MBA gaming off a flash drive.

[MrXiro]

I have a base MBA. It only has 64gb and about 40gb left. Wondering if it is possible to game off of a flash drive and just keep a 32gb flash drive with me in case I want to game and just plug it in so I can save some SSD space.

Would that work?

 

[merrickdrfc]

Performance would be terrible I would imagine as you'd have to be using USB 2 speeds, I've never tried it, but I'd imagine it might be possible on the new MBA's with thunderbolt in the future.

 

[FX4568]

I tried to open Office with USB 2 speeds, it was horrible. I had to let it bounce couple times (around 50) and it finally opened.

 

[jdechko]

It should work, but I think it really depends on the game. Some games require a lot of data to be transferred so levels might take longer to load.

 

[cleric]

You also have to understand there is different quality of USB sticks, some controllers are faster than others. Anywhere from 1MB/s - 30MB/s thats a significant difference.

 

[Young Spade]

The actual process of doing it is possible; people load things onto USB sticks all of the time (programs and whatnot, not just files). The problem is, as many have stated here, is the speed you're going to get.

The flash storage in SSDs is different in that the read/write speeds are fast. Very fast. I used to wonder (when they first came out and I didn't know anything about them) why people couldn't just throw some 32gb micro sd cards in there and have the same result.

You could store the game's files and whatnot on there, then copy/move them to the computer if you want to do that, however I doubt you'd be able to game from that drive.

Now you "might" be able to do it with a thunderbolt port and a supported drive as the speeds might be a lot faster with that. External SSD drive to thunderbolt maybe?