As someone who was spoiled by fast fiber internet without any bandwidth limit now finding himself stranded in the boonies with a horrible internet plan, the prospect of transitioning to a new Personal Computer comes with its own hassle on top of all the excitement. My first thought, because of the way I handled this in the past, is just to redownload all of my PC games, which would be very easy to do if you don't have a data cap! Because of that reason, starting from scratch would have been a time consuming nightmare since I will only be able to download a set number of games per month and I would really rather use the remaining bandwidth to download my newer acquisitions. Then, I realized that I have 16 TB of external hard drives, which already contain a majority of Steam games - and all my Epic games - and I feel so much better about the situation.
It's funny thinking back 4 years ago when I hesitated playing games off an external hard drive. Surely, there will be performance impact, I told myself, and that load time would quadruple. But that is not the case at all. I use USB 3.0 connections for the 2 external HDDs and there is no difference compared to playing games off an internal HDD. I have not installed any games on my solid state drive since I don't mind a slightly longer load time. With future games now looking to abuse the SSD speed not because it's necessary but just because it's the cool thing to do (we can thank Mark Cerny for that, whose latest console design is again a failure since its ONLY prominent feature, the SSD speed is already crushed by faster new SSDs on the PC), I am sure that I will find myself installing those straight on the SSD but for a while, I can see myself just playing off the external HDDs. I love that Steam and EA Origin clients both feature an option to move all the game install files to another drive, and in this case my external HDDs, prior to my transition. It helps out a lot.
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