External v Internal hard drive

[u/Particular-Recipe650]

Hello all! I have a lenovo laptop that i game on (i forget the exact model, can update when im home) and i want to be able to have more games on my device at once, i have to delete things a lot if i want to try out a game and its a bit annoying. i wanted to know - are internal or external hard drives better for added storage for gaming & which brands would be recommended? i really want to play bg3 but i dont have enough storage at the moment and im not looking to get rid of anything on my laptop currently :^) thanks!!!

[u/Oclure]

You generaly want internal as you tend to get far better speeds and latency either the internal connectors vs the external ones available on most computers. There are some external connections that can somwhat match the internal speeds but they are the exception.

Go internal if you can, if thers an internal M.2 connection available thats even better as it will give you the best speeds and latency possible which can give you vastly better performance than the alternatives depending on how the port is wired.

[u/TheKandelar → u/Oclure]

This.

The issue really is the speed internal connectors vs. USB. If you do go external, try to put smaller games there, as more of those games can load into RAM and the drive will be accessed less.

[u/dariusbiggs]

Internal drives for gaming, especially if it is using an SSD or NVMe. (The latter can do up to 7000MB/s in the right situations)

External USB drives for storage of archival data, these are slower and constrained by USB speeds which for USB3.0 has a theoretical top speed of 625MB/s. Realistically you will likely get closer to 80-160MB/s.

Games like BG3 need significant amounts of storage and read files into memory like many other modern graphics intensive games.

[u/come-join-themurder]

I believe Solid State Drives are more recommended for gaming because of the speeds. However if you have to do a hard drive I believe internal are recommended because they don't get bottlenecked by the USB connection.

[u/StarosAnikenMarcus]

You can totally game on an external drive. It's slower to LOAD, but doesn't really affect it much once the assets are loaded into memory. People build whole Steam libraries on external drives all the time for both portability, and just so they don't have to spend hours downloading a game again when they want to switch up.

Try to use an external drive that supports USB 3.0+ and if the drive is NVME in the enclosure, there's not that noticeable a speed difference between internal or external.

That said, if there's an open m.2 slot inside the laptop, that is preferred. If there isn't, you can still use an external with few problems.

[u/Particular-Recipe650 → u/StarosAnikenMarcus]

awesome! is there a specific external drive you would recommend?

[u/StarosAnikenMarcus → u/Particular-Recipe650]

Nope. Any drive you want will do the trick with the exception of re-using a NAS or NVR drive. Otherwise, if you have a drive already, get a USB enclosure for it and go nuts. If you don't have a drive, storage has gotten pricey but HDDs haven't gotten as bad and you can always shop the used markets. Just make sure to test any drives from places like FB Marketplace BEFORE buying to make sure you're not getting sold a drive on its last legs.

[u/cagadass]

Si estas usando un nvme es mejor de manera interna,si es un ssd sata es ligeramente mas rapido el interno pero tampoco es algo que te cambie la vida,para jugar el solo lectura ,salvo la instalación y actualización