But it works fine off the SD Card? I am very ignorant to PCs, so when I ran out of storage, I bought an SD card, copied WoW to it, and ran WoW off of it. It was a bit slower, so I did my research and found an External SSD was MUCH FASTER AND BETTER. So, I bought the Crucial X9, plugged it in, copied WoW from the SD card to the SSD, and started playing. The problem is, it took way longer to launch the game after I pressed Play from Battle.Net, and then when it got to the character select screen, the screen was black and the music started stuttering. It’s like it’s loading everything MUCH slower than it did off the SD card, which was weird considering I thought the SD card was supposed to be the much worse option. Does anyone have any tips or suggestions about what to do next? Should I uninstall WoW from the SSD and do a fresh install?
Most external usb drives come formated eFat file system.
Wow requires the format to be NTFS.
Check that.
Also add that if you can put the drive inside computer it would be better.
External drives hooked to usb 3.1 are about 40% slower than the same drive in a M.2 slot edge card adaptor or on the Serial bus or in a 4x M.2 slot.
The external SSD MUST be plugged in VIA a USB-C for the epic speeds to work. USB 1 - 3 wont give you the speeds you read about. USB-C is the small oval plug, not the rectangle one.
Ok, i just checked on PROPERTIES and it says “EXFAT”, but clicking FORMAT has an opgion for File System: NTFS. I assume I click that? Also, Allocation unit size says 4096 bytes, should I click on a higher number or what? Thanks btw.
IMO the allocation unit should be as small as possible so you don’t get a lot of waste. 4096 bytes should be good.
Yes that size is good or as low as the 512 option.
Alright, thanks guys! I’m copying WoW to the SD card again so i can format the SSD, then copy it back onto it and hope for the best. Because of my schedule, I’ll know if it’s fixed by tomorrow since the copying process takes about 4 hours, but based off what you said, I’m hoping it not being NTFS formatted is the problem.
what kind of port is the SSD using? It is imperative that you are using USB C as that supports like 10-20GB per seconds xferates.
Note that if you reformat the drive it will wipe data on it so I’d make a back up elsewhere of anything on there you want to keep, including your wow folders.
I have it plugged into the USB-C slot at the front of the tower. The cord the Crucial X9 came with is a USB-C on both ends if that matters.
good, then you should get the good speeds, once you change to NTFS
NTFS maybe the way to go. I have a few SSDs plugged in via a usb hub that is plugged into a 3.0 slot.
My blizzard/steam games drive is NTFS, and all of the games load/work just fine.
Hopefully that’s what fixes yours.
Amazingly, after following the formatting and making sure the SSD was plugged in right, it still has very bad performance issues. Out of sheer curiosity, I switched over to the SD card and it is still working much better than the External SSD. I am floored. Idk what to do. Do I just uninstall it from the SSD and do a fresh install and hope that fixes the issue?
Does your power supply have enough juice for running applications on the external? Generally speaking, running games on an external drive is a terrible idea because of these performance problems. You’re better off storing your photos, documents, music, etc., on the external and moving the game to an internal drive.
I don’t know much about computers, so I can’t answer that question. What I can say though is I bought a pre-built computer, which I know people say you shouldn’t but I wouldn’t know the first thing about putting one together. Anyway, I read that other people were playing WoW from an External SSD and having no problem. I thought that would just be easier than learning how to replace my internal drive myself. But, I guess not. This External SSD has been a headache.
There’s probably room inside the case for some sort of SSD. Can you post the make and model of the computer
As someone who can easily build computers, I often purchase prebuilts (and then tweak them a bit) because those companies buy stuff in bulk and make the systems cheaper overall. But you always have to check the power supply, RAM speed, and a few other things. Informed purchasing, basically.
There are a lot of reasons why that might be the case, but I’d imagine a lot of them have to mostly do with the driver/hardware overhead adding a lot of latency to the input/output requests of the drive. Basically, picture there’s a really slow middle-man trying pass papers between two people. Doesn’t matter how fast those two people can hand him the papers, the overall speed is only ever going to be as fast as the middle man. A “system” can never be faster than the slowest link.
SD cards might have less overhead or might be lower level, not sure, I haven’t used a system with an SD card port in like 10 years.
That could also be the issue. Usb-c isn’t always fast. Check for a usb-c port on the back and see what it is labeled as there.
Or share the model of pc you bought and see if we can help identify what the best spot to plug in is.
My SSD is a different make than yours (Samsung, 1 or 2 TB), plus my USB hub has its own direct power source I need to plug into ye olde power bar… A past 3 year old machine didn’t need the hub for those drives though, so hm.
Not familiar with the brand you mentioned… but I’m not really seeing much via google that would explain your situation.
PC specifics might be interesting to hear as Zungar mentioned. Is your computer a bit on the older side?