Can I play FFXI from a flash drive?

[liami]

You can set your ipod to be read as a data drive through iTunes, rather than a MP3 player, just make sure you've got enough space free and install it to that?

[Shadowrunner]

More worried about the speed issue than anything else. lol. Is it going to be silly crazy or am I good gravy?

[Norellicus]

Speed is at least as fast as your average HDD, so you'd be fine.

But something people should be aware of is that EPROM (the type of memory used in your average USB flash drive) has a fixed number of read/write cycles; once they're gone, the drive is kaput. With the game constantly having to load texture information and such, you're very likely to burn out your drive much sooner than you ever would a platter-based HDD.

[Zosi]

Thanks to wear-leveling and better production tech, duty cycles on modern flash drives actually exceed most of the rest of the components in your iPod, even under pretty decent use. Well, one could argue that that's due to the shitty lifespan of the other parts, but still, you have nothing to worry about, they last as long or longer than consumer SATA hard drives.

Edit: Also, flash memory has limited writes, not reads. Can load textures 24/7 for the next decade if the physical drive holds up that long, and write (on average) roughly 100,000 times the capacity of the drive. You're not going to wear it out playing FFXI.

[jmc]

ok, so im quite interested in playing ffxi off a portable hard drive.

Anyone have any guides to actually pulling it off?

I tried once before to install the game directly to a portable hard drive, and copy over the registration files....then installed the registration files to the other PC, but when I goto launch the game I got a error of something almost like "Cannot not write to destination folder"

So any advice/help would be nice.

[Norellicus]

Thanks to wear-leveling and better production tech, duty cycles on modern flash drives actually exceed most of the rest of the components in your iPod, even under pretty decent use. Well, one could argue that that's due to the shitty lifespan of the other parts, but still, you have nothing to worry about, they last as long or longer than consumer SATA hard drives.

Edit: Also, flash memory has limited writes, not reads. Can load textures 24/7 for the next decade if the physical drive holds up that long, and write (on average) roughly 100,000 times the capacity of the drive. You're not going to wear it out playing FFXI.

Macro pages, chat and effect filters, and the logs are all written back on a regular basis. Even sitting idle in whitegate you're spending write cycles due to chat spam.

I haven't kept up on the tech with more recent drives so I have no bearing on the lifespan, I just know it wasn't that long ago that it was a primary concern with doing major application/OS launching from a flash drive.

[Zosi]

Macro pages, chat and effect filters, and the logs are all written back on a regular basis. Even sitting idle in whitegate you're spending write cycles due to chat spam.

Macros are only written when you change sets or zone, not even when you edit them. Chat/effect filters are written when you change them or zone. Logs are written constantly, but write-caching lowers the number of actual write-erase cycles considerably. Assuming, for the sake of argument, that you're burning one erase-write cycle per second with normal wear-leveling, you're looking at somewhere in the thousands of years to burn out a 30gb iPod's flash. Running FFXI just is not going to burn out a flash drive in any reasonable time. I know you want to think that flash just dies so fast under actual use, but that just hasn't been true for a few years. You really are behind the curve.

[Pikarya]

wat curve

[Norellicus]

I'm not going to have a pissing contest over this, but it seems like you're making a lot of assumptions as to how nicely SE's bastard child of a x86 based application plays with the windows API; unfortunately I don't have a way to actually refute your information, so if you're correct then I agree, it'll be fine. It's just something that bears mentioning for an app that wasn't designed in any way shape or form to be used in a 'lightweight' function like most flash drive compatible applications have specs for.

[fliprock]

sorry to bump this, was directed from my original thread. i have no computer skills at all and have an ipod which has enough space to store all of ffxi but not sure about any of the extra stuff.

do i just copy the folder and windower folder into ipod and that should be it? i'm guessing not but any info would be much appreciated.

thanks