Running games off of an external hard drive...

I am running out of space on my hard drive and have some games and expansions I would like to install. Is it possible to install them onto my external hard drive and be able to run them successfully? How would I do it? I am currently running Lion on my main system.

It really depends on the game. If it's reliant on the game files being in a certain directory, it could be tricky to get it to run entirely from an external. Also, you have to consider the fact that depending on the bus connection you're using, you could degrade the performance of the game having it on an external (particularly USB2 external drives - it would be less of a concern with Firewire 800).

You can use aliases to trick most applications into believing that their files are in the original location. That may be something to try.

I have some games and applications I want to install but I am running out of space on my hard disk. I have an external hard drive with plenty of space. Would I be able to install OSX on my hard drive along with the apps so I can run them there? Would this be worth doing or a viable option? Would I need to install OSX on my external hard drive to run installed apps from there?

My humble suggestion .... keep things simple and install a larger internal disk in your machine.

Cheers ... McBie

And please do not cross post. Only post your question to one forum and continue with the same thread. Your posts have been merged together.