Putting WOW on a usb key?

[Starbuck_Jones]

Flash thumb drives have fairly crappy write times, but the reads from a USB key are hella fast. Has anyone tried putting wow on a usb key and running it from there? If so, what were your results.

[valkry]

I went to Melbourne for a holiday and didn't want ot have to redo all my mods, downloading etc, so I copy pasted my wow folder from my hard drive onto my external hard drive, took it over, plugged it into the computer there, double clicked the wow launcher and started playing like nothing had changed.

My wow folder is like 3gb too so I can't fit it onto a USB stick (mine is only 1gb), but the external had drive is connected by usb.

[Starbuck_Jones]

External usb drive like that is still a standard SATA or PATA HDD with spinup and seek time where a usb key should have basicaly nil on the read requests. Im wondering how that will impact load times for WoW. Sata has a (paper) throughput of 300Mbps and usb 2.0 should have one of 480Mbps. But a sata drive (non solid state) has seek and spin times where the usb key should not. This is all going to be reads, not writes.

[Sam DeathWalker]

I did it like 5 months ago with a 16g flash drive. It was joke, don't waste your money. It looked good to me on paper also but compleatly usless. I bought 6 and returned 5 of them.

[Shaitan256]

That's pretty interesting. But I couldn't find anything aboutreading speed of USB (in German) even wikipedia has only this I found everywhere:
480MBit/s USB2.0 (60MB/s reading)
1,5 Gbut/s SATA
3,0 Gbit/s SATAII/eSATAII (I'm currently Running eSATAII, Windows and everything had no Issues)

Could someone give me a site with "reading speed" comparison or confirm that it's faster? Would also cost less Power, I would get me 3x 32GB sticks if it works xD

Just found something that might help me to Understand more ?!
SataII
RPM 7.200 ~ 60 MB/s reading
RPM 10.000 ~75MB/s reading
RPM 15.000 ~80MB/s reading (I guess that's a bit low for 5.000 RPM more than 10.000?)

[glo]

That's pretty interesting. But I couldn't find anything aboutreading speed of USB (in German) even wikipedia has only this I found everywhere:
480MBit/s USB2.0 (60MB/s reading)
1,5 Gbut/s SATA
3,0 Gbit/s SATAII/eSATAII (I'm currently Running eSATAII, Windows and everything had no Issues)

Could someone give me a site with "reading speed" comparison or confirm that it's faster? Would also cost less Power, I would get me 3x 32GB sticks if it works xD

Just found something that might help me to Understand more ?!
SataII
RPM 7.200 ~ 60 MB/s reading
RPM 10.000 ~75MB/s reading
RPM 15.000 ~80MB/s reading (I guess that's a bit low for 5.000 RPM more than 10.000?)Your post is accurate which shows the fastest usb drives are about the same as the slowest of modern HDs.

[OogaJiggaWooga]

I run one of my slaves from my WD 60GB usb drive. It's a small form factor hard drive and not a usb key, but I have had no problems whatsoever running WoW from this (I also took it in to Uni a few times to make the tedium a little more bearable).

[glo]

I run one of my slaves from my WD 60GB usb drive. It's a small form factor hard drive and not a usb key, but I have had no problems whatsoever running WoW from this (I also took it in to Uni a few times to make the tedium a little more bearable).An external usb HD is fine of course.

[Vmpwraith]

In china you can buy a wow product on a USb. I havent used it, actually they sell it in the 7eleven's here. I'm not usre what it is, the whole game for transport or so you can play in computer / internet cafes and not leave data on the computers eg logins etc. Next time I see one I'll ask a few more questions and take some photos. From memory it was 180RMB ish about $25US.

[Turenn]

I did that, move my folder to a 16gb flash drive and took it to a friends house, mind you I was only playing one toon, but it worked like a charm. I still use it, have been since the start of WotLK.

[magwo]

My experience with this was poor performance.

[Skuggomann]

If you want fast and stable reading, maby you shud look into Solid State discs (SSD)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive

you can get a PCI-e expansion slot for them (if i remember correctly), not sure if it supports RAID but if it does XD lolz

[Hachoo]

Yeah sorry, USB2 speed might be 480Mb/s, but the speed of the sticks themselves is way lower than that. Performance on a regular USB stick is going to be horrible as the actual read/write speed will be slow as hell.

[-silencer-]

If you want fast and stable reading, maby you shud look into Solid State discs (SSD)
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_drive

you can get a PCI-e expansion slot for them (if i remember correctly), not sure if it supports RAID but if it does XD lolz
Huh? SSDs use the same SATA connector as a standard magnetic hard drive - no need to use expansion slots, and yes they can be in a RAID array.

[Pocalypse]

I have a 32gb Corsair USB stick, I always keep a current copy of wow on it and transfer it over to whichever computer I'm using at the time.

I've never tried to play straight off it though, as the stick itself is pretty slow.

It's still a great way to carry a copy with you.

[Starbuck_Jones]

Like all computer hardware, USB keys are not made the same see the following link

http://www.testfreaks.com/blog/review/usb-flash-memory/usb-flash-drive-comparison-21-tested-and-compared/

If you look at the second to bottom chart where they have the read throughput, some keys are abysmal and are less than a 3rd the transfer rate of a stat 2 drive, but the quality ones are pushing the theoretical limits of USB2.0 at 462Mbps. Read is really all that should matter for WOW, you don't write to the files while playing. Being a USB drive you also remove all the seek time that traditional hdds add to the equation as well increasing performance.

The comments of it sucks to its fine seem to confirm this as well.

A neat solution would be something like a 5.25 ram drive and raid 0 it. But that is an expensive solution.

[moosejaw]

Thanks for the link Starbuck. I imagine that if a drive passes the Vista ready boost test that it would be good to go for playing Wow on. Playable for one instance only to get you by if you were not at home and wanted to get your fix in. hehe

[Sam DeathWalker]

I used a 16G ozc rally 2.

Of course my application was for 5 wow's not one.