Running Steam Games on USB 3.0 Thumb Drive

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teletran8

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Might be a n00b question but would getting say a 32GB USB 3.0 Drive and installing a couple games or whatnot and plugging into the USB 3.0 on your motherboard be faster at loading maps like in TF2/CSS than a traditional 7200 RPM Hard Drive when it comes to Steam Games?

USB 3.0: Released in November 2008.
Specified with a maximum transmission speed of up to 5 Gbit/s, which is 10 times faster than USB2.0 (480 Mbit/s), although this speed is typically only achieved using powerful professional grade or developmental equipment.

Just wondering...
 
that would depends on the speed of your USB drive and internal storage.
 
I saw this 32GB says 120MB sec Read Speeds, and because it doesn't have the mechanical actuator it could be an alternative to getting an SSD, except SSD seem to be like 64 GB for around a 100 dollars or something. Anyone tried this yet with USB 3.0? I would like to know if it would work, but I imagine it should work about as fast as first gen SSD's because it would run @ 120MB/sec. right? A real SATA 3 SSD is probly alot better / faster @ 300-400 MB reads?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ...yMark=False&IsFeedbackTab=true#scrollFullInfo
 
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Only problem I see is that most USB flash drives I've seen don't handle multiple concurrent I/O requests very well, much like early cheap SSDs didn't. This is basically what makes them different from SSDs, which have a controller and multiple parallel flash channels.

Worth a try given the price and relative speed of USB drives now, but I honestly wouldn't expect any significant performance gain over modern 7200 rpm hard drives, could well even be slower.
 
dustNbone said:
Only problem I see is that most USB flash drives I've seen don't handle multiple concurrent I/O requests very well, much like early cheap SSDs didn't. This is basically what makes them different from SSDs, which have a controller and multiple parallel flash channels.

Worth a try given the price and relative speed of USB drives now, but I honestly wouldn't expect any significant performance gain over modern 7200 rpm hard drives, could well even be slower.
Click to expand...

I like how you state multiple concurrent IO requests, I do think I won't try it. Just get a 64GB Sata 3 SSD for around a 100.00 and get better performance per dollar anyhow. Thx for the responses guys.
 
Yeah, the only way to get a fast USB thumb drive would be to put SSD hardware in it (good controller, RAM, 4 or more channels), and that would cost more than an SSD.
 
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