Thread: External <----> Internal PC Games

Hey guys, new poster... I was searching around some google results for a solution to a problem I'm having and noticed you guys have a pretty good knowledge of PC's.

I'm no noob to computers, I actually have built all of my gaming rigs myself, but I came up with an idea recently and can't seem to get a straight answer from people... Nuff said, here's the idea

I play PC games a lot, and my collection is rather large. There are only a few games I play regularly (League of Legends, Left 4 Dead, Team Fortress, WoW) that stay on my Internal HD permanently. The rest of my collection I don't play as frequent, but still would like to have relatively quick access to (Assasin's Creed, Batman, Resident Evil, Fallout 3, etc.)

I view it as a waste of space to keep all of those games on my internal at all times, but I play them a decent amount so uninstalling and reinstalling is a very annoying process. Especially the ones that I have digitally on Steam because you have to re-download them instead of installing, which takes way longer

So I came up with an idea to buy a TB of external memory to sort of act as a "vault" for the games that I don't play daily. This is how the idea worked in my head...

1. Install Game
2. Back it up / Transfer it to the External HD when I don't want to play it
3. When I do want to, Place it back onto my Internal HD until I've beaten it or gotten what I wanted out of it.
4. When done, Transfer it back to the External HD

I've asked around and some people said that idea would work, some said it wouldn't. It's quite frustrating because I don't want to waste 100 bucks on an External and have it not work like I intended... Anyone know about this? Thanks!

I wound up putting in another hard drive (250GB) into my son's PC for his games. I followed baldrick's advice from another thread. Also upgraded the RAM to 3 GB from the 1GB he had before. Games work very well, no hanging. Total cost for RAM and hard drive 2,800 Baht. Cheaper then many external drives.