Inertia Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 I watched the PDC thing live online where Bill showed us that if you put a USB thumbdrive in a vista machine it uses it for RAM. What i was thinking is, arent those things slower than a hard drive ? They tend to put through about 8mb/sec compared to a hard drive of 30-60mb/sec or my raid array of 140mb/sec so it seems to me that one would plug in a thumb drive, the machine would use it and page less, nd this would make performance worse ? also this would prefetch data into it, which could be acessed quicker directly from where it is stored any way ? Any views / thoughts / info on this ? I thoguht abotu it when i watched the demo live, and its been bugging me since, so thought ide open a discussion on it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cm_mc Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 well i have two USb thumbdrives.. one for USB 1 and the other for USB 2 the USB is faster than the thumbdrive for usb so i think the usb key for usb 2 is kinda faster than a HD Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amrinders87 Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 Actually a USB 2.0 drive is slower that the HDD. USB 2.0 is 480 Mega Bits per second, which is 60 MetaBytes/sec. A hdd is 66/100/133 or 150. All theoritically. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
amrinders87 Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 I think it would make it faster if you were using the harddrive for a lot of data processing. So then using usb instead of page file would be better. This way the hdd does not have to read/write the pagefile and the ohter data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cm_mc Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 then we better buy an Iramm lol Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Inertia Posted September 23, 2005 Author Share Posted September 23, 2005 yes i gues that makes some sense, but then it would be better to just add a spare hard drive purley for paging, even an average hard drive is faster than usb drives i ahve used . You say "USB 2.0 is 480 Mega Bits per second" which is very true, but this isnt the bottleneck, the bottleneck is the actual drive itself reading and writing data. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
cm_mc Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 i i remmeber samsung is doing some hybrids hard drives that have like 1 gb of ram inside... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Kr0z Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 Yeah I didn't get that part of the presentation or why it was a good feature. :hmmm: Even at USB 2.0 Speeds a SATA HDD is much faster. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
greenreaper Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 I think those people worrying about raw data transfer speed are forgetting something called seek time. Most of the time spent loading stuff from disk is actually getting over the portion of the disk that has it. It's not a random-access device, while a USB key is. This really matters when it's used as a page file. Hard disks may be as fast, or faster, when use to load data files, but their performance when things are all over the place is lacking. Of course, some USB keys are truly crappy in terms of data transfer speed. Make sure you look up a few reviews before buying one! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BigGiantHead Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 That feature is called Superfetch. Paul Thurott has some more info on it over at www.winsupersite.com. Not sure about the speed issue though. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
xUnix Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 Are this feature available in the PDC version 5219? I've tried on mine and there was no changes. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
BajiRav Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 I think that feature was demoed by Jim Alchin and he said that it will help when you can not add RAM such as laptops (he used a laptop for the demo). I still don't get it how it is better over a HDD page file but there must be valid reason to have something like that. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ATLien_0 Posted September 23, 2005 Share Posted September 23, 2005 It goes towards virtual memory I believe not physical ram Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
+Warwagon MVC Posted September 24, 2005 MVC Share Posted September 24, 2005 what about all the people who always say that using a thumbstick for that would kill it in a short amount of time due to all the read / writes it would endure. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
NetRyder Posted September 24, 2005 Share Posted September 24, 2005 I think those people worrying about raw data transfer speed are forgetting something called seek time. Most of the time spent loading stuff from disk is actually getting over the portion of the disk that has it. It's not a random-access device, while a USB key is. This really matters when it's used as a page file. Hard disks may be as fast, or faster, when use to load data files, but their performance when things are all over the place is lacking.586569368[/snapback] Yep, you're right. :) The following was posted as a comment on my PDC blog by an architect in the Core OS Division in response to a similar question posted by another visitor: While hard drives are faster than USB2 for sequential I/O, USB2 based flash is significantly faster for satisfying random reads, which we have found to be a prime factor in poor system responsiveness. External Memory Devices serve as an extension of the data caching capabilities of main memory. All writes are pushed through to disk, random reads are serviced where possible from the EMD and sequential reads are serviced from the hard drive.Thanks, Rob Reinauer Software Architect Windows Core Operating Systems Division Microsoft Corporation http://netryder.osnn.net/pdc05/2005/09/day...715014800525911 Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
The J Man Posted September 24, 2005 Share Posted September 24, 2005 I think that feature was demoed by Jim Alchin and he said that it will help when you can not add RAM such as laptops (he used a laptop for the demo).I still don't get it how it is better over a HDD page file but there must be valid reason to have something like that. 586569710[/snapback] this is interesting.. im using a laptop too... still 256MB RAM only... :blush: Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
ShadowPHP Posted September 24, 2005 Share Posted September 24, 2005 When Vista comes out i will splash out on some USB sticks and a few hubs, lol. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
dagamer34 Posted September 26, 2005 Share Posted September 26, 2005 Don't USB sticks have somewhat limited number of times they can be written to reliably? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts