Can I use a flash card as paging file in WinXP?

[lookin4dlz]

Curious if it can be done & how it affects performance.

 

[CTho9305]

Flash memory has a limited number of writes before it stops working reliably, so this would not be a good idea.

 

[uart]

Also flash cards are presently much slower than a good hard drive so performance would be poor. I cant think of one good reason to do it.

 

[klaviernista]

Originally posted by: lookin4dlz
Curious if it can be done & how it affects performance.

Easy, it would be a huge bottle neck. The read write speeds on current flash memory are substantially slower than those of a hard disk.

 

[jhu]

i got an idea: how about a several flash disks in a raid configuration?

 

[Lynx516]

possible but it would be dead in about a week they usually only survive 10,000 writes .

 

[Mday]

okay. flash memory CAN be faster. but the ones you can get cheap like CF cards, MMS, SD, etc, are all faster... than a floppy drive. so unless you're using a floppy disc for your page file... i dont think so.

the limited writes have already been mentioned.

of course if you want to get a several thousand dollar solid state hard drive that uses mroe expensive flash memory configurations, you will get speed improvements.

 

[RussianSoldier]

I use a floppy for a windows 98 page file... it made use out of the hundreds of floppies I had...

sidenote: Windows 98 runs slow when entirely off a cd...

 

[glugglug]

disk transfer rate is not the primary performance metric of the drive, especially for a swap file.

Access time matters a lot more. Flash has essentially zero access time, so it actually is likely to perform better even with the slow transfer rate. Until it dies after only a few days use, because as others have mentioned it can't really take that many writes.

 

[Mday]

Originally posted by: glugglug
disk transfer rate is not the primary performance metric of the drive, especially for a swap file.

Access time matters a lot more. Flash has essentially zero access time, so it actually is likely to perform better even with the slow transfer rate. Until it dies after only a few days use, because as others have mentioned it can't really take that many writes.

too bad through put is ass with a "flash card"

 

[klaviernista]

Originally posted by: jhu
i got an idea: how about a several flash disks in a raid configuration?

-Sheesh, don;t you guys read the stuff posted on this webpage? LOL http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2101

-note: not sure if its even possible to run flash mem in a raid config

 

[Mark R]

Originally posted by: klaviernista

Originally posted by: jhu
i got an idea: how about a several flash disks in a raid configuration?

-note: not sure if its even possible to run flash mem in a raid config

Well, CF cards are IDE compatible. So with suitable adaptors, I don't see why you couldn't hang 4 CF cards off a RAID card.

 

[cKGunslinger]

This is an odd thread. Flash cards have limited number so writes, so using them as a heavily accessed paging file would be suicide. Better would be just to use a ram disk. But if you're gonna just add more ram to your PC, why not just leave it as ram instead of swap space? I do realize that a few apps *require* a non-zero paging file, so why not just have 1.5GB ram with 0.5 of it as a RAM drive? I'm not sure if you'd actually get any performance benefit from it. however.