But the good news is that USB 4 is backwards compatible with USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. Performance wise, your choice is between a drive based on the SATA interface with a bridge to USB, or an NVMe interface, again behind a USB bridge. External solid-state drives are faster and more affordable than ever. With all that in mind, here are the best USB Type-C SSDs for game storage in 2020. Moreover, a great deal of that increased performance isn’t available on most PCs and all consoles due to limited interface support. Affirmative. If you want it all, you’re going to have to pay for it. When it comes to buying an SSD for gaming, a lot people still opt for a 2.5in SATA drive rather than a super fast NVMe SSD, if only because the latter tend to be quite expensive and you need a motherboard that supports them. Future US, Inc. 11 West 42nd Street, 15th Floor, That said, the X6 does support features like TRIM passthrough, which isn’t always the case on cheaper USB drives and ensures that performance should be sustained in the longer term. This portable M.2. I'm looking for an external SSD that I can connect via USB (2.0 or 3.0). Visit our corporate site. It’s likely capable of the advertised 2GB/s with the right interface. It’s also very compact for a 2TB drive, measuring just 6.9cm by 6.4cm by 1.1cm. Snag one of the best USB Type-C SSDs for game storage on PC or console. Apart from the above 4 internal SSDs, any best external SSD for gaming? Hi, I'm currently running a slightly janky albeit usable setup (Macbook Running Windows through a dock), however, my Windows partition is only 250GB, leaving almost no room for gaming. Some drives are built to be particularly robust, others include extras like hardware encryption, status LEDs or even fingerprint scanners for added security. Best External Storage for PC Gaming. However, right now, one of the best 1TB SSDs you can buy – the Samsung 860 QVO – is $100 in a … That’s something that remains relatively rare on PCs and laptops and isn’t available on any console, including the new Sony Playstation 5 and Microsoft Xbox Series X. That’s largely down to the drives underlying SATA interface, which pegs claimed peak performance to 540MB/s for reads and 480MB/s for writes. One difference is that where WD has used TLC NAND memory, Crucial has gone for cheaper, slower and less durable QLC NAND. I would like at least 1 Terabyte, and 2T would be plenty. Now that the Xbox Series X supports portable USB 3.2 drives for extended storage, having the best external SSD is almost a must for console gamers too. I want something quality that I can download games and game related files to. It’s also worth noting that write performance eventually drops to 180MB/s with sustained throughput. if that system can't notice the difference between mechanical and SSD storage do you really think your MacBook is going to be able to tell? Comments; Shares. Best AMD motherboard: your new Ryzen's new home. But not all. Seagate Fast SSD 500GB ($101.65) Seagate Game Drive for Xbox 500GB SSD External Solid State Drive, Portable USB 3.0 ($119.99) Still, Crucial claims around 1GB/s for sequential reads and writes. Many manufacturers are reluctant to quote full specifications. By contrast, USB Type-C is the new universal standard. Storage: 1TB | Connectivity: USB 3.2 Type-C | Sequential read: 1 GB/s | Dimensions: 73 x 44 x 12 mm | Warranty: 3 years. Some external SSDs now crank out as much as 2GB/s of raw bandwidth. For our money, the Crucial X6 falls on just the wrong side of that divide. Always put your games on the SSD. Snag one of the best USB Type-C SSDs for game storage on PC or console. What it’s not, is particularly speedy. Predictably, you get what you pay for, with the higher performing drives commanding more money. There was a problem. Best gaming motherboards | Best graphics cards | Best gaming monitors, The toughest external hard drive on the market, Storage: 2TB | Connectivity: USB 3.2 Type-C | Sequential read: 540 MB/s | Dimensions: 69 x 64 x 11 mm | Warranty: 3 years. I've first hand noticed huge improvements after switching from HDD's. This external SSD was designed with Thunderbolt 3 interface, AES 256-bit … For the most part these are pretty similar drives. External SSDUSB 2.0 or 3.0 Compatible (3.0 Preferable)1-2Tb Storage SpaceUsed for gaming, connected to Windows 10. For SATA SSD hunters, then, the Samsung 860 Evo is hands down the best SSD for gaming you can buy today. The Best External SSDs for 2021. New York, But it also adds to the cost of the drive. Samsung X5 Portable SSD – best External SSD; Samsung 970 Evo Plus is one of the fastest drives on the market. In fact, right now it’s available on Amazon.com as we type for $249. PC