CPU and USB 3.0 Flash Drive Gaming?

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person135

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Apr 2, 2013
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I'm planning on running some offline fps games (think bioshock infinite) on a USB 3.0 flash drive since my SSD is running out of space. I heard that USB is very taxing for CPU, so would this be bad for my CPU/laptop in general? Thanks!
 
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twelve25

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is it a fast flash drive? Many are slow, even if USB 3.0. I have a friend that runs all his games off an external USB 3.0 HDD, though, so it should work fine. It will use some CPU, but so does gamign and everything else. The CPU was designed to do work, don't worry about making it. The only thing that might happen is shorter battery life.

And Windows tracks disk IDs and gives them the same letter each time. And if the rare case happens where this is not true, you can change it with disk management.
 
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williamwu2k12

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Mar 25, 2013
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can you explain? i dont understand why you get screwed
 
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aonor

aonor

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It should be fine but I recommend you getting an external USB 3.0 hard drive to keep what you don't use on it instead so your games would load faster by using your SSD.
 
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DarkSable

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Because when the game installs itself, it's going to be telling windows to point to, say, the D: drive. If it suddenly isn't there, because it was assigned to the G: drive, then the game won't work.

The only programs that you can run from a flash drive that work are portable applications, and games are far too large to be made portable.

 
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twelve25

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There is nothing inherently different in the way that Windows handles a removable drive vs a non-removable drive (other than write caching). You can install regular apps on a flash drive, external hard drive, network drive, internal drive, ram drive, whatever. They will continue to work on the computer that installed them. The issue is portable apps, i.e., running on any computer you connect the drive to. That requires special applications that do not use the registry.

Drive letters don't change randomly, unless you assign that letter to another drive. And if it happens, you can change the drive letter back in 30 secs.

 
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DarkSable

DarkSable

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If you have more than one flash drive / external drive / external CD reader or whatnot, the drive letters will change, and it can cause a fair bit of hassle. Yes, you can change it back, but unless you remember that that's what you have to do, it won't make a difference.
 
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twelve25

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I have multiple flash drives and external drives and scripts using them by drive letter. Never had a problem. They don't change unless you manually assign that drive letter to another drive. At least not with Win Vista and 7.

Look under "HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\MountedDevices" in the registry. You will see a list of devices starting with "DosDevices". Those are the drive letters and then the key is a large combination of the drive signature and the device description. The computer recognizes the device if it has been mounted and uses the letter assigned by the registry key.

 
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williamwu2k12

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Ahh I see. Okay thanks.

To OP, I have run StarCraft II from a flash drive before, it went okay. I wouldn't recommend using a flash drive often, though. I've heard it really messes with your flash drive and you only get a limited number of rewrites (which is why using flash drive as RAM is even more terrible).
 
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person135

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I was thinking the Patriot Supersonic Rage XT, or maybe even the Supersonic Magnum. The former supposedly has 50mb/s write speed while the latter can go up to 120mb/s. Is that fast enough?
 
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