Programs on external hard drive.

[pawelinho71]

Hi Ill be getting a rMBP.
It will be my first OSX device.

I'm a bit of a gamer and I want to play some pc games like fifa 2012...

the problem is that the 256 gb ssd im getting may turn out to be a bit to small.
So Ill get myself a extrenal hardrive probably this one

http://www.macmall.com/p/LaCie-Hard-Drives/product~dpno~8857442~pdp.giieaba


ok lets say I have it, and i get windows 7 on my mac. Is it possible to install games and programs on the external drive at all?

two can both of the systems use the external hd to install aps,games...

Thanks!

 

[Rhei]

It should be possible, though not ideal. I believe my brother was trying to play Oblivion off of an external USB 2.0 HDD. A USB 3.0 drive like what you're getting should run better, but again, it's not the ideal way to play games. You should be able to install games and programs on the external as it should be read the same as any other drive. You'll just have to make sure that the drive letter is always the same, which by default it should be. Otherwise you may plug in the drive only to find a desktop shortcut can't be found.

As for your second question, yes and no. I've recently (in the past year) had my MBP so I'm no guru at it, but I believe you should be able to drop an app into the external and be able to run it from there as they are mostly self-contained. Other more seasoned Mac users can clarify, but this seems similar to the fad from a year or so ago when people wanted the SSD as their boot drive and a regular HDD for storage. The only caveat I can think of will be for apps that need something else elsewhere on your system and can't find it because it thinks it's in the Applications folder on your drive (Like a program that needs to look in your media, but can't find it because it's in "Your external Drive/Program file name" instead of "Apple laptop name/user/Applications")

For your external you just have to make sure it's formatted to be read properly by both systems. I believe exFat will be your best bet for native read/write on both Windows and OSX, or you can use something like NTFS for Mac to be able to read/write NTFS on your OSX side while having that native ability in Windows.

Hope this helps.

 

[pawelinho71]

And also what do u think about the hard drive is it ok?

 

[doh123]

And also what do u think about the hard drive is it ok?

its overly expensive... just find some more common USB3 drive... like a Seagate or whatever... you don't need to buy LaCie as they are usually very expensive, and you don't need any special type of drive, is the same you'd use on a PC. I saw some 3TB drive on sale the other day for like $120... spending $80 for 0.5TB seems like a waste unless you really really need it to be portable.. then its still too expensive... maybe look somewhere like at newegg.com or even on amazon.com.