Would a high quality USB 3 SSD beat the speeds of a SATA II internal 7200rpm for gaming?

Question

I have a gaming laptop and a desktop that I switch between pretty regularly due to not being home often. Rather than purchasing two SSDs, I was considering whether I could get away with getting a single USB 3 SSD and installing the games I needed on it instead!

I currently have SATA II , 7200rpm drives drives in both. Standard drives, basically. I'm looking to see a performance increase on load times on both machines, and was curious whether the USB 3 SSD would be able to outperform them in this regard or not. It seems like it would, but I've heard latency across USB 3 can actually be pretty bad, so I don't want to put out the money necessary to get this drive and find out that, in actuality, it comes out slower!

Just for a side note- the laptop does not have an esata drive, so I that isn't an option. :-\

So what do you guys think: Would a high quality USB 3 SSD beat the load speeds of a SATA II internal 7200rpm for gaming?

By external SSD, I mean an SSD drive in a USB 3 enclosure for 2.5" drives (claims 5Gbps)

Solution

There are several factors you'd have to take into account for both the desktop and the laptop;

USB3

What chipset do you have for this? Not all give the best performance.

Any other devices on the USB bus? On the USB3 bus?

SSD

High-end or low-end? Because there's been some turmoil in the SSD market recently.

Are all of the features fully supported by your operating system?

Since most SSDs are designed to interface w/ a SATA-based controller, what management/performance features do you lose when you go over USB3?

GAMES

Just because you specified the path to the USB3 drive during the installation, doesn't mean that there aren't a few hundred lines in your registry and dozens of other files scattered throughout your operating system's drive.

This is true for most Windows-based software.

Comments

[Doktoro Reichard]

Well USB-3 has a 5Gbit/s transfer rate while SATA-2 has only a 3 Gbit/s transfer rate. This would make seem that USB-3 is better than SATA. Reality is that there are a lot of things running in the background and most likely you won't get near any of those speeds. This being said, if a USB-3 can function well with a lot of different I/O operations, the SSD should be faster.

[Aaron Miller]

There are so many uncontrolled variables here that it's impossible to give anything remotely resembling a definitive answer; I can guarantee that USB 3 at full bandwidth is going to outperform SATA 2 at same, and that a 7200RPM drive isn't going to be able to saturate a SATA 2 channel in any case, but USB 3 won't be any faster if your enclosure's or machine's USB interface can't keep up. All that said, and reiterating the caveat that you'd need to do comparative benchmarks to get a real answer, I would expect to see better performance out of the SSD than out of a 7200RPM hard disk.

[Signal15]

I'm sure the poster already has a feel for how fast the internal drives are on each system. "Would an internal SSD or an external USB3 SSD be faster?" was the boiled-down question (as I read it).