Question: Do usb 3 external drives lower fps in games or effect load times? I have a decent gaming setup but cheaped out on the motherboard and only have 4 sata ports one for a dvd/cd reader/burner and 1 for small sdd for os and 2 500 gig hard drives (either 5400 rpm or 7200 rpm does not say in crystal disk info) for games and an external WD usb 3 5400 rpm 1 tb drive I repurposed from my xbox that I hardly use anymore. I do have larger hard drives I could use but i dont feel like transferring all my data So if games on the external drive run just as well as they would on an internal drive that has the same rpm I wont bother moving anything but if I could get a significant boost in performance if i moved everything from the smaller drives and the external drive to a larger hard drive then maybe I would. if it makes load times slightly longer I can live with that as long as it has no effect on game performance and fps. Also on the same note, does storage speed like rpm or ssd speed effect fps at all or just load times? I care MUCH more about game performance than load times. I also have plenty of ram(16 gbs) so there wont be any chance of a situation were my pc has to use the storage as ram.
Answer:Performance shouldn’t matter. Once the data is loaded into ram, assuming you have enough, it won’t read from the drive again until it has to. New level, new area, etc. If you don’t have enough ram and it has to use the drive as a swap/page file then things can get ugly. I think it would use your OS drive for that so your small SSD. It will still be slower than ram. External drive will just take longer to load something then internal drives all things being equal. So if you are happy with the wait/load times then it shouldn’t matter.