Installing games onto an external desktop hard-drive and then playing them?

Ok, I'm building my own gaming PC, and I want to spend as little money as possible- I have an old 38gb hard drive with Windows XP on it, I want to keep it and use it in my new gaming PC..

So, my freind said I can get an external desktop hard drive- so I found one like this - which just plugs into the USB port and presumebly I will be able to install my games onto it and play them without having decreased performance?

So- will I be able to install games onto an external desktop hard drive and be able to run them with no decrease in performance?

it depends on the RAM capacity and the CPU speed.

if you have 2 Gbytes RAM DDR2 and a good CPU it's ok

also, make sure that the data transfer speed of the external drive is fast enough

Yes- I plan to have 4gb's of ddr2 kingston RAM :) (Which i heard is the best quality) plus a dual core processor (2.4ghz)

it's entitled-

'Fujitsu Storagebird 250GB External Hard Drive Hi Speed USB - Retail' - check out the link i provided in my description- an answer would be great :) it says high speed.. but im not sure..

You will have slower load times due to it being USB but it will work. If you want no performance penalty, get an internal to external sata adapter for your PC, an sata drive carrier, and a sata drive to put in it. Captain__Tripps

Gigabytes P45 UDP motherboard comes packaged with an e-sata setup on it and is one of the best motherboards to be released in a very long time. Its also fairly cheap. Most sites like newegg.com and tigerdirect.com sell e-sata cables for very little. They also sell external HDD cases for dirt cheap.ColdfireTrilogy

If you want an esata hard drive but dont have esata on your motherborad, all you need is something such as this :

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16812104063

You could then buy an esata hard drive, or put one together yourself with an internal hard drive, and an esata drive carrier. The only thing you might miss using an adapter such as that is hot swap ability... Also why not just keep your existing drive, then add another internal drive inside your computer?