hard drivehardwarepcsteam
So I installed Steam + a few games onto a USB hard drive easily enough, and so far everything seems to work fine.
But I've read mixed opinions online, many say that it is a bad idea to do such a thing.
Most of the games I play are quite old (mainly Unreal Tournament games) so the speed at which my games run isn't an issue.
But is there a chance something could 'mess up' further down the line and I'll be back to square one?
No, there is no way to queue it at the moment, but Steam has it's pipeline for downloading changed over the last year and only like 100 Games are left with the old content system at the moment.
Once this is completly done, more features will come out on Steam that give you more control over your downloads. The current Steam Beta contains a download speed limiter for example.
Games that require Steam cannot be legally played without Steam. Steam is essentially a form of digital rights management in the context of these games.
Steam is approximately 100MB to download, if you have a slow internet connection you're probably best off leaving it overnight to download as a workaround. If you really can't do this then there aren't many options left.
Once Steam and your game are both installed, you can put Steam into "offline" mode, which will allow you to play your games without being connected to the internet.
Best Answer
Consider the following: The games will load much slower but it will be portable. I for my self wouldn't install the games on a USB hard drive because steam has a cloud service so portability isn't a problem, the only thing that will happen is that your games load way slower so: No, i wouldn't recommend it.