external hdds and me

Big Classy

So I started getting into PC gaming now. Problem is the small amount of space I have to play with on my PC. Its a meagre 160GB and it's over half full already. Someone suggested getting an external HDD for my games but there's issues there worrrying me.

1. All the decent deals are USB 2.0 and from what I gather, that is bad for gaming/running programs off of.
2. I have only a sata card so I suppose I can't go the eSata route.
3. Internal is also an option but only if it's cheaper and easy.

For the record the HDD I saw was 1.5tb for £80. Oh, and the majority, if not all the games I currently play are Steam things. Couple D2D games too but the gist of it is that they're going to be mostly digital as opposed to retail purchases.

KalTorak

Buying an internal hard drive will definitely be cheaper by the GB, assuming you have space to fit it in your case and the available connections. Even if you don't, you can still buy an internal hard drive of whatever size and an external enclosure to put it in - a lot of the time, the total cost will be less than buying a ready-made external hard drive. I'm not sure about how they'll be affected by the USB (or firewire/sata) connection - what about moving games you aren't playing onto the external and using your main drive for the games you are playing?


Alternately you could just buy a nice big internal HD and replace your 160GB one with it.

Big Classy

What would replacing the internal HDD involve? Is it just a simple plug'n'play job?
EDIT: Another problem is that I don't know if the current hdd is 3.5 or 2.5. It's situated in a bracket which doesn't help any. Have found the actual drive online though;
seems to be this one.

GnomeTank

You can just measure it with a tape measure to know if it's 2.5" or 3.5" inch.

Yes, swapping a hard drive is a plug and play affair, as far as the hardware is concerned. Of course, you'll need to re-install your OS and all your programs if you actually replace your 160GB drive.

You're better bet is to leave the 160 GB drive in place, use that as your System/OS drive, and use a larger secondary drive as a games/data driver. This has some nice speed benefits, and saves you from doing a full re-install.

IN any case, a 1TB drive should be cheap now, and will do the trick. I recommend getting a WD Cavaer Black, because of it's large cache (good for gaming), and it's at a good middle of the road price point. I have a 1TB WD Cavaer Black as my primary drive, and I keep anywhere from 20-30 Steam games installed at all times. I still have >600GB free.

e: Oh, external drives. I don't recommend it. For a couple of reasons. Unless you have USB 3.0 (unlikely), it's going to be far, far slower than a direct connected SATA drive. Second, most ready made external packages use 5400 RPM drives, which are dog slow. Obviously you could buy your own 7200 RPM drive and put it in an enclosure, but you still deal with the USB 2.0 transfer bottleneck.

Big Classy

I only have enough internal space for more than a single hdd which is why I''m considering external. Its a dell and it was designed to be space saving hence the stupid amount of weird brackets. I could, theoretically use the sata cared and have the hdd hooked up to it but I don't know how that would work in terms of power.

GnomeTank

Well, SATA drives have a special power connector (there are adapters available for standard four pin molex plugs). Dell is notorious for their PSU's shipping with only enough power cables to match what's in the system, so you may not actually have an extra SATA power plug (or a molex for that matter).

Dell sold me an OPtiplex system for work, and I requested a GeForce 8600 be put in it (this was a couple years back), because we do some 3D stuff at work and I wanted decent hardware acceleration. They sent me the system, and the card, but didn't actually put PCI-e connectors on my PSU, meaning the card couldn't draw full power. I had to get them to send a tech out with the correct PSU and swap it.

Big Classy

Ahahaha. Yeah my card was actually dead on arrival but I didn't know until very recently. I just thought it was a shitty card that overheated too quickly. Ofcourse I couldn't do anything by then.

Molex plugs are those white ones with 4 holes in a row right? Because I have two coming otu the PSU, one large on and one small with ridges. There also seems to be some space between the currently installed hdd and the dvd drive, means I'd have to sit the comp horizontally but that's just fine by me. It was designed to go both vertically and horizontally.

edit: yup, just checked and that is indeed a molex cable. don't have a clue what the small white one is though.

Foomy

Big Isy wrote: »

Ahahaha. Yeah my card was actually dead on arrival but I didn't know until very recently. I just thought it was a shitty card that overheated too quickly. Ofcourse I couldn't do anything by then.

Molex plugs are those white ones with 4 holes in a row right? Because I have two coming otu the PSU, one large on and one small with ridges. There also seems to be some space between the currently installed hdd and the dvd drive, means I'd have to sit the comp horizontally but that's just fine by me. It was designed to go both vertically and horizontally.

edit: yup, just checked and that is indeed a molex cable. don't have a clue what the small white one is though.

if it's about 2cm wide, with a ridge on the top of the connector between the third and fourth holes looking at it from the top and 2 smaller ridges on the bottom edges, than it's a molex mini-spox connector, used for ye olde floppy drives.

Big Classy

Yeah I just wiki'd it through google. That's pretty useless for me tbh, no floppy drive nor any desire to get one.
I did spot a stupid cheap internal hdd though; it's got a 16mb cache if that means anything.

GnomeTank

16mb of cache is pretty decent. I don't know anything about Hatachi HDD's though. I'm pretty partial to WD because of their low failure rate.

Big Classy

I keep getting thrown off by the low price forgetting completely that these things will hold a lot of information and will cause me to freak the heck out should they fail. I'm gonna stick with getting a decent one I think.

SmokeStacks

GnomeTank wrote: »

Oh, external drives. I don't recommend it. For a couple of reasons. Unless you have USB 3.0 (unlikely), it's going to be far, far slower than a direct connected SATA drive. Second, most ready made external packages use 5400 RPM drives, which are dog slow. Obviously you could buy your own 7200 RPM drive and put it in an enclosure, but you still deal with the USB 2.0 transfer bottleneck.

This is all true, but as a side note I can tell you that I run Steam off of an external hard drive and I haven't had any issues with any games other than longer load times. I don't have any games that stream large amounts of data from the hard drive as you play though (sandbox games like Fallout 3, Elder Scrolls, and Grand Theft Auto).

Ideally you would want to go the internal route though..

Alecthar

I'd buy a new internal drive, the Hitachi should be fine. WD and Samsung also make great 1TB drives. Hopefully you've got a plan for getting you're OS and whatnot reinstalled.

Clean installs are awesome, though.

Big Classy

I've decided to just go all the way and build a completely new PC. It won't be a powerhouse behemoth but it'll hopefully run games like Crysis on medium-high. Already have a case, just need mobo, cpu and psu. And the new hdd obviously