Windows 10: Gaming on a removable hard drive.

Good morning.

This may be a silly question...so feel free to laugh *Smile

I have a gaming rig with a 120 gig solid state drive. With the latest World of Warcraft expansion, I am at 101 gigs just in WoW alone, so it's time to remove WoW from my solid state.

I have a 1TB Western Digital My Passport Ultra removable hard drive. So I have two questions really:

1) Am I able to run a game like World of Warcraft from a removable hard drive (that's the part you can laugh at me about)

2) I read that games like WoW can shorten the life of your hard drive because those games constantly access the hard drive. Keep in mind that I read that 10 years ago, but I haven't read anything to the contrary lately. If that is the case, I will just keep WoW on that hard drive and nothing else that I can stand to lose.

Thanks for your help!

:)

 

Sharing problem with a removable hard drive--my Windows 10 laptop is not able to view files

I have a 1 TB HP external drive that I have used for some time for backups to my laptop. I purchased a new laptop last Christmas and continued to use it. It was quite useful in transferring some files from my Acer to my new HP. Both have Windows 10, 64-bit.

Today, I went to retrieve a picture from the external drive and File Explorer would not display the photos in one folder. It says that I do not have permission. I am set up as administrator on both laptops. I can still access the photo on the old laptop.

I am inexperienced with file sharing, permissions, etc. I really could use someone to point me in the right direction.

 

No Media on Removable Hard Drive

I just purchased a new computer tower. Both old and new towers were running Windows 10. I put my files into a brand new external hard drive so I could transfer to the new computer, but when I plug it in, I am not seeing it under "This PC" but I do see it
in Disk Management. In Disk Management, it shows as Disk 2 Removable (F and it says No Media. There are no partitions.

Does this really mean that there are no files on my external hard drive? If so, where did they go?

 

It wouldn't really hurt the hard drive but if you're gonna play it using USB cables (even 3.0), forget about it.

 

Check this out all that 1TB drive is a regular sata drive in a Enclosure

If you really want to make use of it with no worries remove the case and install the Hard drive to the system then you will get maximum bandwidth

 

^ Yep. I've done that before. Worked just fine.

In fact, I've still got the 2 TB drive in my PC that I did it to. I've had no issues with it.

 

Hi there

Most of the intensive work in gaming presumably is done via the GPU and internal processor. So long as any I/O that needs to be written / read can be handled speedily and correctly I don't really see any theoretical reason why gaming shouldn't work perfectly OK on reasonable external HDD's -- they should be minimally 7200 RPM with a LARGE cache and USB 3 connection - better e-sata if your computer has e-sata ports available.

For any "Scratch" / Work areas you could allocate these to an SSD - these areas are AFAIK only used during playing and aren't saved at the end of the session.

Whether Gaming or otherwise 95% of poor computer performance that I've encountered over the years has been due to POOR / SLOW HDD's -- very little problems with not powerful enough CPU or lack of RAM -- if you've got a gaming machine your RAM / GPU / Processor will probably be OK already.

I don't know why but people always seem to scrimp and save on HDD / Disks generally - yet for 99% of computer users out there it's probably THE MOST SINGLE THING that would immediately give them often hugely improved performance.

Cheers
jimbo