Gaming on USB in RAID 0

DOGGYWOWWOW on 14/11/2022 - 21:22
Last edited 14/11/2022 - 21:46

I was gonna buy a external hard drive but remembered I have 4 free USB's from a while back. They are 128gb each and do sequential 140MB/s read and 50MB/s write random is pretty bad at 10MB/s read and 5MB/s write but are probably still better than a harddrive. If put in 4 way raid 0 I'd presume I would get an at least 2x speed uplift but does anyone know of any issues I might run into doing this? I have watched some videos and people do have random freezes in game sometimes but in their case they had slow random writes on their particular USB (0.035MB/s random write from one video). Am I at higher risk of losing data vs a hard drive or ssd?

Would gaming on 4 USB's in raid 0 be fine?

Poll Options

  • 21
    No
  • 2
    Yes
Computing

Comments

  • Hybroid on 14/11/2022 - 21:26
    +5

    No, get a cheap SATA SSD instead.

  • KaTst3R on 14/11/2022 - 21:40
    +6

    We Ozbargainers are tight but not this tight…

  • Master Bates on 14/11/2022 - 21:45
    +5

    eternal hard drive

    No such thing, despite everyone’s wishes.

    • DOGGYWOWWOW on 14/11/2022 - 21:46
      +1

      oops meant external

  • Switchblade88 on 14/11/2022 - 22:30

    If you want the proper vintage experience you need to be loading your games sequentially via floppy disk, however this might come close.

  • Grazz989 on 14/11/2022 - 22:55
    +1

    How would you plug them into your PC ?

    • ty99234 on 16/11/2022 - 14:47

      Same doubt.

  • A-mak on 16/11/2022 - 14:36

    My SATA SSD is 565MB/s read/write.

    My old sata hdd raid 0 was 90-130MB/s read/write which was done by the motherboard.

    Windows software raid on usb would be worse and further random?

    With a raid 0 if 1 drive failed you will lose all data, you can also check the 'health' of your drive with smart data; which is unavailable for USB I think? So yes, a hdd or ssd is safer imo and I would recommend an ssd any day of the week.

    What happens if you want to use one of the said usb ports? or being all shoved in together they heat up? or one of them not performing as good as the others slowing the whole lot down? further risks?

  • ezzahhh on 16/11/2022 - 14:47

    Yeah coming from experience I would definitely not recommended this. I recently upgraded my gaming rig from mechanical hard drives to SSD's comprising of a couple Nvme's and four Sata's since I wanted to go full SSD on my setup.

    I had a couple of spare Samsung USB 2tb T5 SSD's that I had already been using for the portability factor of them. Once my Steam library was at capacity I decided to start using them for my games as well since I wanted to see if it was possible to actually play anything on them.

    I found that if I was playing a significantly smaller indie gamer (Celeste was one such example I tested) it worked fine, but if I tried to play any AAA game from at least the last 10 years it didn't end well for me. I'm not sure when it comes to RAID if it would make much of a difference since I'm no expert on that side of things.

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