I've been thinking about getting an external hard drive before heading back to Uni for a bit of extra storage space, since I found it fairly easy to fill up my laptops 80GB hard drive. What I'm curious about is if there's any drawback to or reason why installing a game on an external hard drive wouldn't work. I can't really see why it wouldn't, but I find computers to be fickle >.>

I guess I'm mostly concerned about the effect of frequent disconnecting of the external hard drive from the laptop. So, does anyone know if there'd be any problems with games?

I haven't had any problems with it.

I've run several games from my laptop, and they work fine. The only thing you might want to consider is what drive letter you assign to your external drive. My external drive was originally assigned to the next available drive letter, and games were installed accordingly. Unfortunately, later on I had Daemon tools emulating a CD drive before plugging in the external HD, so the external drive's letter was taken and therefore changed. That made the links to all of the games go bad.

In summary, give your external drive a letter that isn't likely to have to change in the course of normal peripherals use.

Sounds like good advice. Thanks

Get as big as you can't afford. You wont regret it, and the marginal price of gigs is rock bottom in the higher range.

Also, as far as video editing goes, I need high RPM. I've never ran a game off of it, but I'd assume a higher RPM would be appreciated. A fast transfer, too.

Would running a game off the hard drive cause any slowdowns? I would imagine that using USB would be far slower than using Ide. Or do I misunderstand?

Transfer speed was a worry of mine as well, but I guess if Zecks and Bobbert have both done it without a problem...

Then again, I'm only going to be running older games on my laptop anyway. I doubt I'll be running anything particularly intense from it. If it is the case that there's slowdown, I can always used the laptop's hard drive for games and the external one for other stuff.

Load times will be significantly slower, but everything else will be fine.

Just try to keep games on your internal drive and other data on your external.

If you are looking at 2.5", USB-powered external hard drives, think again for gaming on them. It'll be even slower. These drives are very nice because they are small and portable, seeing as how they don't need a power brick. But to my knowledge they're usually only 5400 RPM.

What kind of RPM should I be looking at? I've only really had a look at play.com, and the only RPM I've seen listed on there was 7200. That was a Seagate 400GB, for £80.

Most likely I'll be using my laptop's hard drive for my games, but it's always nice to have the option.

PC hard drives are typically 7200RPM, laptops are typically 5400RPM.

yeah, 7200rpm is what you want.

Actually, there's something else I'd like to know. I'm fairly certain there are brands out there that aren't as reliable as others. Should I particularly avoid any particular company's hard drives?