When a new drive is plugged into a computer it assigns that drive a letter in sequence.
The last limiting factor is Windows drive letter assignment scheme.
SATA 3 would be the best format to connect an SSD to so it can be better utilized. If you have an external SSD then it will be more limited by being connected to the USB than SATA since their data rates can go higher than 1 gigabyte per second depending on their specifications. Some of the fastest hard drives can only get up to about 210 megabytes per second and about 400 if their buffer is utilized fully which doesn’t happen all the time. This greatly limits the drives reads and writes mainly because of the speed of the drive and the read write head. Hard drives use a physical spinning disk to store its media. This takes time and acts as a bottle neck to the data as well. USB 3.1 boasts up to 1 gigabyte per second speed where as SATA 3 has a speed of 600 megabytes per second this may seem slower but when you take into account that this is 600 megabytes per second both ways this actually is faster if you have to read and write at the same time.Īnother limiting factor is the processing chip that is in an external hard drive that is there to convert SATA signals to USB and visa versa. SATA does not have this issue and so is a much better solution for gaming. This is very limiting for gaming since the computer needs to talk with the drive and the drive to the computer most of the time and having that bottle neck will greatly slow down a game. This means that USB can only send or receive data but not both at the same time where as SATA can do both. The biggest restriction is going to be the fact that USB is only single data transfer rate where as SATA is duplex transfer rate. If you have simple games that do not require much bandwidth from the drive then it is OK to put games on your external hard drive and play them but if you put a modern game onto your external drive with HD graphics and complex maps then you will suffer more in the load times for areas and if the game references the drive all the time then you will suffer game slow downs. Another limiting factor is drive type with hard drives being a physical disc that spins this is very limited with read and write times being much slower than their data cables are capable of with most hard drives only using up one third or so of SATA 3’s transfer rate. The short answer is that SATA 3 while boasting slower data transfer rates than its USB 3.1 counterpart is still superior since it can transfer information both ways. The chief limiting factor of any connection type is speed and if the data transfer is one way or both ways at once. The answer is yes, but there are caveats to this. With the price of external hard drives being very close to their internal counterparts and their ease of use it is a good question to ask whether you can game off of an external hard drive or not.