f13.net

I'm tired of switching games (old and new) off and on my HD. 

Does anyone have experience using a external HD for gaming and if so do you have any suggestions or things to look for?

Thx

If you are playing a game that does a lot of loading I think you will really notice a hit.  I would say try playing a game on the external drive.  if you don't like the performance reinstall it on the internal drive.  Games that load fully into memory or only load at certain specific times (ala 'loading please wait...') you should only notice the difference at startup or loading the new area or when saving.

http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.aspx?i=3035

Interesting, the USB 2.0 performance isn't really that far behind in their game benchmarks.  Like 10-15% is all.

starting to see a few external HD's that now offer eSATA, if you have a mobo that supports it then it is the way to go.

I raided in WoW from an external HD.   :awesome_for_real:

Be careful if you have spare SATA ports on your motherboard but don't have eSATA ports on the back panel and get one of the eSATA adapter brackets. Apparently there are incompatibility issues with them (you can read the comments on Newegg).

Wouldn't Firewire be better than USB2? Better yet, Firewire 800. Or the new FW spec if hardware is out.

It would be except that most PCs (as in "IBM-compatible" computers) don't have Firewire ports and most PC-formatted external hard drives don't have Fireware interfaces.

When I started here in 2000, they were still calling PCs the "IBM compatibles". I got a chuckle and fixed that shit pronto. Also spent a while stripping the 'micro' from microcomputer. My supervisor is 20x the geek I am :P

Is PCI fast enough to do justice to a FW800 interface? Eventually I want to get a ridiculous external drive and rip all my music in lossless compression. I was thinking eSATA, with FW800 as a backup option. USB never entered into it, I've never liked USB.

Thx for the input all.

I switched to laptop a couple of years ago so that knocks SATA out of the saddle.  I'll try the usb 2.0 @7200rpm and see what happens.  I still need the space for music so wouldn't be a loss if it doesn't work.  After a recent reformat I became a believer in backup drives.  Who knew there wasn't a simple way to synch your iPod to your HD.    :uhrr: 

There is. My supervisor uses some shareware to do it, but there's probably a better way (since I inevitably find some easy hack the shareware authors used). Gotta be something for winders, too.

I saw some of that shareware stuff and was about to grab it but found a relatively straight forward way to just treat you ipod as an external drive and basically do a cut and paste.  While confident in my computer-fu I was sweating the whole time my 14+ gigs of music was transferring.  The thought of loading up all those CDs and purchases over the years make me ill.  Especially since some of my old Michael Manring CDs and other hard to find stuff wasn't in the best shape to begin with.  The only issue I had with getting things back on the ipod was the one movie I had.  Still not sure how that got screwed up but if that was the only snafu I'm happy.

Yes, as long as you aren't using the PCI bus at the same time for other high-bandwidth things. PCI can do 133 megabytes/sec burst, in theory. You don't need the fastest possible interface, however, if you are ripping music to an external drive, since your CD/DVD-ROM and the overhead of running through a ripping/compression program will the limiting factors.