Portable Harddrive running games Help

[coldgreentea]

Well lemme explain my situation, my hard drive is dieing, i go into a game and 10min later i hear this "click" sound....it only clicks once and my computer freezes and i usually immediately shut off to try to avoid anything else happening. But thats not my main problem, my problem is that i want to try to run this game off of a portable HDD. This game runs through a program called Steam and the game is called Garry's Mod. If someone can help me find a solution to either my dieing HDD or to running the game off of a portable HDD to help reduce the strain on my computer HDD please respond to this.......Also, if you can find a good HDD deal (IDE) for under 60$ and a decent amount of storage that would be superb.

Computer Specs
160GB HDD IDE
ATi x1950GT
2GB RAM
Antec 850w Sli compatible Power Supply
Gigabyte motherboard

[disophisis]

You could probably reinstall steam on the portable hard drive and install all the local content for the games there as well. Try that.

As for a hard drive, I would suggest upgrading to a SATA drive if your motherboard has SATA ports. But if not,

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822136112

That would be a 160GB IDE drive for ya.

[OlyComputers]

Is it your desktops drive that "clicks" when this happens?

Even if you're keeping the game information on an external, your internal drive is still being used for system files and your swap partition. You can reduce "strain" but there's always a load on your system drive when you're gaming.

You should replace your hard drive, but go to task manager during your systems heavy load and see how much ram you're using. With 2Gb (if you're using XP) you may have enough of a cushion to disable your swap file which would move most of the drives load to your RAM.