Odd idea in windows Vista

[Randy Gloden]

I did a quick check on Toms Hardware to get a few benchmarks and it 
appears the faster SATA drives have sustained read rates of up to 75 
MB/sec (Raid 1 up to 108).  They also reviewed two fast Flash drives and 
the faster of the two yielded about 30MB/sec.

So it appears the Flash read speed has increased to the point where 
these applications will be more practical.  I would expect Flash to take 
the lead in the next year or so.

-------Randy

www.microbabble.com


Articles Referenced:
http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/08/10/two_fast_and_functional_usb_flash_drives/page3.html
http://www.tomshardware.com/2006/02/06/wd1500ad_raptor_xtends_performance_lead/page8.html

Cefiar wrote:

>On Wednesday 15 February 2006 11:50, Senectus . wrote:
>  
>
>>http://www.reghardware.co.uk/2006/02/14/windows_vista_flash_booster_tech/
>>
>>How is this going to be usable?
>>
>>From memory the top speed of USB is slower than SATA,
>>    
>>
>
>USB's seek speed is much faster. If the files you're hitting are all small, 
>you'll gain on the seek speed.
>
>  
>
>>but more importantly, FLASH memory devices have a write limit (of about 1000
>>writes) .. wouldn't using a USB memory key as an extended memory slot
>>wipe out the key after a few days of use?
>>    
>>
>
>Depends entirely on the flash device. Many flash devices (eg: USB keys) have 
>100,000 or 1,000,000 writes before failure, and even that isn't a guaranteed 
>failure. It may still work after that, it may not.
>
>I think the idea is to use the USB key for the kernel and startup image files, 
>which don't change that regularly. It'll speed up the machine at boot, but I 
>have no idea how well it'd work for other types of files or during runtime, 
>except possibly for commonly accessed files (eg: system DLL's).
>
>Note that with a bit of work, it'd be dead easy to copy things 
>like /boot, /lib and /bin (which all change very little, and on my system 
>with 4 kernels currently installed is about 310 meg combined) or possibly 
>just /usr/lib (about 1.2 gig on my machine) to a usb key.
>
>The real issues with doing something like this are:
> 1. Making sure you either can use the machine without the USB key (if 
>necessary?), or recover in some graceful manner if it's not there/damaged.
> 2. Making sure you get the right USB key and not some other device.
> 3. Hiding the USB key from the normal USB key handlers (otherwise things 
>could go haywire).
> 4. Making sure that you sync the data to the key after an upgrade, but before 
>rebooting. Just because your copy has finished, doesn't mean the data is 
>there yet, and rebooting before the copy is finished will leave incomplete 
>files.
>
>Nothing insurmountable, just stuff that would need to be done.
>
>  
>