Any experience with playing video games off an external USB drive?

I've been wanting to upgrade my laptop to an SSD drive to a while but the size that I need it out of my budget for now and would cost about half of what I paid for the laptop so I'm thinking of taking my SSD drives I have laying around and using them as external drives instead. Basically, I only need a 200GB drive for everything except my Steam/Origin/Games folders and I can fit all of those on another 250GB drive and since I have some SSD drives already, I was thinking of putting one of them in my laptop and the other will be in a USB3.0 enclosure plugged into a USB3.0 port. Thoughts on where I might experience some issues? I read some people using regular USB flash drives but if I can save some money and get better performance out of the SSDs I have laying around that would be much better I would think.

Right now my 1TB 5400 RPM drive in my laptop is constantly bogged down with the replication between my NAS/Google Drive/One Drive/Crash Plan so downloading anything causes my mouse to freeze up randomly and during Windows updates my keyboard stops working for a while until the disk IO drops below 100% in the Task Manager.

USB is not good for concurrent reads/writes because of the high latency, just remember the USB controller lives off somewhere in PCI space, behind the 'NB' (or whatever it's called these days)

On some test products I have here, USB 3.0 gives ~30MB/s or so, but that's with one direction (reads) and a little slower on writes (probably because of protocol overhead and writing needs to do some flushes)

If you are /really/ curious, I was able to hack together 5 USB thumb drives in Linux with a LVM with RAID0. It was about ~150MB a sec, but it was just PoC. 

I'll get one of the SSDs and run CrystalDiskMark on it to see what kind of speeds I see (not sure why this never occurred to me).

Load time will drag up a lot especially for games that load big data (maps/etc)

You can actually replace your ODD with a Caddy and put your 1TB drive into it and your SSD on the main HDD bay.

That's what I used to do with my laptop, unless your's don't have ODD bay 



This is my current setup, it was 60GB SSD + 750GB HDD but now 60GB SSD + 480GB SSD  :wub:

johnlth93 said:

You can actually replace your ODD with a Caddy and put your 1TB drive into it and your SSD on the main HDD bay.

That's what I used to do with my laptop, unless your's don't have ODD bay 



This is my current setup, it was 60GB SSD + 750GB HDD but now 60GB SSD + 480GB SSD  :wub:

Click to expand...

No ODD. I wish I would have bought the Intel version of my laptop so I had room for a mSATA drive but I opted for the better performance, battery life, and price of the AMD version.

I'm exploring the idea of whether a network drive will work better than an external drive also.

Make sure you disable c1e in the bios, because it does funky things to the clock signals, causing a noticable drop in bus speed, especially USB and SATA controllers. 

I play Nethack off a flash drive all the time 

I just realized my enclosure is only USB 2.0 but it has an eSATA port (unfortunately my gaming laptop does not). Still ran a disk test for USB 2.0 and it's not to bad, in theory USB 3.0 should be "10x faster" according to articles I read but even 3-4x faster should be enough right?

I have done it via USB 3 external HDD instead of SSD and it works fine. SSD should be even better

KuJoe said:

I just realized my enclosure is only USB 2.0 but it has an eSATA port (unfortunately my gaming laptop does not). Still ran a disk test for USB 2.0 and it's not to bad, in theory USB 3.0 should be "10x faster" according to articles I read but even 3-4x faster should be enough right?


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.2 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

Sequential Read : 38.508 MB/s
Sequential Write : 36.809 MB/s
Random Read 512KB : 37.022 MB/s
Random Write 512KB : 38.544 MB/s
Random Read 4KB (QD=1) : 9.612 MB/s [ 2346.7 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=1) : 16.308 MB/s [ 3981.4 IOPS]
Random Read 4KB (QD=32) : 11.400 MB/s [ 2783.2 IOPS]
Random Write 4KB (QD=32) : 21.269 MB/s [ 5192.7 IOPS]

Test : 100 MB [F: 0.1% (0.1/119.2 GB)] (x2)
Date : 2014/05/15 8:51:06
OS : Windows 8 [6.2 Build 9200] (x64)

Click to expand...

Here's mine off a Seagate USB-3 drive


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :    98.523 MB/s
          Sequential Write :    94.169 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    31.084 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :    48.771 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.340 MB/s [    83.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     0.679 MB/s [   165.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     0.544 MB/s [   132.7 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     0.523 MB/s [   127.7 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [J: 86.5% (2418.0/2794.5 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2014/05/15 23:57:11
    OS : Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
 
Pretty shitty for anything apart from simply storing data.

blergh said:

Here's mine off a Seagate USB-3 drive


-----------------------------------------------------------------------
CrystalDiskMark 3.0.3 x64 (C) 2007-2013 hiyohiyo
                           Crystal Dew World : http://crystalmark.info/
-----------------------------------------------------------------------
* MB/s = 1,000,000 byte/s [SATA/300 = 300,000,000 byte/s]

           Sequential Read :    98.523 MB/s
          Sequential Write :    94.169 MB/s
         Random Read 512KB :    31.084 MB/s
        Random Write 512KB :    48.771 MB/s
    Random Read 4KB (QD=1) :     0.340 MB/s [    83.0 IOPS]
   Random Write 4KB (QD=1) :     0.679 MB/s [   165.7 IOPS]
   Random Read 4KB (QD=32) :     0.544 MB/s [   132.7 IOPS]
  Random Write 4KB (QD=32) :     0.523 MB/s [   127.7 IOPS]

  Test : 1000 MB [J: 86.5% (2418.0/2794.5 GB)] (x5)
  Date : 2014/05/15 23:57:11
    OS : Windows 7 Enterprise SP1 [6.1 Build 7601] (x64)
 
Pretty shitty for anything apart from simply storing data.

Click to expand...

Wow, what SSD drive is that?

I just did a test on the hard drive I'm using now, looks like that USB 3.0 might still be an improvement for me.

It will most probably be a big improvement. The test above was on a standard 7200RPM Barracuda (Ie, Seagate Backup+).

KuJoe said:

No ODD. I wish I would have bought the Intel version of my laptop so I had room for a mSATA drive but I opted for the better performance, battery life, and price of the AMD version.

I'm exploring the idea of whether a network drive will work better than an external drive also.

Click to expand...

No ODD? Ultra Book?

johnlth93 said:

No ODD? Ultra Book?

Click to expand...

HP classifies it as a notebook, it's an HP Envy 15z so it's pretty thin.

If the external Hard Drive is connected over eSATA or USB 3.0, it should be decent. eSATA would be best in terms of the number of controller interfaces the data passes through. eSATA is handled directly through the SATA controller, while USB 3.0 has to go through multiple controller interfaces, which can slow performance down. 

I wish I had an eSATA port, that would be the best solution since I already have everything but it looks like I need to buy a USB 3.0 enclosure.

Just got my USB 3.0 enclosure and put my old Samsung 830 in it and WOW! This thing blows away my local drive and is much faster than when I had the 830 on a SATAII port.

Those numbers look good!

I'm just worried how performance would be affect under heavy use.