Anyways, let’s get down to benchmarking the My Passport X. Maybe they’ve got those All-in-Ones at college with annoyingly restrictive permissions and you absolutely must continue you’re T he Witcher 3 save at 1 FPS during free hour. While we don’t see any practical real-world scenarios where you’d want to do it, there’s even a case to be made here, at least academically, to shift your entire Windows installation onto an external HDD. Well, apart from some pesky DRM, but, hey, that’s Ubisoft’s fault.
While it might feel instinctively wrong to run intensive games off a card-sized drive and a USB cable, as we’ll see, there’s nothing preventing you from running current titles at full speed off the My Passport X. While you won’t see anything near those speeds unless you’ve got an external SSD cradle setup, USB 3.0 allows external hard drives like the My Passport X to really stretch their legs and hit 100 MB/S and above, which is right in line with conventional SATA hard drives. The USB 3.0 spec theoretically supports a 6 GB/S transfer speed. However, with USB 3.0 becoming standardised of late, your options open up substantially. And with regards data redundancy, with the shift towards digital distribution ( Metal Gear Solid V’s retail disc trolled old-school buyers by feature the Steam Web Installer and no game files), you’ll have to endure re-downloading your PC titles unless you’ve got backup copies stored away.Įxternal HDDs were, until recently, relegated to just this role. You’re going to have to accommodate those massive textures somewhere. Setting aside the consoles for a moment, there’s a strong case to be made for high capacity backup storage right now: Most eighth-gen titles come in at well over 20 GB.