An External SSD for GAMING vs HDD & SSD - What You NEED to know

for any of you who've actually been following the channel for a while you might remember a little video that i did more than three years ago and that basically talked about my experience gaming on an external drive since then game sizes have ballooned in size way past the 150 gigabyte mark i mean if you look at modern warfare for instance that thing takes about 200 gigs if you decide to install pretty much all of the game modes it isn't the only one either since the assets of a lot of new games actually chew up huge amounts of storage space and while the speeds of external drives have remained pretty constant with the exception of super expensive thunderbolt and rare usb 3.2 gen 2x2 models the demands of modern games have increased too so we decided to revisit the whole external drive topic with a more in-depth video so this one actually covers choosing the right usb port which can also be super important game performance versus internal solutions and a lot more i'd also like to thank crucial for supporting this project by sending over a bunch of their drives both internal and external uh just so we could get a general idea of how everything lines up so let's get to all of this but first a quick message from our sponsor show off the cool build and not the cables with the new corsair 5000 series welcome the all-new interior you'll appreciate for whatever build you desire without any hassle of cable management and appropriate cooling all around with proper dust filtration on all three models check it out below okay so a lot of people who are looking to expand their storage with an external solution of course might have a bit of an older system or even a laptop so i want to keep this video by at least trying to explain the ins and outs of usb interfaces and that is a little bit of a mess right now first of all nearly all systems regardless if it's a desktop or laptop have indications next to their ports that show which category they fall into if not you can check out the manual of your system laptop or motherboard and it'll be listed there let's start with usb 2.0 that operates at a maximum of 480 megabits per second or 60 megabytes per second it's still in a lot of systems and yes it's still called usb 2. next up we have usb 3.0 which is the artist formerly known as usb 3.1 gen1 and now it's called usb 3.2 gen 1. and the transfer speeds go up to 5 gigabits per second or 625 megabytes per second usb 3.1 bumped things up even more and that also went through two radium inks to usb 3.1 gen 2 and now usb 3.2 gen 2. all of those move things along with 10 gigabits per second or 1250 megabytes per second usb 3.2 gen 2x2 is a relatively new spec at 20 gigabits per second that was first launched last year but we'll see it gaining more traction now with native support on intel's z590 platform unfortunately the 2x2 drives have a lot of stability problems so it won't be included in this video but second generation is due in just a few months and it's supposed to have improved by a lot i also want to quickly mention thunderbolt it's been included on a lot of intel systems ever since it transitioned to a type c connector and both the third and upcoming fourth generation provide up to a massive 40 gigabits per second now there are a couple of issues with this standard first of all external drives are super expensive and we from our testing we also noticed that some thunderbolt drives actually don't play well with some game services like epic and rockstar game stores it just randomly disconnects or it just fails installing a game update so i might revisit these drives a bit later in the future but for now we're just simply sticking to usb devices either way knowing the problems that you may have and their transfer speeds is half the battle when you're shopping for an external drive if you don't you could overspend on a drive that won't even let you run at full speed or plug a fast drive into a slow port now let me explain what i'm talking about with some of these game load times for this i'm going to be using crucial's x8 ssd that has a usb 3.2 gen 2 interface and it's rated at 1050 megabytes per second so it's pretty close to gen 2's theoretical maximum when operating at full speed on a usb 3.2 gen 2 interface it gets really good load times and that starts syncing a little bit when you move to gen 1 but not by all that much but plug that drive into usb 2 port and you'll be waiting around forever for anything to load i mean check this out it takes almost as long as a 5400 rpm internal hard drive and in some cases even more like sometimes even double the amount of time the same goes for pretty much every game i tested another thing i need to mention here is to make sure that you never ever plug too high bandwidth devices at the same time into a cases front panel connector that means an external drive usb capture cards usb headsets dacs or anything else even some mice and keyboards with higher polling rates can cause headaches now you might be wondering what headaches well we actually plugged the same x8 and a usb audio dac into two front panel ports uh when they were both fed with the same controller while the x8 performance tanks and the audio interface randomly disconnected when playing a game but what about performance are there some sacrifices on game load times frame rates and especially game update times when you go external well this is where i wanted to spend some time and go a little bit more in depth with you guys now to do that i've actually got a great selection of internal and external drives that represents almost every single reasonable upgrade solution you can actually find links to all of these i'm going to be mentioning in this video in the description down below so this is the crucial x6 it's a small light and super compact drive which should give us a good idea of what a mid-range and a more budget-friendly external drive can do it's weighted for a peak of 540 megabytes per second so it's right within usb 3.0 or usb 3.1 gen1 or usb 3.2 gen1 spec so it's a good fit for slightly older systems now just remember that if you do buy the x6 for an older setup it'll need a properly rated type c to type the adapter like this one since there's only a type c cable in the box some retailers also sell a combo pack with the drive and adapter though next up is the crucial x8 i talked about this one before which is still a compact drive but its speeds are way up there at 1050 megabytes per second and yeah this one comes with a type c to type a adapter it costs a bit more than the x6 but there is a lot more performance on tap now what are these drives up against well starting at the bottom is a 5400 rpm hard drive which for a lot of people is one of the best options if you simply want to maximize your capacity per dollar there's also a 7200 rpm model that's more performance oriented but still offers good capacity per dollar then we have the legendary crucial mx 500 which is still i think in my opinion one of the best price performance ssds on the market