USB NVMe Gaming: The Good, The Bad & The Ugly

If you move between PCs a lot, or if your main PC has run out of disk space, you might be tempted to buy a USB M.2 NVMe drive and install all your games on there. But is storing all your games on an NVMe enclosure a genius plan – or a foolish one?

So in this video I test out NVMe enclosure gaming in a range of games: Rocket League, Battlefield 2042, Guardians of the Galaxy, Metro Exodus, Sniper Elite 5 and Serious Sam. I also discuss the pros and cons of suing M.2 USBs for storing your games.

If you prefer text over video, please read on for the guide/transcript version of this video.

Video Transcript And Guide

Hey everyone! If you move around a lot, or maybe you’ve run out of disk space on your computer, you might have considered going out and buying an M.2 NVMe enclosure. So, you’d basically store all your games on here, and then, when you’re ready to game, you plug this into your computer or your laptop, and all your games stored on here would be able to be played on that computer or laptop.

Is that a good idea, though? Well, the short answer is… maybe. I mean, these can work really well when they actually work, but they can also be buggy and quite frustrating, as I explore in this video.

Connecting Them To Your PC/Laptop

So, I went out and I bought a UGreen NVMe enclosure, which is USB-C, and then I bought a FikWot NVMe SSD because it was cheap. Basically, you put the NVMe drive inside the enclosure, screw it in, clip it back together, and then you get the USB cable and plug it in—assuming the computer actually has a USB-C port, of course. That’s because the vast majority of NVMe drives do actually require USB-C.

Now, you can get ones that are blue—you know, USB 3.0 or 3.2 Gen 1, as they’re now called—but generally, if you want the higher bandwidths, they often do require USB-C. So, your options then are to have a motherboard that natively has a USB-C slot (some ASRock motherboards do, and some other motherboards have that as well). That is the best option. But, if you don’t have that, there are two other options you can try, and two other options I actually tried out.

The first option is to buy a USB Type-A to USB Type-C adapter. You can buy them in loads of places. I bought this on Amazon, and you simply plug it into your M.2 NVMe enclosure, and then plug that into a normal port on your computer. Unfortunately, in this case, the read and write speeds were absolutely terrible. So, with CrystalDiskMark, it was getting nowhere near the performance it should have. It turns out it’s simply a bad adapter. Amazon probably shouldn’t be selling it, to be honest.

So, I went to plan B, and I bought a PCI Express card on AliExpress. With a coupon code, I only spent a small amount. I wasn’t sure if they’d send it, but they did! You can see it there. It’s got USB-C, and you simply plug it in. It’s very simple—you can put it into an x1 slot or a full-size x16 slot (which is what I did). It’s very easy to install. Then the read and write speeds were really good.

Almost Ready To Game…

In terms of the [temps], you can see internally, my drives were running at around 40°C. The FikWot was around 50°C, but actually, that’s not too bad for an M.2 enclosure. You can see there, things were going really fast. It only took 15 minutes to transfer my entire game library over. So, soon, I was going to be able to play computer games, right? Nope! Because this happened: the write speeds, unfortunately, started crashing.

From 200 MB/s down to 100 MB/s, and then, before I knew it, it was in the 40s. Even though the temperatures were good, it just kept going down and down into the 20s. Unfortunately, it didn’t really pick up much after this, and that’s the frustrating thing with USB enclosures. Their performance is a little hit-or-miss. It reminds me of USB flash drives. I can’t believe how small these are getting nowadays, but basically, with these, there could be loads of different things going wrong.

It could be the PCI Express card (in my case), a driver bug, a Windows bug, a problem with the cable, a problem with the M.2 NVMe enclosure, or a problem with the NVMe card itself. There are just so many moving parts. But obviously, if you do want to buy one of these, it can work. Just make sure you look at the reviews and ensure what you’re buying is actually good quality and everything else.

This Is Rocket League!

But let’s take a look at more gaming results first. When I got all my games finally transferred to my NVMe enclosure, I started with Rocket League. You can see it’s taking a little bit of time to actually start up—a little bit slower than you’d expect. But actually, before long, it does load up, and it’s not too slow, to be honest. When you go into a level, I wanted to see how long this would take to load because it does actually hammer the disk a little bit in Rocket League. You can see, there you go, straight in—there’s no issues at all.

The reason I wanted to do that test is that in a previous video, I actually looked at putting games on my Synology NAS and my Home Lab NAS. The loading screens were a lot slower, but here, actually, things were quite fast. So, let’s actually go back, let’s go to a different mode, and let’s see if things were equally fast again. Yes, again, very fast loading screens, and the FPS rates here are completely great as well. You can see there, really, it’s my GPU that’s maxed out. My CPU is being hit a little bit, but there’s no read and write data actually going on on this S drive, as you can see there in the top left. My average FPS rates are really good, and I’m not getting any stutters or anything like that.

Battlefield 2042

So, actually, Rocket League has run perfectly fine. My NVMe enclosure has not really caused any issues. So next, I went over to Battlefield. This obviously launches an EA launcher, and then there’s DRM involved as well, which meant that previously I couldn’t actually run this game on my Synology NAS or my Home Lab NAS because the DRM stopped it running. I was worried that this would happen again, but thankfully, it did actually start up.

So, you can see there, eventually, after the EA launcher, we got this splash screen. It is very slow—I’m going to skip ahead like 20–30 seconds—but now you actually have this window appearing, and at some point, the game’s going to load. Woohoo! There we are. Brilliant. The game is actually loading, and you can see the S drive here being absolutely hammered in the top left. It’s slowing down a bit now, but in general, that is why things are loading so slowly.

Once you get inside the game, though, your FPS rates are going to be absolutely fine. You’re not going to really have any issues because everything’s already been loaded up into RAM and VRAM. So, as you can see here, I’ve got fairly good, playable FPS rates. So that’s good—both Rocket League and Battlefield actually loaded fairly quickly, which is a relief. Especially with Battlefield, you see, that just wouldn’t load when I was streaming things over the network due to the DRM thinking I was cheating or something, which was annoying.

But it does work with this because it comes up as a normal drive within Windows, and so I think the anti-cheat DRM stuff simply worked. So that is brilliant. But, of course, the loading times were very slow. To actually get from Battlefield loading up into a conquest game took me over 2 minutes by the time the game had loaded and actually loaded the level. You can see the drive is doing its thing—it’s constantly being hammered with read speeds, and that’s a good thing. But obviously, it does mean that if you’re playing multiplayer, you’re going to be that annoying guy that’s not loading up while all your teammates have already joined and they’re running around getting killed or whatever the case may be.

I usually get killed in multiplayer games, but basically, that is the problem with something like this—the slow loading times are really not ideal.

Disaster!

Then, unfortunately, disaster struck—not literally, of course. But basically, the S drive started hanging quite a lot. It was a lot slower, and in Task Manager, it was showing as being completely maxed out even though it didn’t have read and write speeds. Battlefield refused to launch, and the same was true of Cyberpunk.

So, it would think about it a bit, and then it would go from “cancel” to “stop,” but it would never actually launch the red launcher in this particular case. The drive had basically died or locked up or something. So, I did the usual thing of turning it off and back on again. I unplugged it, and then I restarted the computer for good measure before I plugged things back in. Thankfully, that seemed to do the trick because Cyberpunk then would actually load. The loading screens weren’t too slow here—like, that’s actually quite quick going into the game. It wasn’t substantially slower than I’d seen when gaming over my NASes and things like that.

Now, the average FPS rate here is not great, but that’s nothing to do with gaming on the NVMe drive. Overall, performance is good here, and I’m being GPU-limited. There is one issue you will see, though: every so often, you’ll be running along, and because this is a big open-world game, it needs to load new textures, which it’s doing now. Then you get this stutter, as you can see there. Basically, while it’s very visible anyway, that’s going to affect your 1% lows and your 0.1% lows because new textures are being loaded in, or new parts of the level, or whatever. Then you get the horrible stutter, which clearly isn’t a very good experience.

That’s something key to point out. The actual average FPS rates when gaming on this will be very similar to local gaming, and that’s why I haven’t put charts up comparing the two—because it’s pretty much the same. That’s because, when a game is loading, the textures and levels and things like that actually get loaded into the RAM and the VRAM. But once that’s done, a lot of the time, you can just be playing your game or running around an open-world level or whatever it is, and the actual average FPS rates are going to be exactly the same.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

So, let’s check out some more games before I actually give my final thoughts on gaming on the NVMe enclosure. I went over to Guardians of the Galaxy, and I ran the benchmark mode. You can see here I’ve clicked it, and the read speeds are going nuts—it’s maxing out the NVMe enclosure, which is good. It’s actually performing as it should. But you can see, actually, things are very slow. It’s taking a long time to get into the benchmark. Now, you’ve got talking, but you’re not actually in a position to load the visuals, so you’ve just got my voice—hello—which isn’t really a good experience. I mean the game, as opposed to my voice.

But basically, eventually, the benchmark does load, thankfully, and you can see things are fairly good. You will get some stutters every so often—for example, now, yeah, you just see them there—which isn’t really ideal. But actually, I get that a little bit locally anyway. I think that’s more of a driver problem than anything else. We then come to the end of the benchmark run, and the average FPS rates are good and everything else. But it does take a little while to actually show the benchmark results, because locally that is fairly instant. It’s just thinking about it, and then eventually, it does load the results. Actually, fairly respectable results there.

Metro Exodus

So, gaming over an NVMe enclosure hasn’t dramatically affected things, apart from the loading times. We then come to Metro Exodus, which also doesn’t run great locally, but this is at 4K, so it’s not too bad, I suppose. I wanted to check out the loading times, just so we can see how long it would actually take, and that is fairly fast. That’s actually fairly impressive and on par with gaming locally. So, an NVMe drive hasn’t actually slowed that down, which is good.

Now, you can see some read speeds actually happening throughout when playing this game, but that doesn’t seem to cause loads of stutters like we see with Cyberpunk or Guardians of the Galaxy. So actually, this is a fairly good experience, in my opinion.

Sniper Elite 5

Next, we come to Sniper Elite 5, and actually, that loaded fairly quickly. You can see the read speeds of the drive being maxed out, but actually, it’s doing fairly good. These textures haven’t loaded yet, but they don’t load straight away on my computer either—they have now loaded. That is actually fairly fast, and it’s faster than when I gamed over my Synology NAS, where it took like two minutes to actually load those textures. So, Sniper Elite 5 does actually hammer the read speeds quite a lot, and it does that continuously—it’s something I’ve noticed. But the NVMe enclosure is actually performing fine. It’s actually handling that with no issues.

Again, I’m GPU bottlenecked here—I’m not actually IO-limited or anything like that. So, this is another good experience.

Serious Sam

And now we come to a slightly older game, which is Serious Sam. The game loaded up quite quickly, and also loading up the survival level is loading fairly quickly as well. It’s probably slightly slower than local, but that’s still fairly respectable—it’s finished, so that’s not too bad overall. Then I’m in the game itself, and the disk is being read to a little bit every so often, but not much at all. The GPU is the limiting factor, which again you’ve seen throughout. You know, once the game’s loaded into RAM and VRAM and all the textures and everything else, your disk itself isn’t really the limiting factor.

So, the FPS rates are really good here, and it’s really the GPU that is limiting things a little bit. You just see there—it’s being maxed out constantly, above 95% usage. I’m not very good at this game, but what I should say is an NVMe enclosure clearly works absolutely fine in this game. I’ve had no real issues with it. The game loaded fast, the levels loaded fast, and I’m not really seeing any stutters or anything like that.

So, this is actually a really good experience. And it’s an older game, which is interesting. So maybe some of the really new games, which have massive 4K textures and things like that, an NVMe enclosure might not be as good of an idea as with an older game like this, where things are running really flawlessly.

So, actually, that wasn’t too bad in my opinion. Yes, things were quite slow—whether it’s loading the game or some of the benchmark data on Guardians of the Galaxy—but in general, I think things were actually fairly good on this when it did actually work.

Game Downloads And Updates

But one thing I did notice is a few games had released an update, and then it took quite a long time to actually install the updates onto this. What you’ve seen was, even though I’ve got a really fast internet connection, it was downloading the actual data for the game update, then it needed to be unpacked, and that took a long time. So, the download rate goes down to zero, meaning that Steam has actually downloaded what it needs to download, and then it needs to be unpacked onto here. And that process was a lot slower and laggier than I noticed when gaming locally.

Heat FTW

The next problem you’ll probably find with an NVMe drive is heat. So, basically, inside your NVMe enclosure, you’re going to have your NVMe drive, as we looked at earlier. And this is only a Gen 3 card, which doesn’t get too hot. It would be worse if it was Gen 4 or Gen 5. But basically, you don’t have space for a massive heatsink or anything like that. You know, it’s literally—you don’t have space at all. You literally just put it in; you might be able to get a thermal pad on it, but that’s about it.

And that’s why some NVMe enclosures will have grills and things like that for heat dissipation purposes. It’s still not going to be as good as putting this inside your computer and having a proper heatsink. And what that’s going to mean is that, in time, your drive is going to get hotter and hotter. Although, admittedly, this did cap out at around 55°C. But the hotter it gets, the worse your gaming performance will be, and that is worth knowing.

Whereas, if this was in a proper computer with lots of fans bringing in cool air and things like that, it’s going to perform better than this, to be honest. So that is worth knowing. But overall, storing games on here hasn’t been too bad. Once you accept that your loading screens will be slower, your average FPS rates will actually be pretty good—you know, the same as gaming locally. And that’s actually pretty good.

Yes, you’ll have some stutters sometimes. You’ll also have to accept that. And if you were doing competitive multiplayer gaming, I probably wouldn’t want to rely on storing my games on here, because you’ll be put at a disadvantage by being the last person joining that online game, which is never really ideal.

But overall, gaming on an NVMe enclosure can work fairly well. If you’re interested in looking at more tests like this, I installed all my games on a NAS and my Home Lab NAS, and I talk about that more in another video. The results are actually a little bit different to what I found on this particular NVMe drive, so it might be worth checking that out too.

And I hope you enjoyed this video! If you did, please click the thumbs-up button, and please subscribe to see more videos like this. Thanks for watching!

cropped A picture of me Tristan
About Tristan Perry

Tristan has been interested in computer hardware and software since he was 10 years old. He has built loads of computers over the years, along with installing, modifying and writing software (he's a backend software developer 'by trade').

Tristan also has an academic background in technology (in Math and Computer Science), so he enjoys drilling into the deeper aspects of technology.

Tristan is also an avid PC gamer, with FFX and Rocket League being his favorite games.

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