Gadgetory

gaming on a USB stick how fascinating does not sound well some of our viewers may recall Dimitri taking a crack at it about a year ago and from his conclusion it was fairly evident that it was a pretty playable experience although he did experience and random freezes with csgo that is still a question but two other titles where flawless if you missed out on the video we'll leave a link down below now I consider gaming off the USB Drive to be a luxury just like Dimitri and the reason is pretty straightforward if you happen to game on multiple systems having your entire game library within portable media like this or a portable solution like this is pretty awesome although there are a few caveats to understand the for jumping into this bandwagon so let's discuss about that along with alternative solutions right after this hula master is hosting an exciting overwatch tournament with a $40,000 prize pool that will go towards one High School Robotics theme you can watch live on Twitch or visit the eSports arena downtown Santa Ana for free more info at Coolermaster Invitational comm alright one of the things to consider before transferring your entire game library to a USB flash drive is one the price per gigabyte on USB flash drives are still at an all-time high especially for high performance USB 3.0 drives take this kingston ultimate GT one terabyte USB 3.1 gen2 on Drive at $1000 I'd be much better off building a gaming PC supporting a hard drive with the same capacity - this has some relevance to my previous point and that is modern games are at least 60 to 70 gigabytes in size so if you're accumulating a lot of titles that adds up quickly and soon enough you'd have to step up your storage game a 256 or 512 gigabyte SSD is not going to make the cut I'd say 1 terabytes would be a sweet spot for gamers to offload their existing library plus three and a half inch hard drives are relatively inexpensive today but what if you're willing to game off an external hard drive with the same capacity oh I'm not talking about spinning drives that are external but external SSDs like this Western Digital My Passport I mean seriously they could have come up with a different name anyways recently I got a chance to test this guy out and I was very impressed with its read performance and that's thanks to its USB 3.1 gen2 interface performance in a portable package once again if you're interested in learning more about this drive I'll leave a link down below so today I decided to test game load times on this external SSD and compared to a standard three a half inch standing drive a two and a half inch SSD and my aging external rugged hard drive that I paid $100 for a while back testing was pretty straightforward I installed Origin battlenet you play and steam on each Drive to test battlefield one or watch Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon and dune respectively I also made sure to disable as much as background applications as possible to get the best results before we move on here are the crystal disk mark results per drive just so you're aware of where each drive stands with respect to each other alright our first test involves battlefield 1 with the first step being to start up the game and as you can see the WD external SSD aligns right in line with my Neutron XD I'd local SSD with both completing the task in about 34 seconds the other two drives were not that far apart either with the WD blue drive taking seven seconds longer and the external shrunk boot drive taking one more second honestly it's not a huge difference between the four drives but when we're switching to loading a permission in my case I chose over the top which is our standard benchmarking scene the lot of times were quite significant at least when comparing the SSDs and the spinning drives and that's some surprising but what surprised me was the low time on the WD SSD it just took four seconds longer than the corsair SSD but also gaming on it was flawless I did not experience any stutters or random crashes even multiplayer worked perfectly and I was focused on the gameplay without having to worry about unnecessary hiccups and such so that was awesome next I fired up overwatch which isn't a highly demanding title because the overall size of the game is about 10 gigabytes and the results between the four drives were a lot closer than I thought the external SSD was the fastest but surprisingly the WD blue drive took second place followed by the corsair SSD and finally the shockproof external hard drive loading up the practice session was also quick on all drives as you can see the external SSD took the lead once again by a slight margin but the blue drive and the Corsair were just seconds apart the shockproof drive was the a list and that shouldn't be surprising since it's running off the USB tape I know that roughly provides five gigabits per second theoretical throughput I was excited to test Ghost Recon because a it's graphically intensive title and be loading up the game along with missions take a while so it's a great way to test each drives we performance and we're aware that the WD passport SSD is a monster at that so how do we do well just as expected the passport SSD was faster during the initial game launch loading to the main menu took about 48 seconds but the corsair SSD was almost neck-to-neck to the timing taking just a second longer surprisingly the shockproof drive took 12 seconds longer than the corsair SSD but it was also faster than the WD Blue Drive that took approximately a minute and 13 seconds forcing hits away to the last spot next up I loaded up a mission that took 19 seconds on the corsair SSD 26 seconds on the passport SSD almost doubled that time on the WD blue drive and about a minute on the SP drive I need to point out that you plate took a lot longer to discover the game files on the shockproof drive so be aware of that but gaming on all four of them were flawless no stutters or crashes and that's a thumbs-up my last test was to load up steam and test out doom which again is an enormous title that's also graphically intensive I have expected steam took its time installing on the SP Drive compared to the rest that completed that task in seconds loading up the game was the fastest on the passport SSD followed by the corsair SSD and the WD blue drive but check out the SP drive it took three minutes to launch the game which is a significant difference between the other three drives but loading up a mission was fairly faster on all four drives as you see here gaming on it was also flawless so again very playable experience no stutters no crashes which is awesome so what can we take away from this video well I wouldn't recommend you to go out there and spend three hundred sixty dollars on my passport ancestry just for faster load times because that would be money not well spent as we saw from the charts the two and a half inch solid state drive performed very closely to the WD drive in some cases the standard three-and-a-half inch hard drive performed very well I would say it was about 10 to 20 seconds slower than the SSDs which wasn't still not too bad but again very respectable I think that the passport SSD had the benefit of the newer USB 3.1 gen2 interface compared to SATA 6 or even USB 3.1 Chen one which is just USB 3 by now that being said driver speeds didn't really affect frame rates within games and I validated that battlefield 1 averaged around a hundred frames per second on all drives I'll be a few frames per second higher or lower same with overwatch Ghost Recon and doom so all you need to know is that if you just value framerate over load times you can save a lot of money and up for a three and a half inch hard drive that has a much better price per gigabyte ratio but if you value load times I would highly suggest picking up a high-capacity two and a half inch SSD although be mindful they are pretty expensive I think the maximum you can pick it up for is around $300 we leave a few options down below if you're interested now if you're the type of user who games on multiple systems and if you're looking for a quick plug and play solution without sacrificing on load times or frame rates pick the my passport SSD it's a much faster solution it's compact it's fast and it's reliable although be mindful it's expensive so that'll do it for now I hope you enjoyed this non-scientific test comparing all four drives let me know what you guys think about it in the comments down below I'm people with hurricane X thank you so much for watching make sure to subscribe for more similar content and we'll see you in the next one