Eve on a USB Flash Drive

Following on from my previous experiment which was fairly complicated and gave only a little boost, I would like to post the results of another experiment - Eve on a USB stick!

If you have a slow hard drive (like me - 7200rpm ATA100 2MB Cache) then jumping can be a slow process.

Jerkiness, stuttering that sort of thing.

For very little outlay if you are on a budget, you can decrease the load times and gain a noticeable performance increase.

For the purposes of this experiment I bought a 4GB USB drive. This is the exact one here: Ebuyer product 123442 at just over £10GBP.

Technical specs on USB 2.0 speed give max speed of 480Mb/s.
This drive was tested at approx read speed of : 15Mb/s so the drive isn't particularly quick, it's certainly not being bottlenecked by USB 2.0 speeds. In fact, it appears to be a USB 2.0 Full Speed device (equivilant to USB 1.1 standard) rather than a true USB 2.0 High Speed device, which would be optimal and worthwhile checking out.

Regardless, at that price and with experiencing quicker load times, Full Speed is an interesting alternative. If you can find an affordable High Speed 3Gb+ drive, try it out! One drive is here but well outside my price range. At £50GBP I may be as well get a faster hard drive, however your situation may differ in which case, go for it as access speed will be 480Mps!

To make this work for you, just copy your Eve folder within your ?:\Program Files\CCP directory to your new USB drive.

Then adjust the shortcut icon accordingly, i.e. Change drive letters and locations.

Good luck and have fun!