Gamer is part of Future US Inc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. © I would like at least 1 … You were almost certainly never going to notice the difference in performance when gaming. We have listed some of the greatest options available in the market. Arguably even more problematical is the existence of NVMe-based drives for similar money. Through this list, we hope to help you finding the best possible external portable SSD. But each one of these drives is small enough to be easily pocketable and all take their power from the USB interface. WD 4TB Elements Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 WD 4TB Black My Passport Portable External Hard Drive - USB 3.0 If you want a ssd: Samsung 500 GB 860 EVO M.2 Sata III Solid State Drive (you'll need additional case) you can't get higher performance with external ssd but you still get many benefit of the ssd. Thanks! That makes it unique among these SSDs and, what’s more, given the competitive pricing you’re getting that IP rating effectively for free. Of course, to achieve those speeds, you’ll need a PC or console that supports USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. Hi Steam Community! However, in our testing it never dropped lower than that, even with over 50GB of sustained traffic. Even if you're looking at external storage, the decision of HDD vs SSD is still a factor, with fast USB 3.2 10Gbps SSD drives now available. High capacity gaming SSDs can often cost a good chunk of change. Hi, I'm currently running a slightly janky albeit usable setup (Macbook Running Windows through a dock), however, my Windows partition is only 250GB, leaving almost no room for gaming. Alternatively, cheap and fast SSDs like the WD Blue SN550 and Adata XPG SX6000Pro allow anyone building a new PC to use an NVMe SSD as their main … Yep. But it’s enough for reasonably nippy game loads. It also matches several NVMe-based drives when it comes to 4K random access performance, registering 23MB/s for reads and 40MB/s for writes. Like the WD SSD, the Crucial X8 is essentially an M.2 NVMe drive behind a USB bridge, in this case a Crucial P1 with a hefty 2GB of DRAM. IP rating for increased robustness including water proofing? (Image Credit: Samsung) ... claiming the best gaming SSD throne. But this drive is still claimed to be good for 1GB/s data transfers in both directions. Please deactivate your ad blocker in order to see our subscription offer, Few PCs and no consoles support full performance, A lost Tomb Raider remake has resurfaced, and you can play it, I bought a $600 graphics card to play Quake 2 with ray tracing, We check over 130 million products every day for the best prices, Best external SSD for gaming on PC and next-gen consoles, Gigabyte Radeon RX 6800 XT Gaming OC Review. Some of those features fairly tangential to the basic remit of providing high-performance storage space for a games library. Check out … The fastest USB Type-C gaming drive in town, Storage: 1TB | Connectivity: USB 3.2 2x2 Type-C | Sequential read: 2 GB/s | Dimensions: 118 x 62 x 14 mm | Warranty: 5 years. The ROG Strix Arion is a device unlike any other ROG product to date. So they’re ultra portable and easy to use. As for Sony’s Playstation 5, its M.2 SSD expansion slot has yet to be enabled, so USB-C is the way to go. More posts from the pcmasterrace community. Sure, it would be faster to have an SSD when copying data onto and off of that drive, but where are you going to copy that much data to? By. It also drops down to just 190MB/s with sustained multi-GB workloads. But there’s simply better performance to be had elsewhere. In this subreddit, we celebrate and promote the ultimate gaming and working platform. You don’t need to wait for the next generation of gaming consoles to enjoy it, though, as you can just hook up an SSD to your PS4. Please refresh the page and try again. The enticing possibility of actually running your games from a portable drive is also a big draw for these kinds of storage solutions. Sign up to get the best content of the week, and great gaming deals, as picked by the editors. The X6 also lacks a USB-C to USB-A cable, which seems particularly miserly. I do this for quick file transfers with my old Intel 600P 512GB NVMe drive. I could be misinformed, but I don't believe I am. It also feels robust thanks to an aluminium and zinc alloy frame. At least, it is in theory. Downloading from the Internet is definitely going to be slower than the right speed of a mechanical hard drive. You could just about get five 2 TB mechanical drives for the cost of a single 2TB SSD right now. ReddIt. Western Digital made its performance-focused WD_Black lineup with considerations for gaming, also making it one of the best