Can I Run PC Games Off External Hard Drive

Of course, video games are the type of entertainment most influenced by technology and the visual arts. These developments make the games more realistic every day. There’s only one drawback, and that’s the size of the games. Today we’ll talk about hundreds of GB games and the most frequently asked question about them: Can I run PC games off external hard drive?

Run PC Games Off External Hard Drive

Even though the answer to this question seems simple, there are actually a lot of things you need to consider. Yes, you can technically run games from any external disk. This means extra capacity, of course, but what about the negative effects?

Can I Install Games on an External Hard Drive?

Of course! Although there are big differences between internal and external disks, the task of both is to read and store data. For this reason, you can play your games on an external HDD or SSD just like other programs.

It’s even easier than you think. Unlike the 2000s, you don’t need to insert six CDs to load or play a game.

We’ll explain how to install a game on an external hard drive in a moment, but first there are two important warnings about playing games on external hard drives.

You should carefully choose the external disk you want to use. If you choose a hard drive with a slow read speed to gain extra capacity, game loading screens will take quite a long time. The only way to avoid this is to buy a fast SSD.
Pay attention to the cables you use to connect it to your computer. Even a small interruption in the connection can cause the game to freeze or crash.

After these two warnings, we can start talking about how to install the games.

How to Install Games on External Hard Drive

Like all programs on your computer, games see the internal hard drive first during installation. So unless you manually change the destination installation folder, your game will be installed on the hard drive where Windows is installed.

Since we don’t want this to happen, we need to explicitly select the external drive we want to use for all game installations. If you install your games through clients like Steam, you have to select it during the installation phase.

There’s one important detail you shouldn’t forget here. You can copy the files of the downloaded games to any external disk before installing it. However, if you’ve already installed it, copying the folders to the internal hard drive won’t work. You’ll have to reinstall your game on the external hard drive.

Things to Know About Playing Games on External Drive

Considering the fact that all AAA games are now very large, it’s only logical to opt for an external drive. Here’s what you need to know when making that decision:

Extra Capacity: Installing your games on an external SSD gives you a lot of extra capacity. This makes it easier to use your internal disk for your other programs.
Cost-effective Solution: Buying an SSD that only holds a few games mightn’t cost you that much. Use this resource for an external hard drive, because it’s unreasonable to buy a small internal drive.
Mobility: If you organize game nights with your friends or have a gaming laptop, games installed on an external hard drive will be your biggest entertainment.
Performance: There’s a risk that the loading screens will take much longer due to the reading speed, but this won’t affect the performance of your computer FPS.

Conclusion: Gaming on External Hard Drive

If you ask yourself the question these days, “Can I run PC Games Off External Hard Drive” the answer is clearly yes. Considering that games are getting bigger and bigger, it’s a good idea to have a good external SSD anyway.

Not only does it have the advantage of not affecting your computer’s FPS performance and being easy to carry around, but you can get by with it until you buy a high-capacity, bigger-budget internal hard drive.

Don’t forget to buy an SSD with good read and write speeds, so you don’t have to wait long for game loading screens. When you finish your favorite game, you can easily clean the disk and use it as a storage disk again.

We hope that this guide has helped you understand PC games, but if you still have questions, feel free to contact us.