Gadgetory

so gaming off a USB stick is certainly possible and it's a very appealing process because depending on the capacity of you USB stick you can load as many games as you want and having to run them without reinstallation on different computers just grab your drive and go and also make sure to check out our gaming on a USB stick video because that will give you sort of a good reference baseline as to what we'll be doing today high-capacity USB storage also have their place for creative individuals who want to use them to offload cache files and store different information without having to unload it onto the computer itself but today I'm excited to create the world's fastest gaming USB Drive using an m2 SSD and an appropriate enclosure USB 3.1 gen2 enclosures in particular so let's see if it's worth your time and picking up an MD 2 SATA base SSD combine them with enclosure like this and see if you've got yourself the ultimate customizable capacity based on the m-dot to drive that you pick up use B stick for gaming and productivity right after this oh yeah it's the new dark base pro 900 the white edition from be quiet all Y the exterior and interior with black accent look gorgeous with a tempered glass panel and uniform paint job on the other side too comes with a Qi charger up top three excellent fans and a fully modular interior as your playground get yourself the limited white edition dark bass pro 900 only 2000 mate links below alright so our hardware for this project include a 275 gigabyte and a 2 SATA base SSD that I picked up for under hundred dollars now the center portion here is important because nvme and the two drives will not work with these enclosures because the power limitations of the gen 2 interface it simply is not powerful enough for nvme storage the drive is 80 millimeters in length the longest out of the m the two selection and therefore current enclosures must be large enough to house these drives and are significantly larger than the regular USB sticks but I'm sure that we'll see smaller enclosures to accommodate for smaller em the 2 drives and the cool thing obviously is that whole DIY aspect of creating your own USB stick so capacity will be based on your budget and these M de 2 enclosures range from 15 to 50 dollars depending on the interface so I picked up a few to compare two of which are USB 3.1 gen2 and the is gen1 and I've compiled a list of all the m2 SSD enclosures in the description below so you can check them out now the most convenient out of the three is the silverstone ms on 9 that aside from having the gen 2 interface and the beautiful aluminum enclosure the USP slider mechanism is absolutely brilliant it is very satisfying it also does not require a cap like on standard USB stick nor does it require a cable like the other two enclosures have which are based on a type c port which is convenient and have a type-a end of cable now a quick note about the silverstone closure that it is thicker than most USB sticks so it will block adjacent USB ports on your notebook now the two things they all have in common is a screw drivers included and they all support the largest 2280 format but size difference varies between all three plus they don't all support the shorter and the two drives now installation is very simple on either enclosure just plug in the m2 SSD and you have yourself your own DIY USB stick ready for games just make sure to format it to the NTFS filesystem and of course plug it into the appropriate USB 3.1 gen2 USB port on your motherboard alright so the first thing was to compare the speed differences between all three enclosures including the HyperX Irish Drive and the m2 SSD plugged directly into a motherboard so looking at crystal disk benchmark obviously the gen 2 enclosures are faster especially in the 4k sequential which are important for smaller files and we're about 10 percent slower versus when the SSD is plugged directly into my motherboard next I copied my small 72 gigabyte video project folder that maintained good speeds until about 20 gigabytes after which the buffer gets full on the SSD so here we have the SSD being the bottleneck with some interesting variation between closures and the HyperX savage USB stick has completed the task much faster despite not having those superfast burst speeds in the beginning instead we see a consistent transfer rate whereas the M that to SSD really slows down after those 20 gigabytes doing the same procedure backwards we still have some variation that is not consistent I don't know why but it's clear that the read performance is superior from the MDOT 2 slot on the motherboard and now let's shift our focus to gaming so I transfer to folders with many any files 55 gigabytes worth to show the benefits of higher 4k write performance on the SSD versus the HyperX USB stick that really slows down when those tiny cs:go files are being moved next is game discovery from Steam so it basically looks for those files and installs the game on their drive with similar results across the board even the native and that 2 slot is not much faster versus the rest and loading into dishonored to game save it gives us an identical result of 19 seconds across all drives and so from my time gaming off the MDOT two USB stick regardless of the enclosure I did not notice any unusual behaviors the games were loading just fine there was no stuttering loading between map sections was just completely normal and I did not encounter any anomalies that I did with the HyperX savage drive in csgo where the game would just simply freeze up randomly throughout multiplayer or single-player and offline mode and I'm thinking I might just buy a one terabyte ml 2 SSD plug it into one these enclosures and have my entire gaming library on it so I'm a little bit more flexible on how and how many pcs I can just plug this into and have all my Steam and origin and battlenet games on it now it is weird that we're experiencing these inconsistencies and performance sometimes I get even better right in the reap performance of a USB 3 port versus my 3.1 gen2 port on my crosshair 6 hero motherboard so when I tested this on my intel based x99 designator from gigabyte i got much higher reading the write performance through this little enclosure versus when I tested the SSD natively on the MDOT two slot on my aim the motherboard and when it comes to file transfers on my into machine the read performance was a little bit quicker but the write performance was like we saved a minute and a half and that whole transfer time but my M that to SSD is still the bottleneck here capping out at 150 megabytes per second for the transfers on both machines and so these results are quite strange because for example the HyperX savage USB stick is slow in synthetic benchmarks but it outperforms the m2 SSD and let's say transferring files and stuff and even though I've dub dated all my motherboard settings and the BIOS settings and the USB drivers on my Rison system it still is not as fast as what I'm getting on my into machine so perhaps more testing will come as we figure out what's happening with this rising machine but regardless you do gain that convenience of having your entire game library literally in your pocket and having that flexibility of moving it around between pcs if that's something you're into and lastly from a value perspective this whole DIY approach is roughly the same price is if you were to buy something like the my passport SSD from Western Digital which looks better and is also faster for the 512 gigabyte variant the only benefit here is that you have more capacity options for em that two drives and you actually physically have the drive so if you want to populate it into your motherboard later on you can do that alright so building your own USB 3.1 gen2 USB stick is super accessible now plenty of affordable m2 SSDs in market with plenty of enclosure options available as well so you basically decide how big of a USB stick you're willing to carry then you courser avoid pro gaming headset is comfortable stylish in different colors delivers fantastic wireless performance even for competitive gaming with an all-new microphone for clear communications check out the void Pro Wireless or wired in the description below and so this is awesome for gaming productivity media and yeah let me know if you guys are interested in this concept of creating your own USB stick for whatever purposes that might suit your best I'm Dimitri without recognized thanks so much for watching we'll see you in the next video