Just a quick question. When I bought my laptop recently, I didn’t realize how little it held in terms of storage space. It has a 100gb SSD, barely enough to hold WoW and the other Windows essentials. I’ve been skirting the line with my storage space for a while now.
Today though I found that I couldn’t finish DLing the new patch, so I ultimately had to uninstall and reinstall onto the external harddrive I’ve been using.
Am I going to have problems there? I’ve got other games like Terraria and P99 EverQuest on it, and they work well enough, but I’m anxious about WoW not working somehow.
You should be able to get a new SSD. If you find out what model type fits your laptop then there likely would be bigger sizes out there to upgrade it. It’s just an easy swap and swap. Though you’ll have to reinstall everything.
If the drive is formatted properly it should work.
It should just be as simple as plugging it in, copying WoW over, using the Launcher to point the install at it and pushing Play.
I can’t guarantee it’ll work well since most externals I’ve seen run off of USB ports and I don’t know what the throughput of USB versus the SETA ports most HD’s and SSD’s use for data transfer.
So, depending on that difference you may have excessive load times, jumpy frames, and all sorts of other performance/stability issues.
As a stop-gap measure it’d probably be okay if you already have the external lying around, but I would highly recommend looking into upgrading your laptop’s internal storage instead if you’re going to continually use it for WoW as a dedicated system.
However, depending on the laptop that may be considerably more complicated (and expensive). Definitely do your thorough research on the idea before spending any money.
“WD 1.5TB Elements Desktop Hard Drive” This is the one I’ve been using. Dunno if that would make a difference? I’m notoriously bad at being a techie, and it’s why I had to buy a new laptop and miss almost all of Shadowlands in the first place. xD
I actually have World of Warcraft installed on an external Hard Drive. Only downside I have is the loading screen, but that is because of it being a HDD and not an SSD. But it runs the same as if it was installed directly to my C Drive
If its solid state and using USB 3 it’ll be fine. SATA is faster but it won’t be noticeable for the most part. If you’ve got a spinning drive, you’ll suffer regardless.
Hello, I see you made a thread about external harddrives. While you can technically run the game from such a drive, your bottleneck will be the USB interface. While USB 3.1 is much faster than older versions, the read/write speed of a internal SSD or m.2 would be a better option due to either a SATA or PCIe 4.0 connection. You also have to consider that your USB port might not actually be 3.1 and could very well be 2.0!
I literally do this and it works just fine. Installed on an external SSD, I open the launcher from the drive and never had to assign anything. It is actually a good way to improve performance if you have a bad desktop/laptop. Console games have often recommended running from external drives to improve performance.
Running from a hard drive is slower, this is an objective fact that you cannot argue against, leave the people who actually know what they’re talking about to give advice
I am trying to say an external SSD won’t hurt your load times or rendering and may actually help. It is actually often recommended to improve performance for console gamers. I do so and have done so for some time now.
But I realize you were saying hard drive, and I only skimmed your comment thinking external SSD. An external HDD will be slower than an internal SSD that is correct.
It might be easier for them to purchase and use an external SSD though.
At work I run it off an external SSD with USB 3.0 connectivity. The initial load screen is a bit longer, but in-game performance is superior to using a normal 7200rpm hard drive. Most laptops run slower 5400rpm hard drives.
It 100% will hurt load times, and can even cause slower rendering, that’s literally what happens when you move from SSDs which are much faster then HDDs, and it’s not even close.
He’s on a laptop.
An internal SSD is still far superior to Internal HDD.
Him using an external HDD just amplifies how much slower everything on it will load.
