Post by Mac Doktor on Aug 5, 2020 23:12:45 GMT
I've been using an external SSD for gaming in Bootcamp for several years now. I started out with a 500GB and when I ran out of space I upgraded to a 1TB. A few months ago I was down to about 50GB free and expecting to buy more games. The size of game installations has been growing exponentially in recent years and when Doom Eternal and the reboot of Modern Warfare (over 200GB by itself) went on sale I found myself up against the wall.
I bought an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini external 2.5" drive enclosure a couple of Garage Sales back for about $65 (it was an open box return with a full warranty). It's USB-C and bus-powered. I put two 1TB OWC Mercury Electra 6Gs (bought new a few sales back) in it configured as RAID0 and formatted as NTFS. It took several hours to copy 950GB of game files over as they aren't 4K video grade SSDs and slowed down to a whopping 44MB/s most of the time. Once the copy was done I was playing with power. it can sustain large reads indefinitely at over 840MB/s. Level load times have dropped quite a bit.
The total cost was about $350 for 2TB of space which was an excellent trade-off in price vs. performance. I'm extremely happy with it. I suspect that cheaper SSDs would work just as well because the only time anything other than software updates and game data are written to it is when new games are being installed.
The only problem that I've run into in Windows 10 (1909) is that I can't get Modern Warfare 2 & 3 to work due to some sort of DirectX 9 error. World At War is broken, too. I've searched for a fix but all I can find are other gamers asking the same question. Oh well, I've got plenty of games (including a few I bought a year or two ago) to keep me busy (assuming that they even work with an older 2019 driver while we wait for Matt to have time to work on something newer).
Just a heads-up for other gamers running out of space and/or fed up with slow loads. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for more bargains so I'll be ready when it's time to upgrade to 4TB...
Oh, and be sure to sign up for sale alerts from OWC. They announce Garage Sales to subscribers 24 hours before the rest of the world and serious bargains go fast.
I bought an OWC Mercury Elite Pro Dual Mini external 2.5" drive enclosure a couple of Garage Sales back for about $65 (it was an open box return with a full warranty). It's USB-C and bus-powered. I put two 1TB OWC Mercury Electra 6Gs (bought new a few sales back) in it configured as RAID0 and formatted as NTFS. It took several hours to copy 950GB of game files over as they aren't 4K video grade SSDs and slowed down to a whopping 44MB/s most of the time. Once the copy was done I was playing with power. it can sustain large reads indefinitely at over 840MB/s. Level load times have dropped quite a bit.
The total cost was about $350 for 2TB of space which was an excellent trade-off in price vs. performance. I'm extremely happy with it. I suspect that cheaper SSDs would work just as well because the only time anything other than software updates and game data are written to it is when new games are being installed.
The only problem that I've run into in Windows 10 (1909) is that I can't get Modern Warfare 2 & 3 to work due to some sort of DirectX 9 error. World At War is broken, too. I've searched for a fix but all I can find are other gamers asking the same question. Oh well, I've got plenty of games (including a few I bought a year or two ago) to keep me busy (assuming that they even work with an older 2019 driver while we wait for Matt to have time to work on something newer).
Just a heads-up for other gamers running out of space and/or fed up with slow loads. Meanwhile, I'm waiting for more bargains so I'll be ready when it's time to upgrade to 4TB...
Oh, and be sure to sign up for sale alerts from OWC. They announce Garage Sales to subscribers 24 hours before the rest of the world and serious bargains go fast.
