Can I download the game from the battlenet downloader to a flash drive and will it run?
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Please follow your dreams and get back to us.
When you find out some dreams just don’t happen, we won’t be surprised.
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You can download it to a flash drive and it will run, but it will not run at a speed that you will enjoy playing it.
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Thank you for the info.
That’s nonsense. Flash drives have better access times than hdds. Back in the days when I played D3 I played it from a flash drive.
You can install the game to regular hdd and move the folder to the flash drive, or directly install to the flash (but it will take much more time).
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I doubt they have better IO performance.
(Flash != SSD)
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Flash is quicker than mechanical hard disk drives (HDDs).
(HDD != SSD)
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So tried this and had success. I ran it on a USB 2 and a USB 3 drive. The usb 2 drive had longer load times than my SSD, and longer that my WD black platter drive. It was a decently smooth experience once loaded up though.
The 3.0 was much master than platter and SSD but slower than m.2.
I had some driver issues though when I moved to a different machine. So if your goal is to move this from machine to machine you could have some issues but overall this was a success.
Splurge on a 3.0 drive if you choose to do this.
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My terminology:
- Flash drive is USB stick
- SSD uses SAS/SATA interface
Can one run D3 from USB stick? Probably not
Can one run D3 from SSD? Sure. It is my recommended method
You can run any Blizzard game from USB, not just D3.
Let me clarify,
Yes it works fine from a USB flash drive 2.0 and 3.0 but a 3.0 worked just as well as an SSD running at 6 Gb/s (Kingston 500) but not as well as an M.2 (970 evo).
I stand corrected. 
The problem with using a flash drive, even a USB 3.x drive, is that after a few patch cycles data and ToC within the CASC filesystem that the game uses gets fragmented enough that it will slow down very noticeably. The only remedy for this is a format of the flash drive followed by a reinstall of the game. The formatting step is required to reset the drive’s ToC, while the reinstallation of the game is required to get a contiguous data set from the game’s files. It’s the whole index system that has CASC all whacked out.
The reinstall is eventually needed for internal drives as well, just further down the line. USB flash drives suffer from I/O limitations much sooner due to CASC fragmentation from patches.
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All the pros and cons aside, yes, you can run Blizzard games from whatever drive you want.
To do that, just move it to the USB drive. The launcher on the other hand resides on the PC playing the game. Just point the launcher at whatever drive has the game files. Remember to patch the game as well before playing. That does involve pointing the launcher at those files and telling it to update unless you have it set up to auto update the correct location.
The only thing you might have a bit of an issue with is the D3prefs.txt that handles your game settings for graphics and a few other things. If you have any custom settings, then you may want to write those down or keep a backup copy of the file. That is located in your Documents, not program files.
This was where the graphics driver issues were.
I was able to test launcher, it works fine on the usb as well. You can mount everything in one location. The problem is that if the cards are different (nvidia vs Radeon) you may have to update the file for the right setting if you’re playing on dual monitors.
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This shouldn’t be an issue after the initial setup on each computer since the D3Prefs.txt is saved in C:\Users\AccountName\Documents\Diablo III\ and not on the USB drive. That means the same installation can be moved between computers just fine.