Is it possible to run Guild Wars 2 from a USB-connected drive?

My machine is an early 2011 17-inch MacBook Pro with a 2.2 Ghz Core i7, 4 GB RAM, and a Radeon HD 6750M with 1 GB of VRAM.

Based on the published system reqs, I think it should be able to run the game client, at least at minimal settings. (Comments on that are welcome.)

However the internal HD doesn't have nearly enough free space.

I have an external USB drive with plenty of space though.

Could I install GW 2 on that and run it from there?

2 Answers

Welp, I installed a larger solid state drive.

GW2 runs reasonably well on the machine described in my question.

Not the greatest -- you have to put it on pretty low settings -- but definitely playable.

I just confirmed that yes you can run Guild Wars 2 from an external drive. I plugged in an external USB 3 HDD, moved the Guild Wars 2 file from the Applications folder to the external drive, double-clicked it, downloaded an update, logged on, and everything worked fine.

It is a little slower on a USB 3.0 external than an internal SSD, but freeing up 26 GB is worth it to me.

This is on a MacBook Pro using the Beta GW2 client with Heart of Thorns.