Running games off a flash drive

[Aereldor]

My sister wants more storage to install large games like Guild Wars 2 and Sea of Thieves, but she's overseas and doesn't want to spend a lot of money or open up her laptop, which has a single M.2 SSD slot.

 

I've found a bunch of USB 3.0 and 3.1 flash drives that are like $25 for 250gb, with advertised speeds of 120-150 MB/s, which is comparable to an HDD. Would she be able to run these games off them? Or would the actual USB interface prove a bottleneck?

[FakeFBI]

1 minute ago, Aereldor said:

My sister wants more storage to install large games like Guild Wars 2 and Sea of Thieves, but she's overseas and doesn't want to spend a lot of money or open up her laptop, which has a single M.2 SSD slot.

 

I've found a bunch of USB 3.0 and 3.1 flash drives that are like $25 for 250gb, with advertised speeds of 120-150 MB/s, which is comparable to an HDD. Would she be able to run these games off them? Or would the actual USB interface prove a bottleneck?

she would prob have problems, since flash drives are meant for photos or videos and stuff like that, not actual games, i recomend getting a m2 for here

[Applefreak]

13 minutes ago, Aereldor said:

My sister wants more storage to install large games like Guild Wars 2 and Sea of Thieves, but she's overseas and doesn't want to spend a lot of money or open up her laptop, which has a single M.2 SSD slot.

 

I've found a bunch of USB 3.0 and 3.1 flash drives that are like $25 for 250gb, with advertised speeds of 120-150 MB/s, which is comparable to an HDD. Would she be able to run these games off them? Or would the actual USB interface prove a bottleneck?

Honestly, easiest solution is to get an external USB 3 drive. A 2.5 inch external USB 3 SSD is fast enough and will feel like an internal one in terms of speed. Flash drives are great for short periods at a time. If you use them for a certain period of time the get hot and loose throughput as well as interrupting the connection from time to time.

[Biomecanoid]

14 minutes ago, ComputerBuilder said:

she would prob have problems, since flash drives are meant for photos or videos and stuff like that, not actual games, i recomend getting a m2 for here

Flash drives die with constant read-writes

[jaslion]

External hdd or ssd. Usb sticks are not meant for constant access and they pretty much behave like cruddy ssds with a small fast cache and then slow storage for the more expensive ones. 25$ usbs are not going to go at those speeds at all and it will be a mess to play games off of those if at all even possible. Gw2 might work since it's a lot lighter with data to load but sea of thieves for sure will not. That and it will wear them out very very quickly

 

So just get a cheap external 2.5 inch hdd or a actual good and reviewed external ssd to prevent just having a big usb in a 2.5inch enclosure scenario.

[FakeFBI]

5 minutes ago, Applefreak said:

Honestly, easiest solution is to get an external USB 3 drive. A 2.5 inch external USB 3 SSD is fast enough and won't feel like an internal one in terms of speed. Flash drives are great for short periods at a time. If you use them for a certain period of time the get hot and loose throughput as well as interrupting the connection from time to time.

get external hdd or ssd i forgot to add

 

[Biomecanoid]

22 minutes ago, Aereldor said:

My sister wants more storage to install large games like Guild Wars 2 and Sea of Thieves, but she's overseas and doesn't want to spend a lot of money or open up her laptop, which has a single M.2 SSD slot.

 

I've found a bunch of USB 3.0 and 3.1 flash drives that are like $25 for 250gb, with advertised speeds of 120-150 MB/s, which is comparable to an HDD. Would she be able to run these games off them? Or would the actual USB interface prove a bottleneck?

Also changing the laptop's m.2 is very simple to do. Its one of the easiest things you can do to a laptop

[Aereldor]

9 hours ago, Biomecanoid said:

Also changing the laptop's m.2 is very simple to do. Its one of the easiest things you can do to a laptop

I know, I have done this dozens of times, she doesn't want to

[WereCatf]

10 hours ago, Aereldor said:

Or would the actual USB interface prove a bottleneck?

It would *definitely* be a bottleneck. Buy an M.2 SSD and an M.2 -> USB -enclosure. It'll only be somewhat bigger than a typical USB-stick, but will perform leaps and bounds better.