Flash Drive vs. Hard Drive

[TheSco]

Has anyone played EQ2 off a Flash Drive?  Any speed increases on loading?  32GB enough or go for the 64GB?  Slow downs? Corrupt data?

[asmiro]

<p>i<span style="font-size: small;font-family: Times New Roman;">t is my understanding that the solid state drive (SSD) technology, while good for some specific computer uses (ie, Kiosk, etc where there are limited writes to the hard drive), is not really good for people who use the computer alot for gaming. most of the time, you are not changing too many files on the computer, but MMO's are more prone to patches, etc. that write new stuff to the drive</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;font-family: Times New Roman;">SSD's are not very "write-friendly" in that they have a limited write capacity. once ou reach this, you will start to see file copy errors, etc. this is where a regular hard drive has them beat.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;font-family: Times New Roman;">SSD's ARE usually much faster at reading data off of them than regular hard drives (depends on the mfg, and model it seems), so your comp boot times can be only litterally 5 seconds or less (after the bios does its thing) to load fully into a windows desktop (provided you dont have alot of junk running in the background, that takes longer to load), and, even though it may not load EQ2 from the desktop very fast, it SHOULD zone you nearly instantaneously when you hit a zoneline. the time it takes to zone would then depend more on your internet connection speed, and less on the hard drive.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;font-family: Times New Roman;">now, if you are talking about usb flash drives (usb keys, usb thumb-drives as they are commonly called), that is a different story entirely. they play by a whole different set of rules. it would still take about the same time as a regular drive to load the game and zone from one zone to another. but they also suffer from the same limited write capactiy that SSD's do, although possibly to a lesser extent.</span></p><p><span style="font-size: small;font-family: Times New Roman;">right now, i do not think EQ2 takes up quite 32 GB of data space, so i would get either one of those or a 64 GB one, and put your eq2 folder on it. make sure you change where your desktop shortcuts for the EQ2 launcher point to if you do this, and see for yourself just what kind of performance you can get.</span></p>

[Wingrider01]

<cite>TheScowl wrote:</cite><blockquote>Has anyone played EQ2 off a Flash Drive?  Any speed increases on loading?  32GB enough or go for the 64GB?  Slow downs? Corrupt data?</blockquote>It is playable, just expect a great slowdown - USB 2.0 maximum transfer rate is only 480Mb/s if it is the only device on the chain, it can drop to 1.5Mb/s or 12Mb/s depending on what else is sharing the chain