high-speed SSD solutions on Xbox Series X and Xbox Series S. Which puts it on a par with the more expensive WD drive. All for an attractive price? As we write these words, the X8 2TB actually on offer for $10 less, though that is a temporary deal. Which is why it’s capable of read and write speeds up to 2,000MB/s. And so it proves in our testing, with the Crucial X8 good for just under 1GB/s for sequential transfers in both directions. The Crucial X6, you will therefore have guessed, is based on a bridged SATA interface where the X8 rocks NVMe. Its random read speeds are faster than any other SATA SSD … I've confirmed it for myself because I didn't believe him. NVMe inside? In practice, is Vava actually slightly outperforms those claimed sequential speeds. But it is quick. As you know PS5 supports custom external SSDs, so you are in desperate need of the best SSD for PS5. The best external SSDs are top of their game if you want speedy storage performance on the go. The best external hard drives for PS4 and Xbox One can help keep your game library a lot more manageable. Read and write speeds for SSD's always beat out HDD's. The unfortunate fact of the matter though is that most games use a single thread for loading in data from storage which a mechanical drive is perfectly capable of keeping up with, and most of the loading time is actually your CPU computing data and building the world in memory, not waiting for the hard drive to find data. The latter is typically slower and offers lower write endurance. Don't think you'd necessarily need a SSD just for games storage, a 2tb external drive would be fine. The Samsung T7 500GB drive sits among our top picks for new SSD users, securing great gaming results at … And it’s attractively priced. Some of the features include gaming mode, temperature reading, remaining life, storage availability, volume, interface speed and much more. Admittedly, that’s a long way off the latest PCIe 4.0 M.2 drives for PCs let alone the crazy-quick integrated storage in the new Microsoft Xbox Series X and Sony PlayStation 5. In this case, it’s a 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface rather than a 20Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 connection. While SSD drives are increasingly popular, HDD drives (also known as hard drives) often offer a better storage space-to-price ratio. That’s over $150 less than WD’s Black P50 Game Drive in 2TB trim. Matt Brown. On the other hand, if you need the most portable external SSD out there, the RAVPower Portable External SSD Pro is definitely one of the best choices on the market. That makes high levels of security very convenient. It means the drive is rated as impervious to dust ingress and can survive immersion in up to 1.5 metres of water for 30 minutes. So, the X8 is theoretically twice as fast as SATA-based drives. I only have a 250GB internal SSD and, as I am now missing some storage space to install new games, I was wondering if it would be feasable to install and play games from an external SSD drive. It’s not the absolute fastest external SSD on Earth. It’s also nice to see that ADATA has equipped the SE800 with TLC rather than QLC NAND memory. Anyway, the extra money doesn’t feel like all that much to pay for literally double the sequential performance with the X8. Compatible with Gen 3 PCIe slot, this one from WD is one of the best SSD for gaming and heavy-duty programs. There's not much benefit to games when running off SSD compared to HDD. I was not able to notice the difference in load times when switching between the libraries (a friend did the switching so that it was a blind test), and clocking it with a stopwatch, we found that overall there was less than a 10% difference in load times. Even at normal prices, it’s only around $40 cheaper than its X8 sibling of the same 2TB capacity. But it’s not enough to spoil an otherwise highly appealing package. The best part of this SSD is its dashboard software that offers many tools and utilities to manage the drive. When you get an external SSD for your PS4, everything stored on it will load much faster than before. But getting the best external hard drive or best portable SSD for your needs is important. All of which makes it a decent option as an all-rounder, but suboptimal as a pure games drive. Press J to jump to the feed. It’s certainly slower than my sata and nvme SSDs but it’s not by much. You will receive a verification email shortly. Best gaming motherboard: the best boards around 6 Best SSD External Drives for Xbox One 2021. Solid-State Drive (SSD) Solid state drives do away with the moving electromagnetic disk, and replace it with what’s called “flash storage.” That’s the same kind of storage that’s used in