USB drive for virtual memory

[~kev~]

Is anyone here using a USB jumpdrive for their virtual memory? Not a usb hard drive that has to spin up, but a 2 or 4 gig usb jumpdrive.

I am wondering what kind of performance boost a system might get if it has instant access to the swap file instead of having to access the hard drive.

[Paft]

What will a 256mb stick give me? :)

[Innoc]

Is anyone here using a USB jumpdrive for their virtual memory? Not a usb hard drive that has to spin up, but a 2 or 4 gig usb jumpdrive.

I am wondering what kind of performance boost a system might get if it has instant access to the swap file instead of having to access the hard drive.
The thing that would worry me with that would be a USB failure that causes your system to come to a screeching halt. Depending on which windows version you're using...that could be problematic. Now some people report faster bootup using a usb drive for "readyboost" in Vista.

[Acid Reflux]

That sounds interesting but can you provide any redundancy with this USB trick?

[~kev~]

That sounds interesting but can you provide any redundancy with this USB trick?

Why would you want redundancy on a usb drive that holds no data - except a windows swap file?

If the drive fails, just plug another one in. Since these drives do not have moving parts, there is nothing to fail.

I am thinking of getting a 2 gig jump drive this evening, setting windows to use the whole drive as virtual memory and disabling the swap drive / virtual memory on the regular hard drives.

=============================

What started all this, back in February Toshiba launched a solid state drive notebook - http://blogs.eweek.com/desktop_confidential/content/laptops/solid_state_of_the_union_address_1.html

Virtual memory is the slowest part of your computer. It relies on the speed of the hard drive. If your system has to access the swap file, while loading a game like half-life, the hard drive has to do a lot of work.

So why not take the load off the hard drive and give windows instant access to the swap file / virtual memory?

Programs like paintshop that use a lot of virtual memory might see a nice little boost from using a USB jump drive.

Plus, this might reduce fragmentation of the harddrive.

[Innoc]

I think you're barking up the wrong tree Kev. It's nice in theory but at the end of the day you're still bottled necked by USB 2.0 at the best. USB will still be far slower than sata2 any day. If you had a faster dedicated path to which that flash drive was connecting I'd think you had something. With the hybrid drives you were talking about I believe the transfer is still through the SATA bus which is where the performance gain comes from.

[mervaka]

i was just gonna say, bottleneck much??

what you're after is a solid state drive, with SATA on it. i dont know what you're trying to achieve though.

[Innoc]

i was just gonna say, bottleneck much??

what you're after is a solid state drive, with SATA on it. i dont know what you're trying to achieve though.
He wants to speed up performance of swap file usage by forcing it to reside on a flash drive. Flash does, theoretically, have much faster seek and access times but USB would kill any benefit there. There's a huge difference in how ready boost helps versus this scenario.

[zSilver_Fox]

USB is insanely slow compared to SATA or IDE. I wouldn't bother with it, though a solid state drive would be much better.

[Paft]

I am testing out http://www.eboostr.com/ atm with my external SATA HDD.

http://img372.imageshack.us/img372/9529/eboostrjw0.gif
Hmm

[mervaka]

my system drive is a pair of raptors in raid0. does the job for me.