external hard drive / GEF

Hey guys, so I just got an external hard drive yesterday, and have been asking a few questions on this forum. So far, people have managed to be very helpful with the previous questions, hopefully someone can do so here too :)
Here it is:

tl;dr - Reinstalling all my games to external hard drive, need to know if they will / how to make them appear / function properly in my GEF, whether added automatically or manually.

I am basically going to have EVERYTHING put onto my 1TB external, and by everything I mean "Music, Pictures, Videos, Documents, Games, and maybe Programs". So, I made a folder for each of those things on it, and only now that I am reinstalling my games into the Programs one have I realized something...
I am a bit obsessive about having a fully functioning Game Explorer Folder (GEF) with all my games visible in it. It's my assumption that when I install into an external hard drive, none of those games will be automatically added into the GEF. However, if I add them in manually (using the regedit method in the tutorial), should everything function properly, so long as I have my external hard drive on whenever I use the computer?
I just need this to be confirmed before I start reinstalling more. Also, if not, please let me know if there IS a way to get them to show up in my GEF properly, or possibly move the GEF to the external hard drive or get it to recognize things from a different directory.

Any help is greatly appreciated :)

wysiwyg said:

Its probably a waste of time putting Games and Programs in, you'll probably have to re-install them anyway.
The rest OK.
I tend to install Games and Programs on a different HD to my OS.

I intend to do so as my internal HD is only 180 some GB.

logicearth said:

Installing Games and Programs on the External HDD is possible.
However, from my own experience, the performance really really sucks when you do.
I have a 1 TB Ext. HDD myself and tried doing that.

As for the Game Explorer, it doesn't matter where you install the game to it will work just fine as always.

It actually makes a difference where you are running it from? The data transfer rate on mine is max 480Mb/s, does that still mean they would run slow (I will test them out, but let me know as well if there is a way around this, i really need my games on the external for space)

logicearth said:

I'm going to assume you are using USB seeing as you said 480mb/s. You will be lucky to even get half-way to the theoretical 480mb/s limit for USB. Not only does USB have a low throughput, it also requires CPU time to work. Versus an internal HDD which would be handled by a dedicated controller. For USB the CPU is the controller. That of course cuts into games and the I/O cost is even greater.

But go ahead and try it. Maybe you will have a better experience then I did.

I am about to try it out, you seem to know your stuff but also between now and when you mentioned this, I googled it and apparantly there shouldn't be any complications with running / installing games onto your external hard drive. I'll try it out now on a high requirement game and let you know.

Alright, so last night I tried out The Last Remnant, and it ran the same as it did on the internal hard drive...if there were any differences, they weren't noticable.
Thank you for your help :)