Faster to boot from an SD card?

I was wondering if I installed Windows XP to a class 6 SD card, would windows boot faster compared to if the OS were installed on a 5200 rpm HDD?

Which has faster transfer rates SD or HDD?

Google'd this and searched various forums and couldn't find a clear answer.

Thanks in advance for any help~!

-Kuya

 

Nm, just found the answer I think...

HDD's have a transfer rate of up to 133 mb/s, which blows the 6mb/s of an SD card out of the water...

Sorry for this useless thread. >.>

-Kuya

 

Actually, it may be faster. SD cards have almost 0 seek time, while HDDs have seek times in the 10-20ms.

For 10-20ms, your card could be reading and writing. Per data request for a HDD. That adds up.

 

Hmmm... anyone have any experience with this / find an benchmarks?

-Kuya

 

USB memory sticks get performance up to 25mb/s , which dosnt drop unlike hard drives. And there seek times are still 0.1ms Perhaps try a branded memory stick , I recently bought a 2GB freecom one from ebuyer for £7 and it manages to get 20 MB/s read although they only stated a maximum of 7MB/s

 

Can you do this "boot from SD with Vista"

kuya=older brother??

 

First question is whether your BIOS would support booting from (i) a card in the media reader or (ii) a USB device. I have seen USB support in recent BIOSes but no support for the media slot.

I have seen some USB flash drives which claim to be dual channel and have much faster performance. One of those could be an option.

SiSoftware Sandra includes a removable media benchmark so you could compare your existing hardware. The media card reader might be a bottleneck - I know that whatever Sony uses for SD cards in its sub-notebooks is abysmally slow (perhaps to try to make Sony's MS look better).

John

 

Just doing my re-install of vista , It says it dosnt allow vista to be installed on a USB device... You need some sort of adaptor to make it look like the USB device is infact a IDE/SATA hard drive!!!

 

XP can be installed on a flash card. I have tried it with my U709. It has a compact flash card slot in the media card reader. I installed XP to an 8GB adata 266x card. The operating system has a hdtune of about 33mb/s through the media reader.
You will not be able to install xp properly on an sd card because sd cards do not support pio 6 and they cannot run 16 and 32bit applications. A compact flash card can.
I gave up on the compact flash card because the 33mb/sec was much less than the raid 0 array from my two 7k200's in raid 0.

K-TRON

 

Gunna try this out as soon as I get my laptop tomorrow~

Yup... ^^

 

I have an additional ASUS EEEPc.. I installed XP on the 4 GB inbuilt SSD..

& i added 8 GB SD card for Program files, data etc etc ...

Working PErfectly Fine..

the SSD is damn Fast.!!

& SD card gives no problem for Program files... donno about the entire OS

 

Greg has a valid point that needs to be understood. As much as we rely on read/write speeds, the access time is what makes the magic of flash. A .1ms seek time is all it takes to gather information from an ssd (and I would believe this similar in a flash). A hard drive requires 10-20ms each and every time it makes a pass for information. For a large file that it makes a few passes for, this becomes a large difference.

 

Now we just gotta figure our how to boot from the internal media card reader~ =/

-Kuya

 

I've tried booting Windows XP from a USB stick. It took over 15 minutes to boot up Windows every time, but seemed pretty fast once loaded. A SD card might boot faster than my attempt with a USB flash drive, but I can't imagine it would be faster than your hard drive.