Question about external hard drives

[jekajekalynn]

I am thinking about purchasing one , and I have few questions.

For one, how do they work? I was gonna buy one to keep games and movies on. If I have a movie or a huge pc game on the external one, can I access it even if I am on the internet? Odd question, but I'm new to these. lol thanks for the help .

 

[jsmith]

Most external hard drives are usb connected devices-just like your "jump" or "pen" drives or the memory in your camera. they come in sizes from 80 GB to 2 Terabytes (terabyte is 1000 GB). You can access any data stored on an external hard drive as long as the device is connected via a USB port to your computer. The one thing i will tell you is that you cant not move games that have been installed on your hard drive by drag and drop to the external-you need to uninstall it and reinstall it on the external-this is because the software creates directory paths at installation and it willnot be able to find the game if you install in on the hard drive and then drag and drop to the external.

 

[Barbossa]

Keep in mind that running software from an external hard drive will likely slow the software down significantly.