will external sata SSD work as a game drive?

[OLU]

i just got a new ITX format pc, and sadly i'm too dumb so i fit both sata slot with HDD that are slow as fuck, and both the NVME slots are filled with intel optane memory that are both 16GB, one of them used for System drive and one for speedingh up hdd, and turned out the optane speeded is still not as fast., i'm thinking to get an external SSD for Christmas.

 

Finally, would an external SSD work for game drives? would it work as same speed as internal ones? i do have USB 3.1 Gen 2 type A on the PC, but i can't find an adapter to SATA, the theoretical speed of sata 3 and USB 3.0 are almost the same so would they work the same?

[LIGISTX]

2 minutes ago, OLU said:

i just got a new ITX format pc, and sadly i'm too dumb so i fit both sata slot with HDD that are slow as fuck, and both the NVME slots are filled with intel optane memory that are both 16GB, one of them used for System drive and one for speedingh up hdd, and turned out the optane speeded is still not as fast., i'm thinking to get an external SSD for Christmas.

 

Finally, would an external SSD work for game drives? would it work as same speed as internal ones? i do have USB 3.1 Gen 2 type A on the PC, but i can't find an adapter to SATA, the theoretical speed of sata 3 and USB 3.0 are almost the same so would they work the same?

I would remove the Optane "system" drive and replace it with an nvme ssd.

 

Technically yes, USB 3 is fast enough, but it isn't set up the same as SATA or nvme is. It can't handle nearly the IOPS that SATA or PCIe nvme can, so for big file transfers USB 3 is "plenty fast" but for program access where its always reading and writing little things all the time, it wouldn't be great. It would work, but I would 100% do my first solution before doing this.

[OLU]

On 12/25/2019 at 7:58 PM, LIGISTX said:

I would remove the Optane "system" drive and replace it with an nvme ssd.

 

Technically yes, USB 3 is fast enough, but it isn't set up the same as SATA or nvme is. It can't handle nearly the IOPS that SATA or PCIe nvme can, so for big file transfers USB 3 is "plenty fast" but for program access where its always reading and writing little things all the time, it wouldn't be great. It would work, but I would 100% do my first solution before doing this.

thx for that answer, i just though i could swap an HDD out for an SSD and use that HDD externally, since the HDD is already super slow, will the USB bottleneck the HDD performence?

[LIGISTX]

22 hours ago, OLU said:

thx for that answer, i just though i could swap an HDD out for an SSD and use that HDD externally, since the HDD is already super slow, will the USB bottleneck the HDD performence?

Technically, same issue. The harddrive being external will have its own latency issues + the throughput issues of USB. I would scrap the optane drive. I understand their value, but if its costing you a valuable m.2 slot for an nvme SSD, its causing your more harm than good. A little optane acceleration of a HDD is much worse than a full 1 TB+ nvme SSD. Optane's true "calling" is to accelerate harddives in very economical PC's, or be used in the server space for ZFS caching and such.