Can I use a flash drive like a Solid State HD?

[blanketyblank]

I'm seeing the prices for 32 gig flash drives have fallen to about $150, and probably in a little while will be under 100. The 16 gig drives are already uner 100 around 70 or so. What I'm wondering is if it's possible to use a USB flash drive instead of a normal and more pricy solid state drive. It looks like the SATA 32 gig drives are still over 500 which makes a USB drive a more viable option for me.
However are there any drawbacks to loading my OS onto one of these drives? I know you can boot from flash drives, but I've never actually tried it. Are the limited numbers of writes/reads going to be a problem? Does the seek time actually help? Will the USB 2.0 speeds be a limitation?

If anyone has tried this please post your experience with it. Thanks.

 

[stevf]

i am getting ready to try that as soon as i get to fedex tomorrow. The biggest problem doing this is speed compared to hard drives and of course the limited writes. from my research you can work around the the write problems but speed is still a factor as the flash you want for performance is still kind of expensive - i am going to be trying this http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820208297

I think the way the ssd drives get around the speed issue is by how they arrange the flash in banks and probably cache because the memory itself is pretty much the same

 

[LOUISSSSS]

in order to do this... i guess one would just have to boot from USB-HDD in the bios, then install the OS onto it?

 

[blanketyblank]

Steve let me know how that goes. The speed on that looks great, but I'd be worried about whether the CF adapter could handle 40 Mb/s. I was thinking of using a USB type flash drive like one of these:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820233042
http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16820220253
It looks like the read on these is about 30 Mb/s though the write is horrible.

I've seen some people make boot flash drives with linux and stuff for setting up a computer or troubleshooting, but never heard of someone using one long term.
Ideally I'd love to have something like this one with 100Mb/s read and 80 Mb/s write.
http://www.excaliberpc.com/SAM...artinfo-id-582175.html
I drool when I imagine raid 0 with something like this, but the price is way out of my league.

 

[BD2003]

Throwing in a decently fast (sandisk ultra) CF card into a 2.5" adapter works pretty well for a laptop HD replacement. If youre trying to outdo a desktop hard drive though, you'll have a much more difficult, not to mention expensive endeavor.

 

[EarthwormJim]

USB drives have huge CPU usage. So a flash drive may can have equal read/write speeds to a ssd drive, but it's gonna be rather taxing on your computer.

Running HDTune on one of my flash drives, I got pretty good read write speeds, roughtly 30 and 20. However cpu useage was around 30% on my quad core computer.

 

[taltamir]

Originally posted by: LOUISSSSS
in order to do this... i guess one would just have to boot from USB-HDD in the bios, then install the OS onto it?

My nforce570 mobo from asus (M2N-E) can see any USB flash drive and lists them in the "HDD boot priority" list. So I can set it to always boot from the flash disk directly. Unfortunately I only have a 2GB stick, the only OS I can put on it comfortably is nexenta (its a file server) and it doesn't want to do it right now due to an installer bug.

Originally posted by: EarthwormJim
USB drives have huge CPU usage. So a flash drive may can have equal read/write speeds to a ssd drive, but it's gonna be rather taxing on your computer.

Running HDTune on one of my flash drives, I got pretty good read write speeds, roughtly 30 and 20. However cpu useage was around 30% on my quad core computer.

Yea, IDE means that most the work is done by the "Integrated Drive Electronics".
People keep on calling the ATA cables IDE cables. While drives are all IDE nowadays, they just either connect with the old ATA cables, or with the new SATA cables.

 

[PandaBear]

Other than heavy CPU utilization, lower transfer rate (35mb/s for USB rather than 150mb/s for sata), limited wear cycle, it should work.

 

[taltamir]

it is 1500mb/s not 150... and that is the theoretical maximum of the SATA interface. 3000mb/s for the SATA2...
Notice it is small b. that means its BIT, not BYTE. So you need to divide it by 8.
So its 187.5 MB/s for SATA1, and 375 MB/s for SATA2.

