Can I Use An External Hard Drive On My Mac For Video Games

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Best Answer: By default Mac drives are formatted as HFS+, and Windows drives as FAT32. Although Macs can read from FAT32 drives, Windows cannot read from HFS+ drives. If you want to keep the drive HFS+ formatted, you can use a program like HFSExplorer or MacDrive that lets Windows see the drives. Discover the world of external hard drives for Mac. Compare portable, USB and external hard drive models for office and home and shop online.

Sata II supports up to 300MB/s, a typical hard drive wont eat that bandwidth up. Secondly, an external hard drive can be 5400RPM or 7200RPM, neither of which will require 300MB+ of bandwidth. Secondly and a half. Just what interface do you think the HDD uses inside the encloser? Awesome calendar for mac. Do you think its just a straight USB 3.0 connection hooked directly to the drive and plugged into the computer? Its typically a sata connection to USB interface.

USB is an external interface while SATA is an internal interface. Both have their uses and pros and cons including their own overheads.

Ive tested loading times on my dedicated game drive which I pulled from an external enclosure. SataII vs SataIII is no difference in loading up a game. Ive loaded games from the drive while it was an external drive connected to USB2.0 and had problems. For the most part, most games can run fine from an external drive/USB stick.

Games with large files that are needed to load such as BF3 might experience loading stutter. I say might, because it depends on the internal specs of the drive, fragmentation and the workload of the rest of the PC's interfaces as in do you have a lot of other USB devices using resources? Overall, give it a shot. Small games like Terraria can easily be run off of a usb stick via USB 2.0 or sometimes even 1.0 though I havnt seen any 1.0 interfaces in the wild for sometime. MMO or MP games have a much higher chance of seeing this load stutter since you have to stream more data from the drive then you would normally have to.

This is from my experience though so its best to test it out yourself.