game installed on external hard drive = slower performance?

Thank you for the input. The hard drive in question is a Western Digital 250 gb with a usb connection. Game in question is SupCom Forged Alliance. thanks in advance...

Might be. External drives are meant for data and backup purposes, not for installing programs.

I would say yes, but have never tried, so your results may differ.

The speed of the bus may be your first problem, but probably not a show stopper. Thereal problem is thatif you have other USB devices,the hard drivewouldsuffer from device prioritization as it has to 'share' the bus bandwidth (actually a timing issue not data size)with the other devices.

If its a sata drive and the enclosure has an eSATA connection, use that. It's almost as good as hooking it up as an internal (for most good enclosures that is).

That said, USB isn't going to be ideal for load times :)