Gaming from external hard drive with Surface Book?

[Lundon44]

I've been highly considering the purchase of the 8GB i7 model with dgpu. But the hard drive is a little small at 256GB which doesn't leave much space for games and media.

I'm not sure if anyone is or has set things up this way but I've been trying to figure out if I buy something like a 3TB WD My Passport Ultra portable drive can I run all my games off of it? I've never tried before so it could be just a simple yes or no. But I was hoping USB 3.0 was fast enough to run games like Metal Gear Solid.

 

[coasterfreak212]

It depends on the game, really.

For a frame of reference, I tried to install games on a 64gb MicroSD back when I had the Surface Pro 1. Some games worked, others not so much. For example, it took forever to boot Bioshock Infinite, but then after it did it played fine.

It largely depends on how the game is optimized for asking disk read/writes. That being said, I think you should be fine with USB 3.0, especially since this is how the Xbox One handles games with extra storage.

tldr, Yes, should be fine. For games that aren't, just temporarily install them on the SSD

 

[csharpguy76]

I have a Surface Pro 4 and I download and install all my Steam games on an external usb 3.0 1TB drive, it works really nicely. The downside is that if I want to play the game somewhere else I have to carry the drive with me as well.

 

[seneleron]

read/write speeds aren't the issue here. I actually attempted to get steam working on my 128GB USB 3.0 flash drive, and am running into the same issue my external drive does: the USB ports on the Surface Book do not seem to push enough power to adequately run the drives. At random intervals the USB drive errors out, the steam game download crashes, and the flash drive needs to be repaired, and/or steam goes into crash/infinite hang mode either during installation of or actual running of the steam client.

I didn't try Steam specifically on my externa 2 TBl, but I can copy files to/from that one just fine, providing I use the BACK USB [it won't even register in the front one, says "windows does not recognize this device] If, however, I attempt to UTILIZE a file (as in have Handbrake transcode a video file straight from the external drive to my microSD card, I get a random BSOD before I can even start handbrake. One may have better luck with the Surface Dock, but I don't own one so can't confirm.