And more importantly, should you? External hard drives, also known as portable hard drives, are portable mass storage devices usually connected by USB or Thunderbolt. Internally, these portable hard drives are essentially internal HDDs in a USB enclosure, making it easier to disconnect and reconnect drives and protect the fragile drives from knocks and bumps.
You can store game files on these drivers and use shortcuts on your desktop to launch them easily. Some drives may require you to download drivers before use.
Not only will this clear the drive of any default files left on by the manufacturer, but it will also ensure the drive is formatted to the correct file system. This removes the 4GB limitation while still allowing files to be read on both Windows and Mac.
Once formatted, you will see the drive will have a drive letter allocated to it. Remember this so you know which directory to install games to. Using the drop-down menu, select the drive letter assigned to your portable hard drive. Select your external drive and it will install to your external hard drive.
Using external hard drives gives you a boost storage capacity to install your games to your drive. Another reason is portability.
Game launchers like Steam will require you to log in, but you should be able to access your games library from multiple devices. There are two main reasons to install games on an external drive.
The first is portability. If your game is installed on a flash drive or any other small device, you can take it with you. That means you can plug that storage device into another computer and play your game as long as the computer is compatible and capable of running the game. If you are visiting friends or family and want to show them your game, you can take your drive. Sign in to Steam on their computer and plug in your drive.
It should be able to launch the game just fine although you might have to reset the folders in the settings to help it find the game. The bigger motivator is to save storage space on your internal drive. Every drive has limited space, and upgrading to a bigger drive costs money and can be a huge nuisance. This is especially true if you opt for some of the fastest hard drives on the market.
Getting more storage pushes up the cost pretty quickly. All of that said, there is one compelling reason to avoid putting your games on an external drive: performance. The best hard drives in the business right now connect directly to the motherboard using PCI connectors. These are the fastest connections you can get on a consumer-grade computer.
The incredible hard drive speeds you get from this technology can help with game performance in general. Most external hard drives are considerably slower. The same can be said of large flash drives and other flash storage media. One of the limiting factors is how external drives connect to your computer. Typically, they will interface via some form of USB.
So, if you want the best performance, you put games on the internal drive. Still, plenty of USB drives are fast enough to play a game with no noticeable problems. You can absolutely try some games on the external drive to see if you like the performance. If you do, then take advantage of it. Put the games that need the most performance on your fastest drive.
Everything else can go on the external drive and save you space. Tech Guides Tech Education Programming. Keep reading! If your computer has a USB 3. So, figure out the speed of your internal hard drive and the type of port on your computer. Here are tutorials. How to check the speed of your internal hard drive? You can try MiniTool Partition Wizard. Its Disk Benchmark feature can reveal the read and write speed of your internal hard drive.
Free Download. Step 2: Click the Disk Benchmark feature at the top bar of the interface. Step 3: Once the Disk Benchmark window appears, choose a drive to be tested and configure other parameters.
Then, click the Start button. Step 4: Wait for the tool to complete the speed test. Once it finishes, you will see a complete graphical result. Now you should figure out the speed of your internal hard drive.
Then, go to check the type of port on your computer. Step 1 : Right-click the Windows logo on your taskbar and then choose the Device Manager option from the menu.
The gameplay experience on an external SSDs is more marvelous than that on an external hard drive. How to choose an external hard drive or external SSD for gaming? Keep reading.
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