Eh, not necessarily.
The one I got was a Sandisk Ultra Flair 128gb, it looks like it’s currently going for aboooooooooout…$19? On Amazon.
I was thinking more along the lines of:
These kinds of devices are pretty rare, as USB flash drives are a very price-sensitive market.
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The type of flash drive you reference here is just your run of the mill USB stick without a built in controller (the host controls the NAND via the device’s ToC). The “they do cost” refers to SSD thumb drives. Those only come in the USB-C/Thunderbolt connection variety, as that connection utilizes PCIe lanes for the connection and does not go through the typical USB controller chip. As a result, they have more hardware on the thumb drive and are rather spendy as they have a built in controller (they are SSDs after all, just in a thumb drive or small drive format, usually a thin square or rectangle).
Edit: The above post also makes a distinction, which I had forgotten about, which is drives that utilize UASP (USB Attached SCSI Protocol). This is ironically found more often on external drive docks than on USB thumb drives.
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Ooo, sounds fancy!
But yeah, what I’m saying is that even a $19 standard run of the mill USB stick will run the game leagues better than running it off a mechanical drive. So if someone is leery of getting a real SSD due to the way that it would require installation and potentially cloning their existing drive and a lot of techy stuff, it’s still a lot better to run the game off a cheapy USB drive than a mechanical drive. If they’re not intimidated by the thought, though, it’s definitely the inferior option compared to a real SSD (or even a fancier USB drive).
It’s a workaround that people came up with in…early Legion-ish? The code for WoW is such a hodgepodge of fifteen years of layers of nonsense, the seek times from a HDD just absolutely slaughter the game.
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That works, and I understand USB drives are a less intimidating solution. 
I have a friend who uses that solution for her vacations.
I need to do something similar this winter. This may be a good excuse to buy a fancier USB stick. <.<
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Fancier USB stick ?
One with a mustache , top hat and cane clearly.
I’ll let myself out 
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Nah, I don’t think I want to play WoW from a record. ^~
World of Warcraft, Hipster Edition?
Edit - Maybe that’s what they should’ve called Classic.
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As I stated earlier, the 15" HP Omen has a mechanical hard drive to save on manufacturing costs, it is not an integrated digital hard drive. It also has a 16g SSD as a recovery drive.
I have been talking with a friend of mine that does tech support and they have said that I might be able to just replace the 16g SSD with a larger SSD and just save the 16g recovery disk in a SSD M.2 enclosure. No clue how well that will work but she assures me it should work fine.
Oh yech, that’s gross. Yeah, in that case, if one doesn’t super want to pry apart their laptop to replace the recovery drive, I would definitely recommend a high speed 100 gig and up USB for most people. I’ve taken apart a laptop before to solder some power connections with a loose plug and it was not fun times, there’s usually a million layers that have to come apart in a specific order as opposed to with a PC where you just unscrew and take off the side.
But if you’re wanting to have that bad boy cracked open, that’s probably the better option!
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Who are you and when were you abducted by the aliens?
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