USB Drive as Scratch disk/page file (non-vista)

[imported_cheapdude]

I was tinkering with the idea of using my 4gb cruzer as a photoshop scratch disk instead of hard drive, similar to the vista's readyboost idea.

Just wondering would I see a hit in performance or improvement as compared to 4gb of regular HD space?

 

[Zepper]

Flash drives aren't really intended for frequent write/erase cycles.

.bh.

 

[corkyg]

You will see a performance loss. Max transfer rate for USB 2 is 480 Mbps. For Mode 4 IDE ATA-2, it is about 16 MBps. Note the upper and lower case b's. B=Bytes; b=bits.

And as Zepper suggests, the life span of your Cruzer can be seriously shortened by such use.

 

[imported_cheapdude]

Thank you for the quick responses, so what is the readyboost hype all about?

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: cheapdude
Thank you for the quick responses, so what is the readyboost hype all about?

What flash drives have going for them is the fact that there are no moving parts, which makes their access times excellent.

What would be nice is a external SATA (eSATA IIRC) based flash drive.

 

[Zepper]

Well, if there was a large chunk of data files that are accessed frequently from the hard drive but not altered, it would speed things up to have that in Flash. AFAIK, frequent reading from flash has little or no effect on its longevity - it's just the write/erase cycles that do.

.bh.

 

[Fullmetal Chocobo]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Well, if there was a large chunk of data files that are accessed frequently from the hard drive but not altered, it would speed things up to have that in Flash. AFAIK, frequent reading from flash has little or no effect on its longevity - it's just the write/erase cycles that do.

.bh.

Sorry, I should have clarified that a bit more. Having an eSATA flash drive would increase thoroughput and access times--the issue of having limited read/write cycles would still be something that would have to be contended with.

I'm of the opinion that soon, RAM will be added to hard drives or a secondary RAM slot for cache will be on motherboards.

 

[imported_cheapdude]

I am assuming that microsoft is using a different approach to read/write access to prevent damaging the flash drive?

 

[Zepper]

There is no alternate method - it's erase a bank and write, erase a bank and write. That's the way Flash memory works.

.bh.