Lately I've been playing games on my computer and since my HDD has insufficient space for large amount of bytes I've been storing my games in a removable device (flashdrive). So Is the execution of programs in a hardisk much faster than a removable disk? my theory that it would since its connected to a USB hub and it would still take some time to receive data from a removable disk? What do you think?

Advance thnks for the reps

I would think that the flash drive is still faster because of fragmentation on the HDD.

That would make sense, since HDD have larger space than a Flashdrive that is more prone ro fragmentation.

It actually really depends on a variety of factors. Solid state memory will generally have faster read/write speeds than an HDD, but it also has to do with how the drive interfaces with your computer. In all likelihood your HDD will still be faster than a flash drive because the flash drive is going to be bottlenecked by having to transfer through the USB port. This is especially true if you're using a hub, since it's just another stage to pass through.

At least in the case of USB 2.0, using that speed boost system could actually slow your computer down rather than speed it up just because of the relatively slow transfer speeds. This may no longer be true of USB 3.0 however, but I'm not sure.

but fragmentation still has some effect to the execution speed.

>>4 It's still true of USB 3.0. SATA also recently upgraded and is beyond 3.0 speeds (although a lot closer than before)

It is important to note that most of the game's 'execution' occurs in memory on your physical computer, so the only reason any given drive will be faster is if it can transfer data to memory faster. Being able to write faster doesn't make much of a difference. If you are saving or loading, then it would have to write to the stick, and I suppose it would write faster, but it still has to transfer that data from memory to be written to the stick, and that takes way longer through USB than SATA.

Basically, this means loading and saving will definitely be longer, but not much else I believe. The flash drive is not faster, but it's not that much slower when playing games overall.