As the title says. Everyone was telling me they were faster with load times and I’m a little confused on how to transfer games like WoW and those on my steam to the SSD and make them just play from their. will i have to redownload everything again to the SSD?
As I tested this … I found speed usb3.1 was 100% usage at 40% the speed of my pcie x4 SSD with at the same time a 20-30% usage of my C:\ drive sata 3 SSD.
I am able to achieve 32Gb to game with my pcie x4 in my pcie x16 slot.
Just 512GB SSD only for the Game.
I have the UD i5 10400 as my CPU/GPU.
I get 60 FPS in Zan’ s Outland on 7.
So 40% game to 100% game differences.
Oh with very small usage of my C:\ drive … Around 5-10%.
Since I just want to test classic. I can not just run the exe with just the classic on it. So copy to the entire wow directory.
I am currently coping my d\ to my g\ a USB 3.1 Sorbet SSD . have a section of 146 GB , so big enough.
81 gig to drive in 4 min. The started at, but at about 28 gig left to go ,it said 13 min left…at 20 gig to go it said 5 min…omg data.077 was forever.
Ok done copy.
First need to make a new DIR.
So G:\test is new directory.
Now move to that dir.
G:\test\world of Warcraft
Just mouse drag and drop.
Note: Must be formatted as NTFS not Fat 32. On the USB drive.
Will run wow wotlk and report back.
The test is … As I pushed or fly away it goes from 40-60 to 30 -20 in the the time … C:\ drive was indeed increased to 40-80 % usage as the G: drive was nearly non read in the usage records.
This is very odd indeed.
Well over all the preform hit is how much you are using you speed. Normal fights were non issue…only thing I found I had a hard time dismounting and auto attack in flight.
If you never had it … You would not miss it.
Overall if you need to play like this just note some hits in performance is gonna happen.
Have fun.
I forgot to in plug the USB when I was done flipping it back to my internal drive . fly in Saterath at 15- 20 fps I said woo.
Unplug the drive and sitting at a 60 fps jump to 45 then back to 33… Now flying at 50 fps.
I found the external drive to be somewhere in-between an HDD and internal SDD in performance, so long as it was connected by USB 3.
You can copy your installation over if data caps are an issue, just remember to repoint your launcher to the new installation.
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Yea externals aint as fast as internal since its USB
You want to install an internal SSD. Samsung drives include free cloning software to move everything
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That’s what I’ve done, but if someone doesn’t have the budget, or has an external drive handy, they’re decent interim steps, and takes zero technical skills.
Like people said that it depends on what your motherboard can handle.
USB 3.0 is faster than 2.0 etc etc…
However an internal solid state should just replace a hard drive unless it’s your main one with windows on it. If you have a backup disk that’s great but I don’t so it’s more difficult.
But you can download it on a thumb drive or something
all my ports are USB 3.0, it seems to be avg 145 mb/s when transferring 30+ gig files
I mean, it depends on a lot of factors.
Ports: PCIe / nvme connections are capable of nearly 4000 mbs. SATA (what most internal drives use) typically floats around 100mbs. USB3 is rated at 500mbs and USB 3.1 is rated around 1000mbs although there are faster gens now. Realistically many USB ports are connected via SATA or regular USB3 back to the motherboard so very often you don’t actually get faster-than-SATA using a USB drive.
The drive type: the more layers in an SSD, the longer it takes to read. But layers are the cheapest way of adding capacity. SLC is faster than MLC is faster than TLC is faster than QLC and so on. This is kind of irrelevant in terms of nvme SSDs, but for USB or SATA SSDs it means shelling out more money for a bigger drive also means that drive is going to be slower.
In the second post of this thread someone is comparing transfer speeds of misc data and that’s not useful. To seriously test transfer speeds you need to use large compressed files, like 2GB of encrypted or zipped data from one point to another. When you copy a bunch of random tiny crap like your wow folder, your CPU and the block size of your filesystem for both source and destination drives become larger limiting factors when measuring speed.
For redownload wow, you should just be able to copy it to the new destination, but you may have to update start menu shortcuts to point at the new location. Unclear of there’s any longer term problems like a cache or temp folder path being hard coded to the initial installation directory.
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Are external drives a lot better these days? I would never dream of running an online game off of one with actual success.
EDIT: I read a bit of the rest of the thread, I think I learned. Still wouldn’t do it!
An external SSD should outperform a 7200 rpm internal HDD, but it’s unlikely to outperform an internal SSD even if the internal SSD is only using SATA.
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There was a period over a decade ago where I would occasionally run WoW off of a 20GB iPod (the secondary function as a portable HD those things had was amazing) and it ran fine, but that was also back when the whole game took up less than 10GB of space and assets loaded fairly quickly regardless of what it was running off of… hard to imagine doing the same with todays 85GB+ behemoth.
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I guess I’ve underestimated externals, that’s pretty neat!
All read/write benchmarks assume sustained read/writes, which isn’t usually the case in the real world as streaming data is more common and more present in WoW.
When I moved my installation from an external SSD to an internal SSD there wasn’t much noticeable difference (maybe 1sec on load?)
If you are just transferring the game you can just drag and drop the folder into the new drive. The launcher won’t have the right shortcut, but it will give you the option to show it the new folder location and after that its fine. Windows will still run off the old drive, but having to fix that is a little bit more involved.
From what I learned having a PS5, external SSD’s aren’t great and don’t reach anywhere near the speed of internal. Heck PS5 games wont even play off an external due to speeds, I can’t imagine playing WoW off external would be good