Thumbdrive as pagefile?

Would having a 512mb thumbdrive as pagefile be faster than having the pagefile on my harddrive? How much slower is each compared to ram?

 

no it wouldnt be. very slow compared to ram

 

The pagefile uses a portion of the hard drive as virtual RAM, so it's as slow as the access rate of the hard disk. Using the thumb drive might be faster, if the hour thumb drive has a faster read/write than your hard disk. It might also work faster because the thumb drive can be dedicated to the pagefile, while the hard drive has to multitask between the pagefile and other tasks accessing it. Might be worth testing for performance differences.

 

no thumbdrive is faster than the actual harddisk on your pc unless its old. i guess accessing it first might be faster if the hd is busy...i wouldnt think so though.

 

Flash memory is faster than Harddisk.

There are some specially designed thumbdrives MADE OF Vista READYBOOST.

Google them,.

 

ya i have a sandisk one. but i remember reading and even saw tests that it wasnt as fast...heh was awile ago...maybe it was external hard drive.

 

Run HD Tune on your hard drive and flash drive and compare the graphs. The fastest flash drives might have a transfer rate of ~25MB/s (the upper limit for USB 2) but more likely to be half that. Write speeds tend to be slower than read speeds. Where flash memory scores is in near instant access times. However, I don't think that's a major benefit if a block of RAM has to be written to the paging file and then a block of paging file copied into RAM.

I also doubt that Windows would like to have the paging file on a removable device. It's something it likes to check for when it wakes up in the morning and, if it can't find it, then spends the rest of the day sulking.

What you can do to boost the paging file performance is to make sure that it is defragmented (easy - use PageDefrag) and also get it located at the fast end of the hard disk (let us know if you find software which does this).

John

 

Flash discs have very good read speeds but around half the write speeds. So its only good to access stuff from it, not write on it constantly. (eg. Pre-fetching)

Readyboost is pretty much useless, i dont notice it at all. I think its cause of my 4gb ram. I have the Sandisk 4gb cruzer w/ "readyboost support"

On my old 2gb RAM/T5600 programs and games loaded slightly faster. Boot time was about the same though..

 

is a flawed concept in itself to start with

as a basic understanding of using a separate drive for the pagefile, best scenario is to have the drive (not partition) on a separate controller from the system so that one can take advantage of asynchronius reads and writes.

usb port is not a "controller". One has the tendency to take the "readyboost" a bit further than what vista intends

cheers ...