at 480Mbit/s maximum, but you that is limited by the reading speed of the external hard drive. It wouldn't be a bottleneck because when you load a level in a game it just loads it into RAM anyway, resulting in possibly slower load times. Coming from a laptop drive however, there mightn't be much difference.

Bah, I said 500. I was 20mbit/s off, give me a break

I don't think there'll be any huge bottlenecks unless your games are running on a reasonably lower specification machine compared to the system requirements. Providing there's a good amount of memory, then all you'll really suffer is a bit of loading time.

However, with a lot of the newer, more modern level streaming techniques that are being employed, you could find it to be a much more serious issue.

ok thanks for the confusion people...lol...only messing. Alot of helpful info.. I will consider the external HDD with the awareness that it may give me some slowdowon on loading times from my games...not an issue for more storage space and not having to send laptop to dell..useless bastards.

Hi, so yea i have now purchased a 250gb external HD for my laptop. Its a freecom external hd.

So....the purpose of this drive was to enable me to be able to install GAMES from the cd's onto it so im not taking up shit loads of space on my internal HD. So im installing a game onto the external (from cd), and it pops up at 80% saying...cannott transfer or some shit like that!!! im so pissed off and dont know what to now do!

INFO: Im sure this matters.....the external hd is FAT32 filing system, and my internal is NTFS system..does this matter?? Somone with knowledge of this please help me...is there something i need to do before it will allow me to install games through it?

INTERFACE:USB2
DATA TRANSFER RATE: 480MBITS/S

Also...How the frig do i make the laptop recognise the drive as ONE PARTICUALR LETTER ie: f:\ ??? As everytime i replug the usb in, it comes up with g then h....then i....etc etc...

please help and thanking anyone who does in advance
Rambo1234

Edited by (in order): Rambo1234, Rambo1234

Like said the best thing is to "Mount" the NTFS Volume into your file system. This way it is always at the same place. For this to work format your HD as NTFS ( I would suggest making more than one partition but this is up to you ). Then go to the Drive Manager and map the Partition of choice. Chose there not mapping to a drive letter but to a folder. Then specify the folder in your system ( I suggest "C:\Program Files\Games" or something like that ). The folder has to exist beforehand. Now everytime to plug in your drive it shows up inside this folder. This way games see also C: as the install path rejecting already one of possible causes ( sometimes other drive letters are though to be CDRom or alike causing strange behaviour ).

ok thanks...
1) did u mean to format the external hd as NTFS?
2) Also...where can i find 'drive manager' to map a partition? -update- think i found it under computer management?
3) Can u xplain why i am specifying a c:\ folder for my external hd?
So what u are saying is that when plugging in the external hd and installing cd based or steam games, the games will go into the folder on the c: but will actually save onto the external- will the games show up on my external drive though2 ?
4) How long will it take to format the external hd?its 250gb.

Sorry for all the questions but im a bit crappy with these things..thanks for your patience and i truly appreciate the answers.
Also, i have managed to get SS2 to work, it was a folder on the c:, i copied it onto the external and the game worked....but that was for a game already on my internal HD, i tried pointing the installer of a cdrom based game to the external but it didnt copy files...

thanks again...please keep the answers simple, i will understand then

Edited by (in order): Rambo1234, Rambo1234, Rambo1234, Rambo1234

1) Yes. For mounting volumes you require them to be formated as NTFS. Not sure if only the base system but it can't hurt.

2) Yep, under the computer management. It's the app with the fancy blue/green/red bars for each device.

3) What you do is an old hat trick on Unix systems that micro$oft finally managed to somehow "copy" in a more or less useable way. The idea is to make the content of a device to appear inside your file system as if it would be a directory there. Hence if the device is unconnected the directory "Games" is empty. Once you branch your device though the system shows the content of the device inside the directory. Although for your games it looks like beeing on drive C: everything read and written below this directory "Games" in fact ends up beeing done on the device. Think of it as a pluggable directory. Once you use linux you get used to it and you will see what great invention this system is.

4) Not long. Formatting NTFS is quicker as you can do "format in the background" if you are impatient. I would say not longer than maybe 10 minutes ( guessing off the bat ). Definitly nothing to worry about.

One huge difference between NTFS and Fat32 is that fat32 does not support files over a certain size (8gb?). This could possibly be the problem if the game installs a monster .dat file somewhere.

Just my .02$

(KEEPING THE INFO ON THIS THREAD)

1)will i need to 'enable file and folder compresion' when formatting to NTFS?
2)And 'default' for 'allocation unit size' is it?

can i just mention:
FOR REFERENCE: i just tried to re-install a cd rom based game onto the external hd again to check what the error was (i havent formatted yet, just trying it out last time):

File:d:\data2.cab
error:data error (cyclic redundancy check)

This seems to be the file that is not allowing me to install direct to the external drive!! Would the format to NTFS solve this? or do u suggest to do the whole mount thing 2?

Edited by (in order): Rambo1234, Rambo1234, Rambo1234

1) Enabling compression is not required as you have lots of memory there. Furthermore compression heavily slows down something we don't want accessing an already slow devices ( slow compared to what a SATA drive would gives us for example ).

2) Default is ok. Most games anyways mess things up by either having many tiny files or a couple of huge bombers.

Concerning the CRC error this can be two causes:
1) The game file simply is corrupt. Reinstalling should fix this
2) Your HDD is defunct. Buying a new one should do it.

A little side note: Not every HDD works out of the box with Enclosure Cases. It can happen that a HDD mocks on you if you put it in an Enclosure. So far I had no real troubles with Matrox and Samsung HDDs.

ok sir.
Well ill tell you that my alternative was going to be to install the games to my c: (without your mount thing), and then simply cut the games across to the external drive. This worked fine as i did exactly that and uninstalled the game off the C:, and the pasted version on the external worked! But this is a bit too bitsy for my liking and the idea of the mounting the external into the c: seems like the appropriate solution. So once this has been done i should be able to install cd rom based games onto the HDD? I dont think the file is corrupt in re to the CRC file as it installed fine onto the c: prior.

Well i have a freemons external, but on my device mngr list it says 'samsung'.
As i type i am remformatting to NTFS, i will then proceed to mounting....

Anything else i should know about this proces? I really hope it solves my problem. It seems as though any game with that data2.cab file was stopping the installtion process...weird!

Even if this doesnt work...ill still be able to revert to my old method right? (cut and paste job), However this method is shit as in re to updates of games etc...it'd be all over the place, and i like my files somewhat organised!!!

Quick ques: When you said specify a folder name ie: c:\program files\games......that is program files that already exists yes? Not create a new folder under c: called program files? Sorry...bit of a silly ques.Im assuming the same folder?

Edited by (in order): Rambo1234, Rambo1234

I have accomplished the formatting and installed the game that was nt working prior to this....it installs fine now!!!!

MY GREATEST THANKS TO YOU DRAGON...THANKS FOR YOUR PATIENCE AND PROMPT ANSWERS TO MY ANNOYING QUESTIONS.....MUCH APPRECIATED. TEN THUMBS UP TO YOU!!!

blah blah blah, sorry I didn't read any of this. But I saw this thing, though I'd post it here. link to website. Link to what it is.

What the hell has that got to do with anything???Bit random arent you?
This thread can be closed now!

Edited by: Rambo1234

Supercowbob wrote: One huge difference between NTFS and Fat32 is that fat32 does not support files over a certain size (8gb?). This could possibly be the problem if the game installs a monster .dat file somewhere.

Just my .02$

A FAT32 format without using any non-standard settings has a maximum file size of 2GB as I recall. It's probably what was causing Rambo1234's original error.