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[MuonDecay]

I'm doing a bit of traveling and, not having a laptop (with my desktop heavily entrenched and firmly rooted with more wires than I care to count), I figured I would attempt to take DF with me on a thumb drive. The directory is certainly small enough, and I'll have a computer to play it on.

Has anyone actually tried to run the game from a thumb drive, though? I plan to try keeping my game firmly rooted on the drive and playing it directly from there.

I know USB is slower than the hard drive's SATA connection (much as a casual stroll is slower than riding a rocket), but I figure with a game like DF there isn't much need for file-access/file-swap speed. Has anyone tried this? Am I wasting my time?

I'll report results regardless.

(as an aside: why isn't anyone putting eSATA thumb drives on the market? That would be a hell of a neat thing to own)

[Duke 2.0]

 Plays perfectly fine. I really could not note any difference in speen when playing it off the computer and playing it from a flash drive, and now that both flash drive and computer are gone it becomes a bit difficult to test this out.

 But yes, nothing odd will happen. Man, I crammed quite a few things on that flash drive. Firefox portable, a dozen roguelikes, phun...

 

[Will]

Like he said it runs fine. Just make sure it large enough to hold all the data after world creation.

[Mel_Vixen]

It works fine even with USB 1.1 thought the safing of data can be very slow.

[ahrbee]

I get no slowdown at all on mine (2gb stick). Runs great.

[WhitePanther]

I've done this, and the game runs fine. As long as the computer you're using has enough RAM that the game doesn't have to swap, you'll be okay. I think saving takes a little longer than normal, but that's it.

[PTTG??]

Yeah, it works great. Just make sure that it's plugged in. I once had a game running, hibernated my computer, removed the drive, and then un-hibernated it, and the game was still working. Then I tried to save.

But I believe Toady One is working on a solution to that bug.

[MMad]

Yeah, I do this too to bring my fortresses with me to/from work. Works well - I think it runs a *little* slower than from the hdd, but I'm not sure this isn't my imagination.

Be aware that DF constantly reads and writes to your thumb drive though, which may shorten it's life span - flash drives can only be erased and re-written to a limited number of times, for some reason. It may still take years, though, and since they're not very expensive it may be a non-issue. But worth being aware of if you have other sensitive data on the drive.

[peekama]

It works fine untill you start to get a bigger fort.  After a while the drive's read speed isn't able to keep up with the game.  At least from my experience that is.

[Squeegy]

Yeah, it works great. Just make sure that it's plugged in. I once had a game running, hibernated my computer, removed the drive, and then un-hibernated it, and the game was still working. Then I tried to save.

But I believe Toady One is working on a solution to that bug.

Dwarf Fortress does not need any files while running, I think. It stores all the files it needs on RAM.

[commondragon]

Actually, two simple things are constantly updated withing your game:

Your gamelog and your errorlog.

It needs to be tested on if things mess up if you remove your flash drive during the game and one of those updates.  Obviously you cant do it on a desktop/laptop as that would require you to remove your DF directory during the game.

[Draco18s]

You'll eventually wear out the flash memory, as it has a limited number of writes each sector can perform (hundreds of millions), but it likely won't be an issue for a while.  You'll just be wearing it out faster than normal.

[G-Flex]

Hundreds of millions? You're off by a few orders of magnitude there.

Even high-endurance flash cells in solid-state drives (intended as hard drive replacements) only have something like five million write cycles maximum before a sector wears out. Other flash memory doesn't appear to exceed 100,000 or maybe one million writes before failure.

[Keiseth]

I've used a USB 2.0 external hard drive for years and its speed is pretty much ideal. But all that writing to the logs will eat away at the flash drive; portable programs designed for these things are frequently optimized to make as few writes as possible.

Maybe we can persuade Toady to drop a quick init line for enabling/disabling log writes, but the new version won't be out for quite a while anyway...

[wallish]

If you don't want to risk severely limiting the lifespan of your drive you could just cut the folder off the drive, play, then put it back onto the drive when you're done.