PC Tech Ok so what we doing for game storage beyond our nvme’s?

[stepee]

My old usb 2.0 external hard drives are no longer suitable for me to use for games that aren’t on my main rotation but I still might want to boot up now and then.

 

I have two nvme 2tb drives, and I don’t plan to upgrade to 4tb yet with prices as they are, and definitely not on this build. And two is the max this one can fit. I have two sata ssd’s, I’d prefer not adding more as well.

 

How is running games off of usb-c these days? Is there a usb c external hard drive for this that someone could recommend? I’d still have my 4tb of nvme to cover anything I’m actually really playing but I prefer keeping things to still boot them up quickly in a whim when they move off of that rotation rather than deleting them. 

 

Christmas is coming up and I was thinking this could be a good thing to suggest depending on price. I’d like a 4tb one and then if it works out I’d get another one.

[Mr.Vic20]

I honestly don't know because I have plenty of NVME storage. I am useless to you my friend! 

[Xbob42]

35 minutes ago, Mr.Vic20 said:

I honestly don't know because I have plenty of NVME storage. I am useless to you my friend! 

Ditto. Just get more NVMEs.

Also I have fast internet, even if I didn't have enough storage it'd probably be faster to download the game again.

[stepee]

but i only can do two nvmes on my motherboard and getting two 4tb ones would be like $700 and I might do that next build but I wouldn’t want to spend that much now because I don’t support the top speed as I’m on pcie3 still

 

It really doesn’t have to be like super crazy fast like if it was 4 times as slow that’s fine, I just have no idea how workable a usbc drive is. Like, what about a nvme via usb c could that work okay?

 

 

[Ominous]

The 2 2 TB drives I have right now is fine. Once gen 5 comes out I'll add another couple tb, but I don't need 38326 games installed when bandwidth is cheap and limitless.

[Nokra]

Between having 3 TB of NVME storage in my desktop (2 M.2s) and not playing more than two or three different games at a time within any two week period (and sometimes less than that since I'm still hopelessly addicted to TF2), I haven't had to worry about this, honestly. You can get external enclosures for M.2s though so that down the road you could throw them into your new system if you wanted to go that way. 

 

Honestly though for cheaper storage you can also look into 2.5" SATA SSDs. For loading content like games, I don't think it will make that much difference. 

[dualhunter]

I mostly use a 1TB SATA drive from my old build since I already had games installed on it and I've mostly been playing indie and older games. Battlefield V loads much faster my 2TB NVME drive than it did on my old build running off SATA. I barely played it so the new CPU & RAM and patches may have contributed to the speed up as well, I just remember it taking forever to start when I first got it and it being much better when I tried again with the new build. If you have a USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 port you could try a USB Game Drive but if it's just for stuff you play less often it might better to get  SATA drive that will still be much better than your old external drives

 

WD_BLACK P40 Game Drive USB 3.2 Gen 2x2 Portable SSD Review: Balanced Storage

WWW.ANANDTECH.COM

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[Spork3245]

21 hours ago, stepee said:

but i only can do two nvmes on my motherboard

LimitedSABRENT NVMe M.2 SSD to PCIe X16/X8/X4 Card with Aluminum Heat Sink (EC-PCIE) https://a.co/hFSZdNH

 

F’n noob  

[cusideabelincoln]

On a spare PC I temporarily had an entire Windows 11 install on a USB 3.0 drive and it worked fine. So an external SSD is good enough for games that you'll only play from time to time;  you'll probably only lose a few seconds of loading time.

 

NVME isn't going to matter until more games start using DirectStorage. Forespoken is supposed to be the first one, and it's not even out yet.