Gaming On An External HDD

[byttle]

I'm planning on getting a MacBook Pro in the very near future and I'm going to be using an external drive to keep all of my media/games around, would an external drive (either a Firewire 800 or eSata + Expresscard) be as good as the MacBook Pro's internal drive when it comes to gaming?

 

[wildwobby]

Here you can find benchmarks of both External Hard drives and 2.5" laptop drives.

Compare what you want and see which you want.

To me it looks like the externals using eSata or Firewire 800 are faster than 2.5" sata laptop hard drives (at least read performance wise).

The best 2.5" laptop hard drive listed compatible with the MBP is the Western Digital Scorpio (250Gb/5400RPM) and it reads at an average of 42.7 MBps .... A lot of the external HDs are faster but be aware that some of them are RAID (Uses 2+ hard drives for increased speed).

Heres the link:
Externals:
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storageexternal.html
Laptop 2.5":
http://www23.tomshardware.com/storage25.html

Also, there are even newer hard drives out since this benchmark that may be worth checking out also!

 

[byttle]

So gaming would be better/faster on the external than it would be on the MacBook Pro's internal? And if so would you notice a difference in gaming between a firewire 800 and esata drive?

 

[wildwobby]

According to the benchmarks, yes, if you buy the right external drive. Will you notice a difference between the external and the laptop... probably (load times)... between eSata and Firewire 800, probably not.