Hello everyone!

How would most games on GoG perform if I played them from an external hard drive? I'm guessing the newer games will have problems because they have to carry a lot of weight from the hard drive to the PC. What about the older ones?

There's lots of old school games here. I know that a blanket statement will not apply to some games. I just want an idea of how they would operate in general.

I have some old games that I play from USB 2.0, they work fine. It sort of depends on the game in question of course, but my guess would be that anything pre-2005 (not based on anything, pulled that digit out of my arse) should work without any issues. Just keep in mind that some games are going to store save data in user profile, therefore losing that data if you move the drive to another computer.

Depends on the game(s). There are two main issues that may or may not apply, depending on what you use and how.
Issue 1 is the drive's speed. It may be too slow to properly load the needed assets, thus leading to slow load times. Depending on the game, that may or may not cause it to be unplayable.
Issue 2 is whether the game requires files in the system to be played. This is an issue only if you move the external hard drive to a computer you didn't install the game on.

If you have a fast disk (USB 3.x or eSATA for example) and a small/old enough game, and you play on the computer you installed it on, you shouldn't have any issues. If the disk is a slow one and you want to play the game on a different computer, you may encounter issues.

More specific answers can be given for specific games, if interested.

Well that should not be much of an issue for older games which do tend to load used assets into RAM - I can imagine games which make massive use of streaming like GTA or Morrowind becoming a lot more difficult to play tho.

Well, i dunno wat's ur definition of older games but as another member said, most games pre-2005 shd work w/o any probs. Of cos it helps if ur external hard drive is USB 3.0 enabled.

My suggestion however is to save the installer of the games u dled on the external hard drive but install them on the comp u'll be playing instead. That way, u can always carry a backup copy of ur games with u & dun hv to worry abt games that requires specific files to be save on comp in order to play.

That being said, i believe most (or @ least the majority) of the games available here shd be able to run from an external hard drive just fine.

Edit: Just want to add, if u hv a specific game in mind u want to run off an external hard drive & not sure it wld work u can always check with Support as they shd know if can be played off the drive directly.

I think, as a rule of thumb, anything not connected directly through a SATA can't be considered too stable. Even if you get a few seconds of reading lag every few minutes, it's not worth it.

I beg to disagree, i hv played quite a few 'old' (in my case, games made pre-2005) games off my usb 2.0 external drive & they r very stable. As in, i didn't experience any lag @ all. I think wat matters more is how old the games are, the amt of RAM they use & whether the games require any files to be installed in the system in order to be played instead.

However, i hv to agree that it's indeed not worth it if u keep getting lag every few mins when playing it off an external hard drive of cos.

Just curious, why do you want to play the games installed on an external hard drive? Do you have too little space on the internal hard drive, or want to be able to run the same game installations on several PCs (without having to install it on all of them), or what?

With USB 3.0 (both disk and computer must support this) You will have very little problem. With USB 2.0 you may have serious issues on games that uses disk files constantly. However games before 2000 should work fine.

I haven't tried games, but I am actually writing this on my old Dell laptop whose internal hard drive got fried recently, so I ended up installing Linux Mint 17.3 on an external hard drive connected to a USB 2.0 port, booting the whole PC from it.

Apart from loading times having increased from what they were with the internal hard drive, I haven't noticed any other issues. This is my low-power PC dedicated to running gogrepo.py (to check and download my local GOG game collection, which is on another external hard drive connected to another USB port).

(The reason I didn't replace the internal hard drive is because the old (fried) 2.5" hard drive was a PATA drive, while this is a SATA drive in an USB chassis. Plus, since the old drive seemed to fry due to heat, I figured keeping the bootable hard drive external helps keeping the whole laptop cooler, one less internal heat source.)

Maybe the OP wants to play games at work but lacks the sysadmin privileges to install them. :D Anyway, the only games you can reliably play from an external drive are those which require no Windows installation (i.e. DOS games), and can be run without DosBox. That's what I've found, at least. Old Sierra adventures spring to mind.

Yeah, I'm running out of space.

It works well, I have only a 80GB SSD, because I want the computer to be silent, so I run the very big games from a USB 3 drive, I noticed no performance problems in Skyrim, Saints Row 3 or Bioshock Infinite.

Wha.. really? :O
I didn't think that usb3 would have been enough for "modern" games.
But is your drive 5400 (EDIT: whoops) or 7200 rpm?
Haven't the loading times gotten worse at all?

Well, in this case perhaps u might want to either do some spring cleaning such as removing unwanted files & transfering non-daily essential files to an external drive or it's still not enough, consider upgrading ur internal hard drive instead. Games always work better internally but if all u want play r the 'older' games then i guess they (or @ least most of them) shd be fine running off an external drive.