Best external SSD for gaming

But choosing an external SSD comes with a dizzying headache of options, and making the wrong choice can leave you hungry. Lucky for you, we’ve done the testing and can offer a solid recommendation that’s sure to help, not hinder, your gaming setup.

Best external SSD for gaming

And no, we didn’t make that choice because the drive is literally called Game Drive SSD. This WD drive meets the performance criteria you want and it supports USB 3.2 SuperSpeed ​​20 Gbps. Although 20 Gbps SuperSpeed ​​USB 3.2 is rare, many newer motherboards support it today. If your PC doesn’t support it, the good news is that it will support USB 3.2 SuperSpeed ​​10 Gbps, which is much more common the best solution. It still gives you good performance now and protects you for your next mobo upgrade. Unlike a typical portable SSD which may have a plastic or rubber shell to absorb shock, the WD Black P50 is made of metal, which should help dissipate and diffuse heat from the smoky SSD inside. If you’re looking for ultimate performance, WD’s P50 gaming drive is worth every penny of its premium price.

Seagate’s FireCuda Gaming SSD (reviewed here) is a valid alternative, but it’s just not priced competitively with the WD Black P50 gaming drive just yet. For example, we could find the WD Black P50 Game Drive in a 1TB configuration for US $ 200 while the FireCuda Gaming 1TB SSD was pushing US $ 300. Both are great records, but it’s the price that makes our top pick easy.

How we test the performance of external SSD games

The biggest question you want to know is how much using an external drive affects game performance. To give us an idea of ​​how important it is, we used UL’s new 3DMark storage repository. To create the benchmark, UL essentially saves drive access patterns during several common gaming tasks to make traces. These drive access traces are then run multiple times on the storage device under test to duplicate the models without actually having to load the game.

For its test, 3DMark reproduces what happens by loading the start menus of Battlefield V, Call of Duty: Black Ops 4, and Monitoring. 3DMark Storage is also testing using OBS, or Open Broadcast System, to record Monitoring currently playing at 1080p resolution at 60fps, setup The outer worlds from the Epic Launcher and saving a game in The outer worlds. For the final test, 3DMark Storage tests the copy of the Steam folder for Counter-Strike: Global Offensive from an external SSD to the target drive.

We used a 12th gen Intel Core i9-12900K running Windows 11 on an Asus ROG Maximus Z690 Hero motherboard. The card has native Thunderbolt 4 and USB 3.2 10 Gbps ports. We have added a Silverstone ECU06 for USB 3.2 SuperSpeed ​​20Gbps support. We then used a Vantec M.2 NVMe to USB 3.2 Gen2x2 20G Type C SSD with Western Digital SN700 NVMe SSD to test USB 3.2 20Gbps and 10Gbps performance. We also installed the same SN700 in a PCIe 3.0 riser card to test its native performance. This gives you an idea of ​​what you are losing by being installed inside the laptop or PC versus using a USB port. For added contrast, we also ran 3DMark Storage on an older Plextor PX-512M7VG SATA SSD inside a Silverstone MS09 SATA enclosure that was plugged into a USB 3.2 10 Gbps port. And because you want to know how slow a hard drive would be, we also ran the same test on a Western Digital EasyStore 14TB hard drive plugged into a 10Gbps USB 3.2 port. The EasyStore is actually limited to USB 3.2 SuperSpeed ​​5Gbps.

Longer bars indicate better performance. Right click and select Open in New Tab to view the larger image.

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What should you do with the above results? Well, it is clear that if you can fit an SSD inside your PC, you will get the most out of it. But you should consider some of the context. If you only look at the big, long red bar at the top of the graph, consider that the particular test measures what would happen if you copied a large folder of files to the SSD. For most people, this is only done once in a while.

The most common scenario is to wait for a game to launch. Running an internal NVMe drive will always be faster, but the gap is getting smaller. Of the three popular USB interfaces: 20 Gbps USB, 10 Gbps USB, and SATA over 10 Gbps USB, the fastest is 20 Gbps USB 3.2. With a 20 Gbps USB 3.2 SSD, you might see Battlefield V Shave 25% of the load time compared to a USB 3.2 10 Gbit / s drive. Of course, performance also depends on the game. For example, both Call of Duty and Battlefield see about 45% higher bandwidth on the internal SSD, but with less graphics intensity Monitoring, that’s closer to 30 percent.

The other surprise is the performance of SATA SSD compared to NVMe SSD when NVME SSD is in USB 3.2 10Gbps port. In game loads, saves, and install scenarios, they’re pretty close. The NVMe external SSD opens up a huge lead over the slower SATA once you move on to a task where you copy a huge amount of files, like CS: GO results. But again, how often do you do this?

Of course, we can’t leave this without pointing out that hard drives are horrible. Would it be more improved with a faster hard drive? Unlikely. The minimum you should use if you are storing games on an external drive is a SATA SSD, so don’t run a game from your external hard drive unless you like to wait for everything.