Installing games onto a Flash Drive -- faster loading times?

[WhipperSnapper]

If I installed a game like Unreal Tournament 2004 onto a USB flash drive, would maps load up faster? Would I enjoy better overall performance and not have to wait for maps to load? Now that larger flash drives are becoming less and less expensive, I have been wondering about it.

 

[Lonyo]

Depends.

http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.aspx?i=3531&p=30

This illustrates it best I'd say.
On the one hand you have a game situation where lots of random reads made SSDs better, and therefore a flash drive might perform better than a regular harddrive, but in the second you have an example where there is little difference, and the poor transfer speeds of a flash drive would probably result in worse performance.

Basically in theory a USB flash drive wouldn't be terrible if it wasn't on current USB, which is pretty damned slow (30MB/s maybe). The only place where it could beat a regular harddrive is if the situation had a lot of random access, but even so the Flash drive might not be great because it probably wouldn't be optimised for doing that sort of thing, and it's not going to have the sort of controller an SSD does.

The only way to tell really would be to test it yourself, but I would be surprised if you saw any improvement at all, and most of the time it would probably perform worse.
One thing you could do is use junction points to spread the data so that some is on the flash drive and some on a regular harddrive, and that might work to improve performance in a few situations.

 

[MStele]

While things will load faster, gaming performance in general won't improve at all because most games load everything into memory in order to minimize drive access during play. There are some cases where a game would benefit from a flash drive, such as FSX because it has to continuously load scenery textures from the disc, but most games aren't like this, which is in fact why you way for your levels to load prior to playing. Putting UT2004 on a USB flash drive won't have any benefit other than to save you a little time during map loading.

 

[mmntech]

While things will load faster, gaming performance in general won't improve at all because most games load everything into memory in order to minimize drive access during play. There are some cases where a game would benefit from a flash drive, such as FSX because it has to continuously load scenery textures from the disc, but most games aren't like this, which is in fact why you way for your levels to load prior to playing. Putting UT2004 on a USB flash drive won't have any benefit other than to save you a little time during map loading.

In the case of FSX, you'd beenfit far more from a SATA based SSD than a USB based flash drive. Transfer rates usually aren't great on those things.

 

[GullyFoyle]

In my experience, USB flash drives are slower than internal hard drives, especially if you write anything.
The fastest of the newer, larger flash drives are in general slower than the fastest of the older, smaller flash drives.

 

[HeXploiT]

Just do a drive speed test. Your HD vs the jump drive you want to use.
Any number of apps like everest have a drive benchmark.

 

[metalwatch]

If you ever encounter a problem with your usb where it stops working, you should check out the article on recovering usb drives I posted on this thread. Should come in handy for anyone who has had a dead drive and couldnt format it or get it working ever again. Hey, at least it might save you from needing to buy a new one so soon :awe: