This is not a bandwidth issue, because none of the USB drives even come close to saturating 3.0 connection.
These 3.2 or 3.0 usb sticks are nothing more than marketing gimmick, because they dont reach those speeds at all. Its like connecting your old HDD to Sata2 or Sata3, it doesnt matter because both of them are way above what HDD can achieve.
If its working for your friend it means his USB stick has better memory chips, 3.2/3.0 bus does not matter at all.
Load times are maybe 6 sec longer on this HDD, compared to on my build in SSD. It still plays completely without stuttering or freezes, so a good purchase.
A SSD is also much safer then a HDD. HDD are more prone to movement and cause to destroy your disk/stored stuff if the needle moves. You donāt have such problems with a SSD
I would just get a portable SSD if thats your aim.
In all honesty i play from two devices and i just have it installed on two to be fair, just 10 minutes worth of work to get all the add ons matching etc then its done
USB3.1 is way faster than SATA in transfer speeds, so I mentioned NVME as thatās built to be faster than a 2.5 inch SSD that was made to be compatible with SATA in the first place. Of course, you need a motherboard with USB3.1 Gen 2 to get the extra bandwidth. But connecting to that will definitely outperform a SATA-III connection.
How it goes is:
SATA-III - 750MB/s
USB3.0 - 625MB/s (So yes best to stick to motherboard and SATA-III 2.5inch SSD or 3.5inch HDD in this case)
USB3.1 Gen 1 - 625MB/s (So again not recommendedā¦)
USB3.2 Gen 2 - 1250MB/s which a SATA-III SSD is not going to reach max speed due to itās controller on the PCB. So a PCIE3.0 NVME drive is going to offer the speed increase there.
And thatās the thing, itās the cheaper NVMEās here, the 4.0 drives are a wasteā¦ Well, until they get USB4.0 spec sorted out then I can see that being an option.
And of course itās not having anything else on the USB3.1 Gen 2 USB Root Hub as well which can affect the speed as well, but if properly managed, itās a viable option over other external drives if the fastest speed you want.
Best thing is that while USB drives are cheap, theyāre also not made to every day all the time access and have terrible throughput after their cache has been used up. For the fastest external way, would still recommend a nvme 3.0 drive inside a usb3.2 Gen 2 enclosure and for mac users that or Thunderbolt 3.
External hard drives only come out at 85MB/s for USB3.0 and worse at 22MB/s in USB2.0.
Again, itās having a Gen 2 port, not all motherboards have them. The other thing is that they are red like Gen 1 ports so itās check, get right cable and so on.