Gaming on a SD card

[IAmAndre]

Hi,

 

I'm considering buying one of these laptops under €300 with 4GB of RAM and a 32 eMMC drive. Is it okay if I buy an SD card and install games on it (very light games of course) ? How would you compare the performance on a mid-range SD card to a 7200 RPM HDD? What about general use, besides gaming?

 

Thanks

[Slottr]

Slower storage will cause freezing and stuttering.

[IAmAndre]

Just now, Slottr said:

Slower storage will cause freezing and stuttering.

What do you mean?

[VictorVig]

don't do that

[Slottr]

4 minutes ago, IAmAndre said:

What do you mean?

If your storage is slow, games will have a handful of issues including freezing, stuttering, crashing...

[IAmAndre]

Just now, Slottr said:

If your storage is slow, games will have a handful of issues including freezing, stuttering, crashing...

OK but this is doesn't answer the question : are SD cards fast enough compared to mechanical hard drives? What are the drawbacks?

[Damocles]

Well SD card are kinda considered to be the first SSDs. They're slower but can respond quickly. SD card are often maxed about 40 MB/s read sequential and responds in 10-50 milliseconds.

 

HDD can read anywhere from 200MB/s to 100MB/s on sequential files, but their response times are usually about 500 milliseconds.

 

In gaming, the higher speed from the hard drives excels at loading textures for when you move around a scenery, but the SD card excels at you making sudden actions and quickly performing them without latency. However, the Hard drive will make first time actions seem late and SD card will stutter whenever you move to the next room over and textures are reloaded. Always load games onto an SSD if you can to get the best of both worlds without the worst of them either.

[IAmAndre]

7 minutes ago, Damocles said:

Well SD card are kinda considered to be the first SSDs. They're slower but can respond quickly. SD card are often maxed about 40 MB/s read sequential and responds in 10-50 milliseconds.

 

HDD can read anywhere from 200MB/s to 100MB/s on sequential files, but their response times are usually about 500 milliseconds.

 

In gaming, the higher speed from the hard drives excels at loading textures for when you move around a scenery, but the SD card excels at you making sudden actions and quickly performing them without latency. However, the Hard drive will make first time actions seem late and SD card will stutter whenever you move to the next room over and textures are reloaded. Always load games onto an SSD if you can to get the best of both worlds without the worst of them either.

Thanks! I'm happy to finally get an informative reply

Do you think I should get an external case to use a 120GB SSD via USB 3.0 ?

[Carlos1010]

16 minutes ago, Damocles said:

Well SD card are kinda considered to be the first SSDs. They're slower but can respond quickly. SD card are often maxed about 40 MB/s read sequential and responds in 10-50 milliseconds.

 

HDD can read anywhere from 200MB/s to 100MB/s on sequential files, but their response times are usually about 500 milliseconds.

 

In gaming, the higher speed from the hard drives excels at loading textures for when you move around a scenery, but the SD card excels at you making sudden actions and quickly performing them without latency. However, the Hard drive will make first time actions seem late and SD card will stutter whenever you move to the next room over and textures are reloaded. Always load games onto an SSD if you can to get the best of both worlds without the worst of them either.

What does he mean by "playing on a SD card"? I though you have to play on a GPU to play games?

[TheGhzGuy]

12 minutes ago, Carlos1010 said:

What does he mean by "playing on a SD card"? I though you have to play on a GPU to play games?

He means he has the game stored on an SD card because the storage on his laptop is tiny. 

[TheSuspect]

Don't. It'll majorly bottleneck the system.

[PlayStation 2]

Highly depends on the game.

Games that like streaming a ton of data that are newer, don't. Older games that stream data like Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, however, should be fine.

[Damocles]

On 7/30/2016 at 11:58 AM, IAmAndre said:

Thanks! I'm happy to finally get an informative reply

Do you think I should get an external case to use a 120GB SSD via USB 3.0 ?

You could, I mean a cheap enclosure that I got around 10 dollars worked perfectly fine. You are passing from a 6 Gbps SATA3 connection to a 5Gbps USB 3.0 controller connection. Mathematically it looks bad but in reality a modern high performance 2.5" SSD tops off around <600 MBps, (Notice b vs B where b is a bit and B is a byte while Bytes are 8 bits). 5Gbps maxes at 640MBps (theoretical maximum limit) so you're not going to hinder anything.

 

When you choose an SSD for games, go with a cheaper Sandforce controller SSD. They don't write as fast for certain data types but they're cheaper and read just as well as a high performance ones. You'd really only want a MARVEL or Samsung Controller SSD for content creation like raw video scratch disks which works well with all data types but costs a slightly higher premium. Before buying, search for the TBW value. The higher the value, the longer lasting the SSD and typically the cheaper Sandforce controller SSDs last a bit longer than their higher performing SSDs.

 

Stay away from TLC drives. They tend to fail easily hence their cheap prices. MLC is the consumer price point SSD. SLC, if you can find one, is enterprise and costs sometimes up to 5 times what you'd pay for MLC. Go get MLC around 250GB-500GB for the best price to performance optimum. Usually if you're going past 500GB you'd better just get 2x500GB for a slightly higher total cost, but you can raid them in RAID 0 for better throughput at almost 1GBps. That's about double the speed for the slightly higher cost in material extra!

[IAmAndre]

5 hours ago, Damocles said:

You could, I mean a cheap enclosure that I got around 10 dollars worked perfectly fine. You are passing from a 6 Gbps SATA3 connection to a 5Gbps USB 3.0 controller connection. Mathematically it looks bad but in reality a modern high performance 2.5" SSD tops off around <600 MBps, (Notice b vs B where b is a bit and B is a byte while Bytes are 8 bits). 5Gbps maxes at 640MBps (theoretical maximum limit) so you're not going to hinder anything.

 

When you choose an SSD for games, go with a cheaper Sandforce controller SSD. They don't write as fast for certain data types but they're cheaper and read just as well as a high performance ones. You'd really only want a MARVEL or Samsung Controller SSD for content creation like raw video scratch disks which works well with all data types but costs a slightly higher premium. Before buying, search for the TBW value. The higher the value, the longer lasting the SSD and typically the cheaper Sandforce controller SSDs last a bit longer than their higher performing SSDs.

 

Stay away from TLC drives. They tend to fail easily hence their cheap prices. MLC is the consumer price point SSD. SLC, if you can find one, is enterprise and costs sometimes up to 5 times what you'd pay for MLC. Go get MLC around 250GB-500GB for the best price to performance optimum. Usually if you're going past 500GB you'd better just get 2x500GB for a slightly higher total cost, but you can raid them in RAID 0 for better throughput at almost 1GBps. That's about double the speed for the slightly higher cost in material extra!

Thanks. That was helpful, but I decided to spend a bit more (well almost twice the price) to get something with a 500GB HDD. It won't be the fastest option out there, but it should be fine for a secondary computer.