is a usb 2.0 port fast enough for gaming on an external hard drive?

i ask because i am running out of room on my main hard drive so i thought i might grab a good external one but is a 2.0 usb port fast enough for it to play games like skyrim on ultra? or would i need to buy a 3.0 usb card for my pc

 

I'm gonna say no not really skyrim has a plentiful supply of load screens and lots of data to load,every time you enter building and micro stutters as a new area is loaded, It's one of the games biggest complaints. The max transfer rate of USB 2.0 is 60mbps which is roughly half of the ACTUAL transfer rate for a cheap sata drive,most cheap sata drives can have an average read spead of 120mbps. In my experience though the average transfer speed of external USB drives hover around 30-40mbps, this varies between files sizes,types and drives though, many are a lot slower than this and some may be quicker.

Many people happily game from external hard drives but I couldn't stand it, I can't stand the speed of regular internal hard drives though when gaming and I've had some fast hard drives, which is why I use a really fast SSD for games with a 500mbps read speed.

But that's not what external drives are for anyway,they're for convenient storage of bulky files so get all your bulky media files and dump them on the external drive, then install your games on your internal drive.

 

You would be better to move stuff off of the drive like pictures & music to either an external drive, or add another hard drive, since they have become so cheap now days. You can now get a decent 1TB desktop internal SATA for under $90.