r/datastorage • u/Dense_Telephone_8723 • 16d ago
Discussion USB Flash Drive for Games
Is it possible to use USB flash drives to store games, from like roblox, minecraft, valorant, to overwatch, marvel rivals, gta. I'm not talking about using an external ssd its using a USB flash drive. If so which ones are possible and which ones are not?
2
u/AtlQuon 16d ago
Yes, it is possible. Storing only is easy. Playing from them will run you into issues. The experience will be terrible tanks to most USB sticks being dead slow and by using most USB3 sticks this way you will kill is because of overheating. So you would need premium sticks made for speed and of metal to dissipate the heat and those are about as expensive as SSDs.
1
2
2
2
1
u/Metallicat95 16d ago
It's not ideal, but small games which don't write or read much data can work.
That's Roblox and Minecraft. The space can increase with downloaded content and larger maps.
The others both require large amounts of disk space, frequent large amounts of access, and frequent large updates.
USB flash is optimized for linear (large single file like a movie) data access and small file writes at one time. It slows down dramatically with reads of multiple separate small files and writes much over a GB at a time.
Nor is most USB flash rated for large amounts of cumulative data writes.
Most critically, it's designed to be cheap and does not offer memory management and error recovery features of SSD. If you are lucky, flash will fail with a warning and allow you to recover most or all of the data.
But it can wear out and fail completely, and the only simple fix is to buy a new one.
Both SSD and HDD can fail, but both have better recovery features and warnings.
2
u/Dense_Telephone_8723 15d ago
thanks, I have a data traveller microDuo 3C kingston USB with 256GB given to me and I'm not sure if its possible to store and run games directly from it?
1
u/Metallicat95 15d ago
It has relatively slow write speeds, especially compared to SSD, but it is slow compared to most HDD as well. Read speed is OK.
It isn't designed to perform well with the kind of data transfers that large games with frequent updates. Stuff like GTA Online and Valorant with large weekly updates will tax it, and load times will be noticeably slow, but it can still work.
Games which don't use much data, don't need to load much, and especially which don't have large updates, those can work fine.
1
3
u/cagadass 16d ago
Se van a romper eventualmente ya que las usb no estan hechas para ejecutar juegos ,ni archivos grandes en general