Can I use an external SSD for gaming?

[Jeighke]

Hi Steam Community! I only have a 250GB internal SSD and, as I am now missing some storage space to install new games, I was wondering if it would be feasable to install and play games from an external SSD drive. And if so, what would be the best choice:

Samsung T5 1TB external SSD
or
Samsung 970 EVO PLUS M.2 NVME 1TB with enclosure
or
Samsung 960 EVO 2.5'' SATA III 1TB with enclosure

Honestly, I am a total neophyte with those things, and don't know which gear/setup would be the fastest, have the best performance.

Thank you all in advance!

[Cathulhu]

The bigger question is, how fast is your connection to that drive? What connection do you use? USB? Thunderbolt? Which version?

Also, stay away from 2.5" mechanical drives. Get a 3.5" version if it has to be a mechanical one.

Anyway, is it possible? Yes. Is it recommended? Not really. And if your laptop only has such a small SSD, i wonder if it can run games that require that much space.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

The speeds might be limited if all you have available is usb 3.0

Which exact model of laptop is it so we can check and see if it has usb 3.1

I would never buy an external ssd. Instead buy something like 860 EVO SATA and use your own external enclosure. You can do the same for NVME M2 SSD as well

[Bad 💀 Motha]

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[Bad 💀 Motha]

Check your laptop manual for available ports. If you have another internal sata or m2, use it

[tacoshy]

I use an external 4TB SSD sicne a while. perofmrnace via USB-C 3.1 is pretty identical to internal use.

I wrote a guide about it somewhile ago:
https://steamcommunity.com/groups/Master_Race_Geeks/discussions/0/1735466157768391213/

stay away from prebuild SSD. Despite them being more expensive they also underperform.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

What I meant by don't buy external are the ones already packaged and marketed as such. It's cheaper to make your own external ssd or hdd

[Jeighke]

I have:
2 x USB 3.1 Gen 1 (one Always On)
1 x USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 1
1 x USB 3.1 Type-C Gen 2 / Thunderbolt 3

What would be your recommended gear then? No « packaged » external SSD, I get it. But is it better to have a NVME SSD or a 2.5 SATA III Nand SSD? Which one could give the best performance in these conditions? Thank you again!

[Majestic Turkey]

Hard link shell extension.
Any external ssd solution is fine.
Even with dodgy trim support, game drives aren't written to often, only uasp matters.
Load time \difference between ssds in games is minimal. 4k random reads are usually way below sata/usb 3 ceilngs
Buy biggest ssd for the money.
As for increased failure with cheap, backup your games.

[tacoshy]

SATA SSD all the way for games. NVMe gives no profit to them for higher cost.

If you look into the guide link I posted above I have there a enclosure recommendation for USB-C

[Jeighke]

Thank you guys, much appreciated!
An another quick question. If I can have both SATA SSD and NVMe at the same price, wiuld there be any advantages to go with NVMe, or should I stick with SATA SSD?

[tacoshy]

To actually use NVMe you need 4 PCIe lanes. You not getting that with with simple USB.

So the performance will be lower than internal NVMe. SATA in the end will work fine with every device including smartphone via USB-C.

[Jeighke]

Great, thank you! And, could you please explain the PCIe lanes concept please? I am not quite sure I understand that...

I did a quick search on the internet, and saw this NVMe enclosure:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07K4TCKVL/ref=as_li_ss_tl?psc=1&slotNum=7&_encoding=UTF8&language=en_US&linkCode=g12&linkId=b4c6a27961e8aa77f453919a3f0845e1&imprToken=3c5jSQ3yfNmX6RWFv2Wy0Q&tag=healprodrevca-20

It says, on a few other sites, that the tests gave a sequential speed of 2154.1mb/s, which sounds much faster thant for a SATA SSD...

Thank you again for claryfing!

[Cathulhu]

USB 3.1 Gen 1 aka USB 3.0, yeah that naming scheme got totally ridiculous.
NVMe is useless, considering that USB 3.0 limits you to a practical limit of about 300 Megabytes per second, which means that you'd waste 1,800 Megabytes per second write spoeed that NVMe drive has.

USB 3.1 Gen 2 is twice as fast as Gen 1, so 600 Megabytes per second, still wasting 1,500 Megabytes per second of that NVMe drive.

[Bad 💀 Motha]

I would just get a 1tb m2 sata or 2.5 inch sata, either is fine.

Then buy an external enclosure for it that has either m2 slot inside or supports sata iii 6gbps. It should have usb 3.0 or 3.1 on the outside as for what you will use to connect the drive to a device.

No need to spend more on m2 nvme type of ssd just to run games off of.

If you need more fluid-like performance of the pc overall, then install os and apps to an internal ssd such as m2 sata or m2 nvme

[tacoshy]

Originally posted by TellurianWall4:

Great, thank you! And, could you please explain the PCIe lanes concept please? I am not quite sure I understand that...

I did a quick search on the internet, and saw this NVMe enclosure:

https://www.amazon.ca/dp/B07K4TCKVL/ref=as_li_ss_tl?psc=1&slotNum=7&_encoding=UTF8&language=en_US&linkCode=g12&linkId=b4c6a27961e8aa77f453919a3f0845e1&imprToken=3c5jSQ3yfNmX6RWFv2Wy0Q&tag=healprodrevca-20

It says, on a few other sites, that the tests gave a sequential speed of 2154.1mb/s, which sounds much faster thant for a SATA SSD...

Thank you again for claryfing!

it sound faster but just because a ferrari can drive faster then other cars doesnt mean it is faster in a town where you only allowed to drive 35mph in the first place.
You connection is the limitng factor. It wont allow you to use the theoretical speed of a NVMe. In the end even if you get the speed, games dont need fast drives. They dont profit from it. In theory there some games where you skip the loading times from 5 seconds down to 4 seconds. But in the end the speed advantages are with margin of error if you try to measure it.

Also if you look at that pic, Seq. is more or elss meanignless while you can boost SATA SSD's to outperform NVMe drives ins eq. read and write (its a 4Tb Samsung 860 Evo that I also have in my external SSD enclosure):

SSD Rapid Mode 

Community Created Artwork for Steam Artwork

By: tacoshy

PCI-E lanes to take it very simply though not 100% correct are like the data highway to the CPU. And NVMe drives need for of those lanes to have the bandwidth to actually use this speed. USB doesnt use those lanes directly which means that you cant use the speed as you have the missing bandwidth (highway capacity).