How would a game perform from being instaled an an external HDD?

[Legolas8181]

I am getting a laptop with a 120GB SSD so while that room enough for my OS and some of my favourite games I will have to stoore my less played games on an external drive. If i picked up a 500GB USB 2.0 drive and installed them on there how woud the performance change?

 

[getochkn]

Horribly slow. Why not put an internal drive in?

 

[Legolas8181]

Horribly slow. Why not put an internal drive in?

I can but i can afford to get either a 500GB HDD or a 120GB SSD and i refer SSD speeds over space.

 

[getochkn]

SSD speed isn't all that for everything. The rest of your system comes into play. Yes, it boots fast. Like 5 second fast. Yes some things load fast on it but once they're loaded or a game is loaded, it's all CPU and GPU time. If you don't have enough RAM, SSD's are pointless as they will need to pagefile everything anyways.

If you only have the choice of 1, I would probably take an internal HD for the space.

 

[Legolas8181]

SSD speed isn't all that for everything. The rest of your system comes into play. Yes, it boots fast. Like 5 second fast. Yes some things load fast on it but once they're loaded or a game is loaded, it's all CPU and GPU time. If you don't have enough RAM, SSD's are pointless as they will need to pagefile everything anyways.

If you only have the choice of 1, I would probably take an internal HD for the space.

What if the external drive was USB 3.0?