External Hard Drive for gaming??

tramaapno34 · Joined: May 14, 2009 Posts: 3

Ok... I play the SIMS 2 and it takes up a lot of space on my pc. So, someone told me it would be good to buy an external hard drive. So, i did. I uninstalled the games from my C drive and installed them on my J drive which is for the external hard drive. Now when i start the game the intro to the game plays and then when it comes to loading up the rest of the screens. a screen pops up stating " your application has crashed". Why is this happening? could someone really help me??????

drwho07 · Joined: Nov 29, 2007 Posts: 1508 Location: Central FL, USA

External hard drives, no matter how fast they are, (IDE or SATA) can only be accessed at USB speeds.
That is excruciatingly slow, compared to an internal HD.
That's why they are not used to run programs as HD intensive as a SIMS game would be.
External HD's are best used for backups and storage.

Install the game back to your main HD and it will work OK.

Then delete all the junk off of your internal HD and you'll have plenty of room for the game.

Start with two MS programs already on your computer, "Disk Cleanup" and "Defrag" to improve HD performance.

Cheers Mate!
The Doctor Cool

BudDurland · Joined: Dec 05, 2002 Posts: 474

I'm siding with the Doc on this one. You'll be unhappy trying to run games from and eternal hard drive, unless you're using an external drive that connects via an eSata interface. These run at the same speed as the internal drives of the computer.

goretsky · Posted: Fri May 29, 2009 4:22 am Post subject:

Hello,

Hard disk drives installed in external FireWire-800 (IEEE-1394b) and SCSI enclosures should be fast enough to run complex programs as well.

Regards,

Aryeh Goretsky