Corsair Blog

Before I started overclocking I used to game every day, but eventually I started dedicating all of my hardware and time to extreme overclocking. With the launch of Battlefield 3 and our Vengeance gaming keyboards and mice I recently started to game again. I even started playing Counter Strike and a few other games too. During this gaming resurgance I again ran into an issue that always caused me trouble in the past. I am always changing PCs, reformatting, or changing hardware due to my extreme overclocking addiction. Because of this, I found that I rarely feel like re-installing my games so I can play them. In ordert to solve this issue I now install my games to a 64GB Flash Voyager GT USB 3.0 drive. With read speeds of 135MB/s and write speeds of 83MB/s it is more than fast enough to handle games.

As I said before, the games I have been playing most recently have been Battlfield 3 and Counter Strike. Here is how I setup my Voyager GT drive with both Steam and Origin to play on almost any PC over USB 3.0.

I started off by formatting the drive to NTFS to ensure it would handle any large game files.

I continued by installing Origin to the Voyager GT drive.

With Origin installed I went into the settings.

I changed the game install directory to use the Voyager GT drive. After that I let Battlefield 3 download and install.

You can now take this to any PC and launch the copy of Origin installed from your thumb drive. On the new PC just change the installed game directory again, and you are almost ready to play. You may run into an issue where it says you are missing a .dll — in that case, just download the Visual C++ package from Microsoft. Finally, install the Battlefield 3 plugin for your browser, and you are ready to game!

Steam unfortunately will not let you install to a removable drive. However there is a very easy way to get around this. Install Steam onto your PC and then install any of your games. You can then copy your Steam folder from C:\Program Files(x86) over to your thumb drive. After that just launch Steam from the thumb drive and you are ready to enjoy your games!

Load times may be slightly slower than an SSD but it's still faster than using a traditional rotating hard drive. I've had absolutely zero issues with lag running with this drive over USB 3.0. This process has made it really easy for me to plug into any PC and get in the game quickly no matter what PC I am on. Try it and enjoy it for yourself!