Gaming with Portable Harddrive?

[Slicerer]

I've been having some issues with space recently and while most of it are my games I feel I want to keep all of it. I've deleted quite a bit but it just keeps being swallowed up.

I have a 750 GB Passport drive from Western Digital that I have for video editing. It's partitioned so a majority of the space is Mac compatible (because I have no idea how large Final Cut Pro files are). But I still have a hefty bit of space on it for storing data.

My question is, is it possible to run the entire Steam program and the games it supports off of my portable hard drive. Or is it connected with my desktop system?

Much thanks
-The Slicerer

 

[eightDash]

I would think there would be some lagging. I have my music collection on my external and it take a few seconds to start playing if I haven't listened to it in a while. Other than that this is probably best left to the experts at Tech Talk.

 

[Lorberry]

It's possible, but not recommended. From what I understand, you'd be limited to the transfer rate of USB 2.0, which is lower than what you (would) have with a standard hard drive connection.

What you CAN do, is to make backups of your steam games, save those backups on the portable, then delete the files on your main hard drive. When you want to play one of them, simply move the file back over, restore, and there you go.

 

[PBJ]

I would think there would be some lagging.

Yes, there would be A LOT of lagging. Using a hard drive, you have about 70-300 megabyte/second transfer rates. With USB 2.0 connections, you would have about 60 megabyte/second transfer rates. That is a lot slower, especially if you currently are using a good hard drive.

Your best bet might just be to buy a bigger hard drive. I don't know if you have a desktop or laptop...if you have a desktop, you should be able to add a new hard drive in an empty dock, and then move Steam and your games to it. If its a laptop, you can't do much but too buy a bigger hard drive, but I believe they cap at about a terabyte.

In order, here is a basic list of the terms (hopefully you already know them, but...) from lowest to highest.

bit
byte
kilobyte
megabyte
gigabyte
terabyte

Remember, thats just a rough run-down to compare them, don't rely on it for everything.

Hopefully you can get a new hard drive, and load up all your games to play!

 

[Lorberry]

You missed kilo, but yeah. Mind you, you probably won't find anything less than about 100-ish gigs in the HDD department nowadays, which is where you'd want to look for storage space. SSD (Solid State Drive) are much faster than standard hard drives, but typically have much less capacity for the price. MUCH less.

 

[PBJ]

Thanks man, I added kilobyte to the original list.

 

[Tee Hee Hee]

Just to be different/difficult

I run all games but TF2 off my FAT32 terabyte hard drive without a problem, the ONLY reason TF2 is on my main drive (yes I have two steam folders and rename the client.blob in each folder depending what I want to play) if that TF2 had an issue with being on FAT32 format drives due to one of its files being more than 4GB = not a happy hard drive (in that format)

Anyway, tl;dr I run most of my games off an external, portable hard-drive without any hitches

 

[PBJ]

To add to my first post: It also depends upon the computer. If it is fast, you may be able to push the USB just a little harder.

 

[Slicerer]

Thanks for all the info you guys. But I guess I should add that even though I'm running it on a desktop I have virtually no money to upgrade anything electronic in my life and my family is a bit poor as well (I'm 17, a youngin)

So if I were to pursue an extension, which is highly unlikely as my desktop is slim and I'm lazy, it would have to be pretty cheap as well.

 

[eurocracy]

Hard drives aren't expensive, you can pick up a good one for ?20

 

[Idol]

Might I suggest picking up another internal and putting Steam on that?

I have a pair of 150gb Velociraptors (not in RAID).
C: holds the OS (Vista 64-bit)
G: holds all my executables/applications/programs/games/etc

So long as you are careful during the install process and make sure you specify the right destination, it works fine. And since it's an internal it's hooked directly to the mobo via either IDE or SATA (in my case) so you don't have the lag of USB.

If another internal is just not an option for you, might I suggest using an external with FireWire (IEEE 1394). Much better transfer rates than USB. Of course, being a Mac user, you already knew that

EDIT: just read the part about you being on a lappy. If it has a FireWire port, I would explore that option. If not you could also free up some HDD space by transferring non-executables to the external. Stuff like My Documents, photos, mp3's, video, can suck up some drivespace. Put all that data on your external and put Steam on the lappy.