Gaming laptop external storage for games....platter drive still good?

jarablue

[H]ard|Gawd
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May 31, 2003
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I have a gaming laptop that suits me well. I only have 512gb nvme on it. What I wanted to do was get a fast external drive. I thought about an ssd but it's pricey. Are platter drives still good? External ones? Say usb 3.2 gen 1? I was thinking of picking up say a 5tb one for loading games. But I don't want to get something that is dog slow.

What do you guys say?
 
For offline storage of game installer packages, or actually installing and running the games off the external HDD?
 
spinners are dog slow compared to ssd/nvme, even on USB3 they top out around ~120MB/s. it would work but youll need to be careful with it. i would take half the size just to go sdd...
 
It depends on your tolerance level. If you're playing games that just reference storage at game load time, it might be OK; waiting 8-10 seconds for a load instead of 2 or 3, for instance. A game that's hitting storage on every scene change, probably not so much.
 
All I know is I bought the external drive and it was running dog slow steam took upwards of twenty seconds to cache files on the hard drive for installation I was like freak this. I went out and bought an nvme terabyte drive for a hundred 5 bucks. 3tb less but a lot faster. Thanks again everyone for the help.
 
You made the right call. Trying to use a spinny disk for anything but bulk storage these days is doomed to end in disappointment, they're just too slow (especially with USB latency overhead)
 
All I know is I bought the external drive and it was running dog slow steam took upwards of twenty seconds to cache files on the hard drive for installation I was like freak this. I went out and bought an nvme terabyte drive for a hundred 5 bucks. 3tb less but a lot faster. Thanks again everyone for the help.
atodaso ;)
 
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