Question How will performance in games be affected when using an external HDD?

[Light2424]

I currently have a 1TB 5400RPM HDD in my laptop that I want to swap out for a 256GB SSD (preferably a Crucial MX500) - 512GB SSDs are a bit too expensive in my country, and I don't have a big enough budget. As 256GB isn't too large, I thought I'd repurpose my old HDD as an external one and play games off of that. My question is, how badly would this affect performance compared to an internal HDD? (I know this isn't an ideal solution but I can't get a bigger SSD).

 

[justin.m.beauvais]

Performance will suffer, mostly just load times though. Not only will you run into the problem of the USB connection's speed, which you can overcome by using a USB 3 external enclosure and using a USB 3 port to connect it all, but you'll also suffer from the increased latency of the data having to go through the USB controller.

It is doable and there are people who do it, it just isn't optimal. So, put the games that are most important to you on the SSD and any games that you play less often or don't need performance in on the hard drive. It should work just fine, but load times will be even slower than you are used to. To alleviate load time issues you could upgrade your RAM so you don't need to access the drive as often while playing the game, but other than that there isn't much you can do to make it better.

 

[Light2424]

Performance will suffer, mostly just load times though. Not only will you run into the problem of the USB connection's speed, which you can overcome by using a USB 3 external enclosure and using a USB 3 port to connect it all, but you'll also suffer from the increased latency of the data having to go through the USB controller.

It is doable and there are people who do it, it just isn't optimal. So, put the games that are most important to you on the SSD and any games that you play less often or don't need performance in on the hard drive. It should work just fine, but load times will be even slower than you are used to. To alleviate load time issues you could upgrade your RAM so you don't need to access the drive as often while playing the game, but other than that there isn't much you can do to make it better.

Ok, I already have 8GB RAM in my laptop, I'm not sure if I can increase it at this point. Thanks for your help.

 

[guanyu210379]

Using external mechanical HDD, things involved with loading or data streaming from and to the HDD will be affected.
If the games loads or streams quite a lot, the game will stutter or have a long loading time.
More RAM can help on most occasions/games but some games, usually open-world like Skyrim, Witcher3, etc., will still suffer.