With the 5gb or so storage requirement I was wondering if it is possible to launch and play the game from a USB drive? It would be an easy way to play at work if this is the case. Does anyone have experience with this?
And when your USB drive dies?
I don’t have experience but someone recently said they boot it up from a USB
I don’t have any problems running classic WoW from my external HDD but it is USB 3.0. I haven’t raided in this configuration yet though so we’ll see how it handles.
I need a job that let’s me play at work. Damn government job and their secure computers. (at least I have my phone though)
I used to play in college during Vanilla/TBC on a USB and bad lab PCs. Should be fine.
You can, the computer you are playing on must have proper drivers though. Also run game as admin.
I’ll buy another one?
You can definitely play from a usb connected drive. I have an external hard drive that I have wow on and it plays just fine. You’ll likely want to start from the .exe file rather than the launcher, as the launcher will attempt to install the game on the PC.
So, run the wow.exe and you’re golden. I don’t know if your 5gb size drive is big enough or not, but the point is you can do this if you have a large enough capacity on your drive.
Psst. I have a government job.
I’ll be playing during lunch, not on the clock lol.
Should be just fine then if you’re only using it during break.
This last Thursday and Friday, I played on my laptop that I’d brought to work. It’s an Acer Chromebook that I hacked to run Win10. I have WoW loaded on an SD card, and the Blizzard launcher points to that as the install location. Ran just fine.
So I’m guessing here that you don’t intend to leave the USB drive connected ?
If I were you I would install battle.net to the USB drive then make sure all Game locations point to their locations on the USB drive in the battle.net settings. If you install battle.net to the C drive then the drive assignment for the USB drive may not be valid until you plug it in.
Also 5GB won’t be nearly enough. That’s just the minimum required to stream data in. I don’t think you want to be streaming data in if your playing at work and there’s a possibility of a web filter blocking part of the download. I would recommend at least 85-90 GB.
I feel like 6 months from now gonna hear “and Dave Thompson from XXX company has been hit with a class action lawsuit after negligent actions exposed company computers to an outside virus via USB drive that resulted in hackers obtained consumer information.”
Just to add…only time i’ve had a usb “die” is when i crush it. Those things go through the washer and dryer with no issues afterwords LOL
I mean, it should be possible, but you’re just adding another point of potential failure to the chain. The more complicated the plumbing, the easier it is to stop up the drain.

Also 5GB won’t be nearly enough. That’s just the minimum required to stream data in. I don’t think you want to be streaming data in if your playing at work and there’s a possibility of a web filter blocking part of the download. I would recommend at least 85-90 GB.
I’m not doubting what you’re saying, because you probably know a lot more about this than I do, but why would it need 90 gigs of free space? If the minimum requirements say 5 gigs, I would think they really mean “you only need 5 gigs to play this game.”
My SSD with retail wow on it (fresh install, no extra data) is nearly full, and the game runs fine without running into memory problems.

I feel like 6 months from now gonna hear “and Dave Thompson from XXX company has been hit with a class action lawsuit after negligent actions exposed company computers to an outside virus via USB drive that resulted in hackers obtained consumer information.”
A virus from battle.net ?
#wat

And when your USB drive dies?
I’ll buy another one?
WOW! You must be rich, thats a whole nother 3 pennies

I’m not doubting what you’re saying, because you probably know a lot more about this than I do, but why would it need 90 gigs of free space? If the minimum requirements say 5 gigs, I would think they really mean “you only need 5 gigs to play this game.”
Classic is being based on a modern 8.x.x client meaning it can take advantage of streaming data in. So if you don’t have it all downloaded you can still play (with varying degrees of success). The 5GB is what you would need to download at a minimum in order to safely play.
However it sounds like this guy is going to playing at work as a government employee. Most govt departments have filters that detect unusual activity and block it (I know as I work for one). So he would be wanting to download all of World of Warcraft before attempting to play at work to stop it streaming.
World of Warcraft has a shared data folder. The 90GB was a ball park figure based on my Data folder being ~70 GB plus room for any possible user files , the Battle.net install as well as room for future updates.