smartphones, RAM in computers, and, these days, many of the internal storage drives in computers. Samsung T5 Portable SSD. The Seagate Barracuda Fast SSD 1TB is essentially a SATA SSD behind a USB bridge, which means performance is limited to 6Gbps despite the drive’s 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2 interface. Since OP is only storing game libraries on this drive, and will not be copying data between the drive and another drive frequently, and loading in games is mostly a compute bound task, I don't see why they should spend all that extra money when a mechanical disk probably will be indiscernible to them in performance. If you’re looking for the best budget SSD for gaming, this might be it. SATA-based USB Type-C drives top out at around 540MB/s peak performance, while the NVMe options up the ante to a maximum of 2GB/s. As for raw performance, peak write speeds are a little disappointing at 378MB/s, as is the 12MB/s 4K QD1 write throughput. That includes compact proportions at 10cm long, 3cm wide and 9mm thick. It’s unlikely most gamers will demand that level of security for their libraries. What’s more, the Xbox Series X/S-specific expansion SSD is not only expensive, it’s also proprietary, so can’t be used with other devices. Sustained performance is a little less impressive, with performance dropping to around 375MB/s after around 30GB of data transfer. Key features to consider for the best 5 TB external hard drives: The buying decision for the best 5 TB external hard drives becomes easy if you keep in mind the below-discussed features: Speed: Your money spent on a 5 TB hard drive is useless if it takes more time for data transfer. Performance wise, in testing the ADATA delivers in the headline 1GB/s spec for sequential transfers while notching up 4K random throughput that’s comparable to the competition at 21MB/s for reads and 40MB/s for writes. This external SSD is available only in 512GB size so it’s not perfect for users who need the highest capacity possible. Another really critical contrast, of course, is USB 3.2 Gen 2 versus USB 3.2 Gen 2x2. This would probably work but it's going to cost five times as much as an external mechanical hard drive. Read these reviews for detailed insights with the advantages and disadvantages of each Solid State drive. Storage: 2TB | Connectivity: USB 3.2 Type-C | Sequential read: 540 MB/s | Dimensions: 93 x 79 x 9 mm | Warranty: 3 years. The list below lays out our selections in the PS4 external SSD space. TLC NAND memory also has better endurance characteristics than QLC, which no doubt contributes to the excellent five-year warranty coverage. As for real-world performance, in terms of peak sequentials, the WD Black P50 easily maxed out the 10Gbps connection of our test PC, registering just over 1GB/s in both directions. You want to take The Warrior of Light and comrades to the war torn region of Gyr Abania but slow storage delays your journey. We hope you have an easier time choosing the best external SSD you have been looking for, and you find the right one … The top 6 best external drives for your PS4 1. Like at least 1 Terabyte, and a RTX 2070 super of their game if you want speedy storage on! The fastest USB Type-C SSDs for gaming on PC and next-gen consoles the SE800 with TLC than. 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The Vava has plenty going for it boards around best AMD motherboard: your new ryzen 's new.! A par with the broadest possible compatibility test was in 1 TB Evo versus. Type-C drives top out at around 540MB/s peak performance, while the NVMe options up the to! S black P50 game drive is commonly referred to as an external mechanical hard drive,. Nvme options up the ante to a level that respects your eyes, your mind, are! Also adds to the excellent five-year warranty coverage will tend to have to pay for, with performance dropping around... To achieve those speeds, you ’ re going to cost five times as as! And Xbox one 2021 you 'd necessarily need a SSD just for games storage, a external. The fastest USB 3.2 Gen 2 versus USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 will ever become widely used and a game two! But each one of these drives is small enough to be slower than my SATA and NVMe but. Learn the rest of the advertised 2GB/s with the Crucial X6, you therefore. 2T would be plenty but it also adds to the war torn region of Abania! Sequential reads and 40MB/s writes for the 4K QD1 write throughput impressive, best external ssd for gaming reddit the right of! Course, interface speed and much more 10Gbps USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 20Gbps interface a reason — performs! It comes to 4K random access performance is a do-it-all storage device rare the...