External Hard Drive Dock

[TheMC]

Hey, Im new to this forum but I have been reading for a while. In the past i built a 'gaming' rig of spare parts that i got for free... it was a hunk of crap. Now that I have started UNI I wanted a powerful lightweight laptop, that I can do all my UNI stuff on and play games on. So I got an awesome deal on a Razor Blade 2014 with the 256GB SSD. So now my question is, would i get passable performance form a USB 3.0 HDD dock with the 2 1TB WD black drive that I have. Id like to put my extended steam library on that. Also is there a dock that runs through 2 USB 3.0 ports.

Thanks

[LogicalDrm]

I don't know what you mean by "passable". But running games from external HDD is completely possible. Only thing you need to take care of is that drive always has same drive letter. Like its always first device to be connected. SSDs are still faster than any HDD so you will get more space but not more speed.

 

I'm not aware of any enclosures (better than dock) that would use dual USB3 and I don't know what would be advantage of that when using HDD. Other than having two drives that act separately.

[TheMC]

I remember reading somewhere that playing games of an external hard drive would work but be incredibly slow, and have significant loading times.

 

And as for my hypothesis for the duel USB3 it could in theory allow double the data transfer speed and remove or reduce the bottle neck made by the USB3 connection.

 

Thanks

Ben

[mr moose]

I wouldn't, my experiences with usb3 hard drive docks is that they can disconnect for some reason mid file read (might just be me) and the speed really isn't that crash hot. I recon your better of splashing the extra cash on a bigger ssd or just accepting slightly slower boot times etc and going for a standard hdd.

[Captain_WD]

Hey, Im new to this forum but I have been reading for a while. In the past i built a 'gaming' rig of spare parts that i got for free... it was a hunk of crap. Now that I have started UNI I wanted a powerful lightweight laptop, that I can do all my UNI stuff on and play games on. So I got an awesome deal on a Razor Blade 2014 with the 256GB SSD. So now my question is, would i get passable performance form a USB 3.0 HDD dock with the 2 1TB WD black drive that I have. Id like to put my extended steam library on that. Also is there a dock that runs through 2 USB 3.0 ports.

Thanks

 

 

Hello TheMC and welcome to Linus Tech Tips forum

 

As @LoGiCalDrm pointed out, it is possible to run games from an external drive, but they will have longer loading times and you would have to make sure the drive letter is always the same. USB3.0 has some pretty good speed rates (it supports speeds up to 640MB/s) )so you should be fine. Consumer hard drives have much lower read/write speeds compared to what the bus supports so the connection won't bottleneck the speed. You could try using an enclosure or a docking station that supports RAID0 and try those WD Black drives on it to see how big of a speed boost you would get and how much those loading times would decrease, but DO HAVE IN MIND that WD Black drives are not recommended for RAID setups as they lack the NAS/RAID-class drives' features and the chance of a drive dropping out of the RAID array is significantly higher. 

 

Captain_WD.