OS Neutral external hdd vs external flash drive (usb3)

[ventuss]

I know I can run games on a usb3 (80-100mb/s read write) drive and still have a nice experience. Now what if I have a 64GB usb3 drive that matches that speed? Is the experience be the same?

 

[Confusius]

I know I can run games on a usb3 (80-100mb/s read write) drive and still have a nice experience. Now what if I have a 64GB usb3 drive that matches that speed? Is the experience be the same?

You'll have longer loading times with any external USB3 peripheral. Other than that, performance shouldn't be affected.

 

[Icaras]

You'll have longer loading times with any external USB3 peripheral.

Not if your internal is a slow moving HDD vs an SSD connected via USB 3, then you'll definitely get faster speeds with the external drive. That's my current setup except I'm using an external Thunderbolt SSD. My Windows partition is installed on my 1TB HDD (Fusion Drive).

OP, at one point I was interested in the same thing. That is, installing and running games off a USB 3 flash drive but then I read somewhere that writes are much more limited on a flash drive compared to an HDD or an SSD, resulting in a much more reduced life span. Though I'm still interested in this. If flash drive life span has improved drastically, I wonder if this could definitely be an alternative to game storage.