Playing WoW off a USB drive?

[Bimbolo-hellscream]

@Brightmaw-argent-dawn

It is most likely not a “USB issue”, but more of a “3.0 issue”, since I discovered my friend has a expensive 3.2 USB that he uses for having WoW installed on it. Which works.

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.

[Brightmaw-argent-dawn]

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.

[Tunso-tarren-mill]

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 don’t have such problems with a SSD

[Retributor-draenor (Retributor)]

i had toshiba for video files. it still works after 10 years . good stuff

[anon50227105]

@Retributor-draenor

i had toshiba for video files. it still works after 10 years . good stuff

Rip poor old toshiba .i used to had their laptop .it worked for 10 years before dying on me last year

[Retributor-draenor (Retributor)]

my still works. i used wrong verb form. have * xd

[anon50227105]

Good on u then .your device has outlived the company itself

[Bozo-dragonfang]

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

[Synrelia-kazzak]

@Brightmaw-argent-dawn

Does anyone have any experience with how WoW plays on a portable USB drive?

Playing like that since over a year. 500gb ssd sometimes need to redownload battle net due to updates failing if not but that is about it. works.

[Hoisho-argent-dawn (Hoisho)]

USB3.1 is way faster than SATA in transfer speeds, so I mentioned NVME as that’s 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 recommended…)

USB3.2 Gen 2 - 1250MB/s which a SATA-III SSD is not going to reach max speed due to it’s controller on the PCB. So a PCIE3.0 NVME drive is going to offer the speed increase there.

And that’s the thing, it’s the cheaper NVME’s here, the 4.0 drives are a waste… Well, until they get USB4.0 spec sorted out then I can see that being an option.

And of course it’s 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, it’s a viable option over other external drives if the fastest speed you want.

Best thing is that while USB drives are cheap, they’re 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, it’s having a Gen 2 port, not all motherboards have them. The other thing is that they are red like Gen 1 ports so it’s check, get right cable and so on.