# Forum > Discussion > Mad Science and Grumpy Technology > Tech Help External Hard Drive Advice Desired

## JNAProductions

My laptop is filling up fast with this and that, and while I *own* Fallout and Skyrim on Steam, I lack the space to run them.
But, I've never used an external hard drive before on any device. Would anyone with more tech experience on the playground be able to offer advice for me before I buy something?

Thanks in advance! :)

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## Anymage

Like brands, or how to make them work or what?

For brands, it doesn't hurt to do a little research if you see a name, but most of the time anything that's not a total unknown should do okay.  Especially if it's just for some steam games.  (Where if worst comes to worst and the drive fails, you still have the cloud save and it's just a matter of finding another drive to reinstall.)

If it's for how to make them work, for the vast majority of them it's basically the same as plugging in a thumb drive.  To the point where I've seen non-tech people told to just buy a decently sized thumb drive and install the game on there.  From a quick glance at amazon for "usb drive", this looks perfectly decent for a game drive.

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## JNAProductions

> Like brands, or how to make them work or what?
> 
> For brands, it doesn't hurt to do a little research if you see a name, but most of the time anything that's not a total unknown should do okay.  Especially if it's just for some steam games.  (Where if worst comes to worst and the drive fails, you still have the cloud save and it's just a matter of finding another drive to reinstall.)
> 
> If it's for how to make them work, for the vast majority of them it's basically the same as plugging in a thumb drive.  To the point where I've seen non-tech people told to just buy a decently sized thumb drive and install the game on there.  From a quick glance at amazon for "usb drive", this looks perfectly decent for a game drive.


It's really just plug and play?
That's good.

Thank you. :)

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## snowblizz

The main issue you will face with an external drive is the datatransfer rate. The cheap stuff is usually slow.

Some external drives are of the spinning rust type and they are sloooow. Worth being careful there.

The USB hookups aren't always optimized for datatransfer on the computer. It isn't supposed to matter and things are supposed to be the same for everything, but supposed to.

Something to consider is you can get normal SSD disks and a case for them. Giving you an external drive you can at any point put into a laptop or normal computer if you the opportunity to.

Thumbdrives are cheap cause they are small. My Fallout 4 installation is 84 GB. Getting an SSD you can get terabytes for the money GB gets you on usb thumbdrives.

About the speed it's not just about needing it while gaming, but it takes ages installing the games on a slow drive.

Personally I'd get myself a decent sized SSD 1-2TB and a case for it as external storage. (Optimally, honestly, swapping out the drive in the laptop to a much larger one probably not be bad idea, and no bother with an external unless you also want the backup safety aspect)

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## Jimorian

For gaming, you'd generally be better off putting static files on that external drive like pictures and videos, and keeping the games on the internal drive. Not 100% necessary, but it helps. Or if most of the space is games and programs, putting the ones that don't need best performance on the external.

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## Bohandas

I mostly use a 5 terabyte Seagate portable external hard drive purchased from Amazon

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## Anymage

> I mostly use a 5 terabyte Seagate portable external hard drive purchased from Amazon


I glossed over a lot because Fallout/Skyrim are both older games (and thus won't need tons of storage space or blazing fast data rates), but if OP is looking for an external drive it's worthwhile to know that external HDDs (like the one you linked) will often require an additional power plug.  Flash memory (SSDs and thumb drives) need less power and can draw what they need from the USB socket.  Not the worst thing if you only ever expect to use the drive in one place, but that somewhat undermines the point of a laptop in the first place.

And as alluded to upthread, there are data limits to what you can get out of a USB.  This is less relevant for older games that were built expecting slower hard drives in the first place, but for anything more modern you're going to face annoying load times with anything less than an internal SSD.

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## KillianHawkeye

I have a lot of external hard drives, and one unusual issue I encountered last year was with a new drive's formatting. It apparently was setup for Mac or Windows or Linux, so it was formatted to ExFAT rather than NTFS format.

This isn't a big deal if you're saving large files like music or video, but I got it specifically for small images and text files, and it ended up not being large enough because ExFAT format had like a 2 MB minimum file size (compared to like 4 KB on NTFS).

I wasted a lot of time copying 1.5 TB of files before I realized it, and had to delete and reformat it.

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