The raptor manages 70MB/s sustainable transfer rates, and the new 640GB WD drive with 2x320GB platters manages 80MB/s transfer rates, making it the second fastest SATA drive in the world. With the fastest being the SSD drive from OCZ that manages 120MB/s (100MB/s write)... Nothing comes even CLOSE to the 187.5 MB/s theoretical maximum of the SATA1 interface.
SAS is available in 1.5Gbs, 3, and 6... and it IS compatible with SATA (so you CAN plug SATA into SAS controller). But really, all of those are unnecessarily fast. The real reason to get higher SATA generations is for features, not speeds. You can buy 15K RPM SAS drives that get ~145MB/s, those are the absolutely fastest drives in the world, cost a bundle, and STILL don't reach the theoretical max of 187.5MB/s of SATA1

Anyways, the average desktop drive is ~50MB/s, normal laptop drives are 30-40. And the fastest of USB drives make 35 MB/s.
http://www.everythingusb.com/h...e/USB_Flash_Drives.htm

 

[blanketyblank]

I realize the read/write speed aren't so great, but does the much faster seek time help?
I don't think sustained transfer is a big deal since the drive will be pretty tiny and I won't actually use it for transferring much data. My plan is to get one really fast boot drive for windows and have a terabyte drive or something for storage. From the sounds of it though usb is not a good alternative as the 35 mb/s limit and cpu utilization would probably cancel out the seek time benefit.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: blanketyblank
I realize the read/write speed aren't so great, but does the much faster seek time help?
I don't think sustained transfer is a big deal since the drive will be pretty tiny and I won't actually use it for transferring much data. My plan is to get one really fast boot drive for windows and have a terabyte drive or something for storage. From the sounds of it though usb is not a good alternative as the 35 mb/s limit and cpu utilization would probably cancel out the seek time benefit.

Are you using it for XP or for Vista? Either way, a really fast card it would make a decent OS/program drive. The only ones I can recommend for using as a "real" drive would be the sandisk extreme CF models mated to ATA/SATA.

You cant do this right cheaply, those are some expensive cards.

Windows does a lot of random reading and writing, and it will barely be noticeable with the solid state. With seek times near zero, low priority i/o will work perfectly, and your disk cache will fill silently and transparently in Vista. And that cache will accelerate most launches that absolute transfer rate will be much less of an issue, but so will seek times...you will certainly get rid of a great deal of disk crunching though.

If youre doing this for speed, you'll be disappointed unless youre going to go big by raiding a few really fast cards. Youre better off buying a "real" SSD drive by that point. Prices are dropping like rocks, give it a few months and you'll spend a lot less for something a lot more usable.

 

[lopri]

USB sticks like SSDs? No. They're really slow. I have tried running virtual machines on USB flash, and only the 4GB (SLC) sticks were anywhere close to usable for web surfing, etc. Actually web surfing is pretty fast on SLC flash and I still use it for its convenience (portability).

 

[Ratman6161]

Originally posted by: lopri
USB sticks like SSDs? No. They're really slow. I have tried running virtual machines on USB flash, and only the 4GB (SLC) sticks were anywhere close to usable for web surfing, etc. Actually web surfing is pretty fast on SLC flash and I still use it for its convenience (portability).

Actually virtual machines were what i've had in mind using this idea for. I've been wishing that VMWare would come out with a version of the free VMWare player that would run without being installed on the host system. Then you could carry around a flash drive with the player and your virtual machine and run it on whatever system you happen to be sitting in front of - probably just a fantasy though.

 

[taltamir]

well it depends on the stick lopri... the highest end USB sticks actually test out at 35MB/s... that is better then some laptop drives.

The lowest end SSD HDD I have seen get like... 5MB/s

Ofcourse, the high end SSD drives like the new OCZ gets close to 120MB/s, almost twice as fast as a raptor (600$ @32GB, 1200$ at 64GB... both are about 200$ above MSRP)