How good do windows games run off of external hard drives?

[xi mezmerize ix]

My external drive is on its way. I want to partition it 3 ways: one for osx backup, osx storage, and windows xp back up. But I was wondering if games ran well off of external drives? I was thinking about adding a 4th partition to the external drive to store games, as my bootcamp partition is pretty small on my internal and I want to keep it that way. Any help would be great.

P.S. Any help with the formatting necessary for each partition would be deeply appreciated. Thanks!

 

[Arminator]

If its firewire, you wont even notice its on an external. USB should be also fine for most games, although it will drain CPU, so be aware. I played COD4 via USB and it was just fine.

 

[xi mezmerize ix]

If its firewire, you wont even notice its on an external. USB should be also fine for most games, although it will drain CPU, so be aware. I played COD4 via USB and it was just fine.

Yea its going to be firewire 800.

 

[aki]

Firstly, tangentially, any reason you want all those partitions? I'm presuming you have bought some mammoth multi-GB drive, which is fair enough. Just in the past I've set up drives with partitions that seemed all logical and ordered at the start; and then after a couple of months I'd find that half were too small, the other half were too large, and half of them I didn't really use anyway.

For that plus security reasons (more drives means you loose less when one fails) I tend these days to go for a couple of drives instead of one-drive-many-partitions.

But that aside.

I've been running almost all my games off an external drive for ages and haven't noticed any performance hit. For reference this was a C2D iMac (3.06), running Vista32 and then Win7 64.

At first I set up a firewire (I can't recall now if it was 400 or 800, probably 800); but for logistics reasons I switched at some point to a regular USB drive and honestly I noticed no difference at all.

I didn't actually run framerate tests or anything but subjectively it was fine - and in my case, having the space on my internal drive was more important to me than a dropped frame here or there (presuming there were any).

So I'd say go for it. You can always install a game on your internal partition if you want to check performance yourself on a particular title.

 

[xi mezmerize ix]

Firstly, tangentially, any reason you want all those partitions? I'm presuming you have bought some mammoth multi-GB drive, which is fair enough. Just in the past I've set up drives with partitions that seemed all logical and ordered at the start; and then after a couple of months I'd find that half were too small, the other half were too large, and half of them I didn't really use anyway.

For that plus security reasons (more drives means you loose less when one fails) I tend these days to go for a couple of drives instead of one-drive-many-partitions.

But that aside.

I've been running almost all my games off an external drive for ages and haven't noticed any performance hit. For reference this was a C2D iMac (3.06), running Vista32 and then Win7 64.

At first I set up a firewire (I can't recall now if it was 400 or 800, probably 800); but for logistics reasons I switched at some point to a regular USB drive and honestly I noticed no difference at all.

I didn't actually run framerate tests or anything but subjectively it was fine - and in my case, having the space on my internal drive was more important to me than a dropped frame here or there (presuming there were any).

So I'd say go for it. You can always install a game on your internal partition if you want to check performance yourself on a particular title.

Well the 2 partitions for backing up will be exactly the same size or slightly larger than the 2 partitions I am trying to back up from. That would leave me about 1TB of space for storage. I would probably use that space all for os x storage, and only partition it if i ever need to for windows games (i buy mostly for 360 but some games i want are pc only) so I dont just have a big partition that i may never use.

I'm glad to hear though that games run fine...thanks!