Portable Hard Drive

gremlin666_2

Ive been thinking of getting a portable hard drive to use as a back of my files and also to use for downloading music and games too. Will I be able to launch the music and games to run from the portable hard drive?

Ramz_3

I know you can do it with music easily, just change the sync and 'watched' folders, but I don't know about software, you can try changing the shortcuts on the start menu to the desired location. To do this, right click the shortcut and select 'properties' and then just change the target location.

Stubert

You probably won't be able to run games as it won't have an OS installed on it. Look at www.portableapps.com; you can run things such as Firefox from there and you can take your bookmarks and things with you if you connected it to another computer. Although I have the feeling you just want more space and won't be transporting it anywhere so that might be not applicable to you.

Cerro

An external hard disk that is connected to your computer (for all intents and purposes) is picked by windows as a hard disk. So like any other hard disk you can install and run things off that disk, as long as it is connected to the PC. If you "move" things from an internal hard disk to this external one, most things will work - the shortcuts will no longer work and you may experience problems with some applications because the registry will not be updated.

Having said that, few people run anything off external disks because they are much slower than internal ones. Unless its a SATA connected disk... USB/NAS drives will just create a performance bottleneck. Music is fine because its small, but a full blown application or game probably isn't the best idea.