this post was submitted on 31 Aug 2023
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Than most Solid State Drives you mean, since Hard Drive Disks have way slower read speeds than USB 3.0/3.1, I even have proof, My partners BG3 game was laggy as hell in her hard drive, but it's manageable to play in an external SSD connected to USB3.1. The read speed changes from 35MB7s-ish to 500MB/s-ish iirc. it was VERY noticeable. Her laptop is a gaming laptop bought 4 years ago, and the processor/grapphics card works pretty well still, but the 250GB SSD is just not enough to manage windows and all the other games/programs, and the HHD is way too slow, so yeah. In the future changing the SSD to put a bigger one would be the best but for now an external drive works wonders.
Compared to a HDD, yeah USB 3.0 speeds aren't too bad, but most laptops being released these days use an NVMe for storage (or possibly even a soldered drive). My comparison was around what you'd expect in a laptop purchased in the past year or so.
For your partner's laptop, getting better read performance from an external drive doesn't surprise me, but there are also limits to this. Games are starting to support DirectStorage, which allows the GPU to directly read and decompress assets from the hard drive. This won't work with an external drive (at least from my understanding), so those games will likely fallback to much slower methods of loading assets if they support the laptop at all. This is also not taking into account the other hardware on the laptop, which might have been excellent for the time, but with how much CPUs and GPUs have advanced over the past 4 years, I wouldn't be surprised if they're starting to reach their limits with today's major releases.