eSata Drives & Gaming

[Evil Tactician]

I'm eagerly awaiting my little Nexus, but while I wait I would like to research the possibilities of expanding the storage of the machine. Basically, it's coming with a 60GB Solid State Drive, so that my most used programs are nice and 'zappy' :)

However, for gaming this isn't the most ideal storage solution. Playing games from my desktop drives on my laptop is not realistic and I am thus looking into eSata solutions. From what I understand installing games on an eSata drive and running them is just as fast as it would be internally. (Possibly even faster as I can use 3,5" drives instead of 2,5"?)

Question is; what is a good drive or enclosure? Anyone has experience with running games from an eSata drive?
Any recommendations?

This seems a quite reasonably priced solution (http://www.dabs.com/ProductView.aspx?Quicklinx=539P). Opinions?

[Evil Tactician]

Does anyone have a suggestion or comment?

[MrDJ]

i know nothing about esata so cant really help but that external hard drive in your link looks good for the price.
ive run games from various external HDs ive got and to be honnest i have noticed no difference what so ever.

hopefully not long to go now and you will have your new beast in front of you.:D

[neil@kobalt]

Lacie is a good brand but (and not to de value their procducts) they are the same as any other enclosure - a desktop HDD in an external enclosure. Might be wrong but I think Lacie still use Samsung HDDs.

Regarding performance, it will be a little slower than if you had the game on the laptops own HDD but only when loading levels or save points up. Once in the game it should perform the same.

[Evil Tactician]

Thanks Neil.

I know that performance will be less than it would with the SSD, but that's ok. As long as it performs as well (or close to) as a traditional hdd inside the laptop would - I am happy :) It's just for those games which require large amounts of hdd space these days... But those I would generally only play stationary at home anyway so portability isn't an issue.

[Evil Tactician]

I ordered the Lacie. It's out of stock so it's slightly delayed. Hopefully I can provide some comments in a couple of weeks.

Edit; It's arrived already but the laptop isn't here yet :P Also a notebooker cooler from Zalman ZM-NC1000 which should keep it in a decent state :)