External HDD vs. SSD for gaming?

Hey there,

So, I’ve been running this laptop with a 256 GB SSD for about two and a half years now—it’s been solid, really—but the massive headache is that my storage is basically hitting a wall. I’m dying to install some more games, but there's just zero room left. I was thinking about picking up an external hard drive or maybe an external SSD to offload some of these titles onto. I guess my main concern is... would that even actually work? Like, could my laptop even handle loading games from an external source, or is it going to be painfully slow? If this is a viable path, I’d love some suggestions on which drives to look at and what capacity makes sense. Also—and this is the big one—is it actually worth getting an SSD over a standard hard drive? I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons before I drop any money.

Thanks.

Which laptop are we talking about? I guess it might be safer to just pop it into a second slot if there is one, since booting from a USB would probably be pretty slow.

We’re talking about a Dell Latitude here

If you still have a DVD drive lying around, you could probably just rip it out, grab an external enclosure, and swap in a regular HDD or another SSD. Or, looking at the specs, it seems like there’s an M.2 SATA slot available, so you could just toss in an extra card-style SSD like this:

https://www.bhphotovideo.com/c/product/1618278-example/wd_blue_sa_500gb_sata_iii_ssd.html

Dana Kim6 said:Hey there,

So, I’ve been running this laptop with a 256 GB SSD for about two and a half years now—it’s been solid, really—but the massive headache is that my storage is basically hitting a wall. I’m dying to install some more games, but there's just zero room left. I was thinking about picking up an external hard drive or maybe an external SSD to offload some of these titles onto. I guess my main concern is... would that even actually work? Like, could my laptop even handle loading games from an external source, or is it going to be painfully slow? If this is a viable path, I’d love some suggestions on which drives to look at and what capacity makes sense. Also—and this is the big one—is it actually worth getting an SSD over a standard hard drive? I'm trying to weigh the pros and cons before I drop any money.

Thanks.

It will definitely work. My recommendation is to go with an SSD, and your performance will essentially be capped by the speed of your USB port. This one here should do the trick:
https://www.bestbuy.com/site/external-ssd-storage/

Just a quick heads-up: many people (myself included at times) assume that newer technology automatically means lower power consumption. For instance, we think LCD screens consume less than those old bulky CRT monitors. In reality, they often pull just as much, if not more.
The same logic applies to SSDs. They can be quite power-hungry. When the power supply is insufficient, they can stall or slow down significantly. Laptops frequently struggle to output enough juice through their ports, which means external SSDs might not perform reliably.
Because of that, I suggest connecting it via a Power Delivery (PD) hub. Essentially, you get a device that handles your USB connections, maybe an HDMI output, card readers, or Ethernet... you plug it into your laptop's USB port, but it also features a USB 3.0 slot specifically for power input. Even if your laptop doesn't support charging via USB, the PD function will power the SSD (this is exactly how I handle things when I connect an external SSD to my Raspberry Pi, since the Pi alone can't provide enough current to run an SSD). An SSD requires a decent amount of power, and a hub will provide it if you plug a laptop charger into it (which needs to have a USB 3.0 or Thunderbolt connection for power). If you don't have a charger like that, you'll need to pick one up. However, if you already own a compatible charger, you simply plug it into the port marked with a lightning bolt or "PD" instead of the laptop itself, then plug the hub into the laptop. Your laptop will charge while the charger simultaneously powers your external SSD.
A high-quality hub for this would be this one (though it is a bit pricey):
https://www.amazon.com/dlink-usb-c-hub-pd/

I’d much rather go with an internal SSD over an external one if I had the choice. If your SATA 3 slot is already spoken for, you could always swap out the optical drive for a caddy, or if you're working with a newer laptop, just use the M.2 slot. Honestly, both paths are significantly better than relying on an external drive for a few reasons:

1) You run into a massive bottleneck with USB 3.0, where speeds tend to cap out around 400 MB/s—that was my best result in benchmarks. For context, an internal SATA 3 SSD usually hits 500 or 550 MB/s, and an M.2 can easily soar past 1500 MB/s.
2) Some external models struggle with the TRIM function because Windows identifies them as SCSI devices, which effectively breaks TRIM. It might not seem like a big deal at first, but once you've been deleting and moving files constantly, the system fails to clear out old data automatically, leaving you with a mess of unallocated space.
3) Cost—internal drives are generally cheaper.
4) Most SSD maintenance toolkits won't work properly on external drives when Windows treats them as SCSI.
5) As granitecrane2 pointed out, SSDs actually demand more power than traditional HDDs. On my own laptop, an external SSD wouldn't even spin up through the USB-C port without an extra power adapter, though it worked fine via USB-A; basically, you might run into some frustrating power limit issues depending on the port.

+1 for internal...
Especially if you're planning on using it as a "workhorse" rather than just some archive tool for moving files between different PCs and stuff.

There’s an obvious winner here: just swap out your current SSD for a bigger one, maybe something around 1TB.
Decent models (like the Kansas City Chiefs series or a Samsung EVO) in SATA format go up to $367, and M.2 is actually cheaper, topping out at $333.
The easiest way? If you have an M.2, just clone it to the new drive, pop the new one into its spot, and pull the old one out. You can always grab a cheap enclosure for it later and boom—you've got a portable SSD (basically a massive USB stick). It all depends on what your setup allows: either a spare SATA slot (might need an extra connector) or a dummy DVD drive bay.

Honestly, price-wise, you'll save more than dealing with all that external gear hassle. No need for power hubs, no messing around with weird connectors, and you get the full speed of the motherboard and the SSD without being choked by USB limits... to me, it's a total win-win. Your laptop is probably about 2.5 years old and likely out of warranty anyway, so the install is anything from trivial to super easy.