How does RTW and M2TW run on an external?

[zznɟ ǝɥʇ]

I'm going to need an external for Kingdoms and the lot. How does it run, if it's able to run at all?

Any advice on external hard drives would be appreciated too!

[Roman Clone]

A hard drive is a hard drive, then again, Unless windows is smart enough to recognize and run on both hard drives, your screwed.

[Doono]

Unless your using E-Sata hardrives do not try running a game from an external. Why not just move stuff that isn't so demanding onto the eexternal and install kingdoms onto the real harddisk? Or better yet just buy a bigger harddisk.

[Simetrical]

Unless your using E-Sata hardrives do not try running a game from an external. Why not just move stuff that isn't so demanding onto the eexternal and install kingdoms onto the real harddisk? Or better yet just buy a bigger harddisk.

I'd imagine that not many files have to be loaded on the fly. Is it really slower, other than to load up or maybe to switch between campaign and combat, if your disk is slow?

[zznɟ ǝɥʇ]

Laptop.

But I've cleared enough space to fit it, so it's a non-issue at this point,

[Doono]

Rome and medieval have litterally thousands of small text files to load from, the loading times from an external on a usb port could take ages. You cna try it if you like and if your lucky everything will run fine but im fairly confident you will have excutiatingly slow loading times and lag pauses whenever the game tries to access the hard disk. The usb interface is simply nowhere near fast enough for transfer and reading through the ammount of data for games as a direct sata connection.

And Fuzz you can buy laptop hard disks, they are a bit smaller than a normal one and cost a fair bit more but if you need the space for gaming its a far better choice.

[Simetrical]

Typical consumer drive sequential read speeds are on the order of 50 or 60 MB/s now. USB 2 supports about that much, actually a little more, 60 MB/s. FireWire supports up to 100 MB/s, compared to 150 MB/s for SATA II. I'm not seeing theoretical reason here for "excruciating" slowdowns, especially not for FireWire.

Text files for Total War amount to a few megabytes of (hopefully) mostly sequential reads, and would take a fraction of a second to load on any modern connection. Graphics would be the much bigger hog, I'd think, in terms of I/O, plus of course CPU-bound stuff.

Does anyone have any figures on internal vs. external performance?

[Roman Clone]

Does anyone have any figures on internal vs. external performance?

I Hope this doesn't spark Something. I think he should just do as said previously and move some stuff out of the internal and into the fire .. I mean external