external hard drive / GEF

[Opi8]

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]

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.

 

[logicearth]

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.

 

[Opi8]

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.

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]

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.

 

[Opi8]

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.

 

[Opi8]

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