Using an USB 3 external drive for gaming.

[Tarvaln]

I know. I know. The internet says you're not suppose to do it.

But can you do it with a USB 3 drive and the right settings/software?

Specs are in my sig.

Story :
I got a Seagate Expansion 2TB USB 3.0 Black Desktop Hard Drive STBV2000100 this past weekend for $70.
It's a Chinese drive so, it will probably fail as I'm typing this.
I decided to put my video media (Not my porn though. That is too valuable.) and my Steam account on it. These are things that I can recover if the drive fails.

Things that seems to be important:

Transfer Rate:
My transfer rate is around 81MB/s. I transferred 700Gb to the drive last night in two batches of 350GB or so.

Temp:
Idle temp was 32C. Max was 46C during transfers that took an hour+ per transfer.

Software
I'm using FancyCache on all of my drives. I don't know all the magic behind this but, it seems to throw my writes into RAM first before writing to the HDD.

I'm looking for suggestions to make this work. Other software (free please) or settings.

Thanks!

P.S. So while going through my movies/shows I was thinking to myself,
"I can get that again.", "I can get that again.", "I can get that again."
While going through my porn I was thinking,
"I'll never find that again.", "I'll never find that again.", "I'll never find that again."
Funny how that works.

 

[Elixer]

Actually, it isn't that big of a issue, though, it depends on the game.
The only time you will see a big hit is if the game requires lots of streaming of the data.
On games that only require disk operations on level load, you might be waiting a few extra seconds.

 

[0roo0roo]

I know. I know. The internet says you're not suppose to do it.

But can you do it with a USB 3 drive and the right settings/software?

Specs are in my sig.

Story :
I got a Seagate Expansion 2TB USB 3.0 Black Desktop Hard Drive STBV2000100 this past weekend for $70.
It's a Chinese drive so, it will probably fail as I'm typing this.
I decided to put my video media (Not my porn though. That is too valuable.) and my Steam account on it. These are things that I can recover if the drive fails.

Things that seems to be important:

Transfer Rate:
My transfer rate is around 81MB/s. I transferred 700Gb to the drive last night in two batches of 350GB or so.

Temp:
Idle temp was 32C. Max was 46C during transfers that took an hour+ per transfer.

Software
I'm using FancyCache on all of my drives. I don't know all the magic behind this but, it seems to throw my writes into RAM first before writing to the HDD.

I'm looking for suggestions to make this work. Other software (free please) or settings.

Thanks!

P.S. So while going through my movies/shows I was thinking to myself,
"I can get that again.", "I can get that again.", "I can get that again."
While going through my porn I was thinking,
"I'll never find that again.", "I'll never find that again.", "I'll never find that again."
Funny how that works.

You are better off doing this for caching. http://www.hardocp.com/article/2012/10/17/sandisk_readycache_32gb_ssd_review/1

I see seagates still sticking to drives sealed in plastic boxes, air tight ftw!

Aka kill the drive just outside the 1 year warranty...