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Performance faceplant with external USB 2.0?

L

Llathos

Limp Gawd
Joined
Mar 16, 2005
Messages
151
Anyone got any good info on the performance sacrifice of using an external HDD via USB 2.0 interface?

I've got a nice E1705 Dell laptop I'm using for gaming, but it's only got a 60GB Seagate in it (albeit a 7200 rpm one). I'd like some extra storage to install game titles on and run off of. Will I cripple game performance at all doing this? Will increased load times be the only real effect?

Thanks for any insight...
 
guess it all depends on how the game was coded. Games that load the data BEFORE the level will just have increased load times. Games that load level data as they go along will experience "pauses" while the data is loaded from the drive.

not sure if the cable inside the external drive makes much of a difference either, but I had an external drive from SimpleTech (don't buy their crappy external drives...mine lasted <6 months b/c they put a 7200rpm drive in a very tight enclosure with no ventilation.) and they put an old non-80 conductor IDE cable on the drive. Makes me wonder why they used a 7200rpm 8mb cache drive in there in the first place if a 5400rpm drive could saturate the bandwidth of USB2 and run cooler. dunno...maybe they weren't available... :confused:
 
Hm...sounds kinda iffy. If it is just level load times, that's not too big of a deal I guess. I would think most runtime content would be loaded into memory...but caching to the hard drive could cause issues I imagine.

Surely someone has tried this before...
 
The two games I can give example of are BF2 for pre-loading level data, and Oblivion for loading "areas" as you're playing. I often see the "loading area..." while playin Oblivion.

but I agree with you, someone's input that's actually tried this would be most helpful.
 
bump


Has anyone tried hosting applications (games or otherwise) off an external drive (either USB 2 or firewire I/F) and have any input on performance implications?
 
well, you are limited to by the interface speed, and quite a bit at that. A good USB 2.0 enclosure will get you less then 30MB/s at most. Firewire has a bit more potential, but not much. I don't know if the access time are going to suffer by adding some extra layer on top, but looking at the [H]-reviews for motherboards it appears that USB add little if any latency at all.

My verdict would be this: By adding a second HDD, you will take some strain off the internal HDD and are likely to improve your load times. It may not be night and day, but should be noticable, iff your internal HDD is the limiting factor. Why don't you get the Laptop, see how it works with the internal drive and if you are not happy, get the extenal storage to
 
maybe I read your post wrong...but he's looking to ADD an external drive to load the games on, and is concerned if the speed at which the games load and or run will be significantly impacted by the slower interface that the external drive would use....and not concerned with the performance of the internal drive being lesser than an external.
 
nst6563 said:
maybe I read your post wrong...but he's looking to ADD an external drive to load the games on, and is concerned if the speed at which the games load and or run will be significantly impacted by the slower interface that the external drive would use....and not concerned with the performance of the internal drive being lesser than an external.
Click to expand...
Any current-gen drive that is connected via USB2/ Firewire 400 will be 'severely' limited by that interface. Yes, the interface will affect the performance of the games, but to what extend isn't clear to me, since I have yet to see any reproducible, real-world gameplay loading benchmarks on external drives. The question that I thought he had asked was whether it would be faster than just leaving them on the internal drive. I guess I was wrong.
 
Thanks for the feedback. Yes, you got the question right the second time. I wanted to save hard drive space on the internal drive and install the games (or other application software) onto the external drive and run them from there.

It sounds like that would be pretty crippling. :-/
 
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