Windows Virtual Memory on a memory stick

[aidanjm]

Originally posted by: GrammatonJP

Originally posted by: aidanjm
one way to do it might be to use a 1 gigabyte compact flash card, and install it as an IDE hard drive using a Compact Flash to IDE adapter. The flash would appear as just another IDE hard drive to the operating system.

CF-IDE adapters

edit: but I guess if you have already invested in your usb drives, you might not want to pay for another gig in compact flash 😛

a gig of cf is dirt cheap now.. 20 bucks ? but they have a limited write cycle, so eventually you'll wear out the cf and lose your data.. but how can you tell how many write cycles you have especially running windows.

Stuff I found online
--
Compact Flash cards use Flash Memory. Flash Memory has a limited number of Erase/Write cycles ~ 300,000. The controller in the Compact Flash card does wear leveling by spreading out the writes amongst various 'sectors' in the card to prevent premature wearout of a sector.

Most modern flash memory has a MTBF of 300,000 erase cycles per flash
block, and CF cards use hardware wear leveling to avoid killing any block
early. (even if you constantly write a single logical 'sector' on the
disk, every write will be to a different flash block until all the blocks
have been written.)

if compact flash is that cheap, then them wearing out eventually isn't that much of a problem.

I experimented with using compact flash for my Opera browser cache. Didn't seem to notice any speed difference compared with hard drive cache, tho.

 

[RadiclDreamer]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Any ideas and comments?

That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- M4H

Agree 100%

 

[OSX]

Originally posted by: MercenaryForHire

Originally posted by: girlpower4ever
Any ideas and comments?

That's the stupidest idea I've ever heard.

- M4H

agreed.

 

[girlpower4ever]

lol,
you think zero seek times is stupid?

I read the anandtech article on the gigabyte iram and noticed that there were performance increases using solid state storage.
caching on solid state storage will definitely increase efficiency and bring up the performance but at the bottleneck of the transfer rates.

 

[LittleNemoNES]

they're not talking about iram. Just regular old memory sticks. BAD IDEA.

 

[highlandsun]

Yes, zero seek times is stupid if your fastest sequential burst transfer rate is slower than the slowest random seek read rate of a rotating disk. And that's what you'll get from any USB-attached flash memory device on the market today. Secondary storage performance depends on at least those two factors: seek time plus transfer time. Just setting seek time to zero but ballooning transfer time *is* stupid if the end result is slower than a rotating disk drive that offers 100x the capacity at about the same price. Assuming these are the only factors you care about, of course. There are some applications where a rotating disk is too great a liability at *any* price, and the limited lifetime of flash memory is still long enough to be useful (the flash can easily be replaced before it dies).

Now, Samsung is talking about introducing flash-based drives with burst transfer rates around 60MB/sec, which will beat most notebook drives out there today. If you had something like that, then it'd be worth thinking about. (Of course, if you read the Samsung literature, you'll see that it's not really that fast, they're just cleverly adding a small DRAM buffer to the flash device to accomodate the bursts, and running multiple channels of flash in parallel to get above the 10MB/sec sustained speed.)