this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Read speeds from a USB stick are incomparably slower than most hard drives. The USB 3.0 specification has a theoretical maximum transfer rate of 5Gb/sec (~600MB/s). By comparison, my PCIe 4.0 NVMe (I believe most laptops these days come with NVMe storage? Could be wrong) has a read performance, reported by CrystalDiskMark, of 7.3GB/s (that's a big B, not a little b, and looking at 1MiB sequential 1 thread 8 queues). In other words, my hard drive's measured performance is 12x faster than the theoretical maximum throughput of a USB drive. This also doesn't take into account things like DirectStorage, which some games have started to adopt.
I think realistically games should consider separating the higher quality assets from the low quality assets intended for lower performance systems, and make them separate downloads. HD assets could be a free "DLC" on Steam, for example.
USB 3.2 gen 2x2's theoretical speeds cap out at 20Gb/s (or 2.5GB/sec). It's certainly a performance improvement compared to USB 3.0, but still doesn't quite meet the performance of an internal NVMe. If your PC supports Thunderbolt, you get double the bandwidth (so 5GB/sec) which does match what some slower PCIe 4.0 NVMe drives can handle. This is of course assuming you're comparing to a NVMe, a SATA drive won't come close to these speeds but I believe most laptops these days use NVMe drives.
Regardless, if you're loading games off a USB 3.2 gen 2x2 interface, and assuming you're using a single drive to a single controller (keep in mind that performance is split between connected devices per controller, and PCs often only have a couple controllers at most to manage all the ports), your read performance is probably more than enough.
I said "Internal SSD" not NVME SSD. So some description fail on my part, I meant SATA SSD.
Ah, most laptops these days ship with an internal NVMe, so that's what I assumed you were comparing against. A USB 3.2 gen 2x2 enclosure will vastly outperform a SATA SSD I believe, again assuming it's the only device connected to your controller.
Than most Solid State Drives you mean, since Hard Drive Disks have way slower read speeds than USB 3.0/3.1, I even have proof, My partners BG3 game was laggy as hell in her hard drive, but it's manageable to play in an external SSD connected to USB3.1. The read speed changes from 35MB7s-ish to 500MB/s-ish iirc. it was VERY noticeable. Her laptop is a gaming laptop bought 4 years ago, and the processor/grapphics card works pretty well still, but the 250GB SSD is just not enough to manage windows and all the other games/programs, and the HHD is way too slow, so yeah. In the future changing the SSD to put a bigger one would be the best but for now an external drive works wonders.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren't too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you'd expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner's laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn't surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won't work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn't be surprised if they're starting to reach their limits with today's major releases.
I hear what you're saying, but I have about 200 games stored on a traditional HDD that only provides me a read speed of about 220MB/s absolute maximum and I have never had a single issue with any game running from it. As you say this could become a problem as devs adopt directstorage but as it stands right now, it's a total none-issue.
I have a 2TB NVME M.2 drive in my PC but don't really see any advantage to putting games on there, that's what bulk storage is for. If you are playing online, 99% of games will have a countdown or otherwise make you wait until the slowest PC is also ready to go. If it's a game that uses loading screens, I really don't care as it still loads pretty damn fast.
Pretty much the only games that I will throw on my M.2 drive is open world games that load as you go if I am on my first playthrough. RDR2 lived on there for a while.