right now i also want to mention that it's sata six gigabits per second interface results can also be used to understand how a sata based m.2 drive could behave stepping things up we have the crucial p5 nvme ssd now this is a drive that i've been using and a lot of builds lately and i've been super happy with it at least on paper when you look at the specs this thing should should run circles around everything else that we have over here as for the test system we're using an x570 based platform which has more than enough bandwidth on its various i o ports for all external drives to stretch their legs in terms of raw performance all of these drives are very different in synthetic tests that nvme drive looks like it's gonna rock the house right but remember we're gonna look at how this translates to real world applications like game updates and game load times because you know those are things that people actually care about in their daily gaming lives but generally you're going to want to make sure that any drive you're looking at at least has the read speeds that are almost same as the rights because both should be as fast as possible since reads are important for game load times while writes are key for game installation or updates the first thing that i want to look at is game updates and it's actually one of the most annoying things for me personally because the last thing that anybody needs is to sit down in front of the computer launch the game but then you realize that it it's going to take at least another half an hour or even more to install an update because they just take forever now at this point you might be yelling at the screen saying eber that's probably your internet connection causing the main bottleneck and yeah in some cases it might be but a lot of modern games download smaller packets of information and then wait for game files to be overwritten to your drive to download the next batch you can actually see right over here when network usage drops off completely during an update to warhammer and then it pauses the download until those files are written to the drive so when it comes to updating your storage is just as important as a fast connection to game servers so starting off with pubg the p5 nvme drive the mx500 and the crucial x8 all take about the same amount of time to finish the crucial x6 well that took a lot longer than i expected if i had to guess it looks like the way the specific update's done reveals a bit of a write operation bottleneck on a slower drive we tried this test four times and we ended up with the same result but what's really odd is pubg was the only game that it happened in and you'll see that in the next result even though the warhammer update is about one-third the size of the pub g one we saw just earlier it pegs the storage drive with a lot more write requests so here the nvme ssd is still tops out but the external crucial x8 actually manages to beat the mx500 by pretty big margin then comes the x6 which acts like a nice little bridge between a fast external drive or sata ssd and spinning hard drives so what does this all tell us well there's no doubt that going with a fast internal nvme ssd like the p5 is just a way to go if you want performance without sacrifices but let's not forget a fast external drive operating at usb 3.2 gen 2 speeds or higher can deliver surprisingly good times i mean heck the x6 is a perfectly fine price to performance option because it's really respectable moving on to game load times and i guess i'll just talk over these as they run for the most part the difference between the internal and external drives is minimal to nothing even though they're on paper specs are very very different the only outliers here are the spinning hard drives that do tend to take a heck of a lot longer especially when there's a lot of game assets to pre-load before a level or a new scene starts what really surprised me is how little benefit the nvme drive had i mean yes it's blazing fast in some loads but the two external drives delivered really consistent results right across every game the mx-500 performed really well too especially for its price even though its read speeds are technically lower than the x8 external drive it could be that the sata interface's lower latency give it a slight edge in a few cases this all goes to show what i said earlier synthetic tests mean nothing guys i mean it's a crappy indicator of how any drive will perform in a normal day-to-day use i mean these external drives kept up perfectly fine even though some usb interface bottleneck showed up with a minor extent just here and there the fact of the matter is that a lot of games actually end up pre-loading their assets because developers don't want their engines constantly pinging the local storage again and again and again so that kind of thing could actually cause major issues for gameplay frame rates and speaking of frame rates let's quickly check out those as well on a powerful system like i'm using right over here any massive bottleneck will stick out like a sore thumb but for the most part that didn't happen at all on the external drives everything was within margin of error except the 5400 rpm hard drive did seem to struggle a bit with one percent lows or how fluid the game feels in titles with massive levels like horizon zero dawn and jedi order that's probably because additional game files needed to be loaded as the player walks through the world otherwise though it was almost impossible to tell one drive from the other in just blind testing so we went into this video asking whether or not you can count on an excel drive to deliver enough performance for newer games and the answer to that is absolutely provided you follow a few rules first of all know the limitations of your usb ports usb 2.0 really isn't going to cut it next up don't plug your game drive along with a bunch of other stuff into the front panel's connectors also don't assume the fastest most expensive drive is going to be all that much better than a more affordable option or one with more capacity because like we saw the crucial x6 actually gave us a happy medium of performance between high-end drives and hard drives either way this is all good news for people with laptops or for folks who just want to quickly you know and simply expand their storage or maybe take their games with them from one pc to another you see with higher bandwidth standards right around the corner maybe i'll revisit this whole external drives topic in the future but for now i guess all that's left to say is take the advice in this video and spend responsibly my friends

Channel: Hardware Canucks

Views: 373,808

Keywords: ssd vs hdd, external ssd for gaming, external ssd for laptop, ssd vs hdd speed test, ssd vs hdd gaming performance, best external ssd for gaming, ssd vs hdd fps, nvme vs ssd, nvme vs ssd gaming, nvme vs ssd boot time, nvme vs ssd vs sshd vs hdd, nvme vs ssd game loading, m.2 nvme vs sata ssd, hardwarecanucks, hardware canucks

Id: -Q1t9tIAY9Y

Length: 13min 31sec (811 seconds)

Published: Thu Feb 11 2021