Put page file on a thumb drive

[b11_]

I moved the page file to a thumb drive but Wxp ignores the thumb drive and
put a 1500mb page file on partition C. The registry correctly shows the
page file as being on the thumb drive. It appears that I have found another
page file bug. Would someone confirm my discovery?

 

[Holz]

I moved the page file to a thumb drive but Wxp ignores the thumb
drive and put a 1500mb page file on partition C. The registry
correctly shows the page file as being on the thumb drive. It appears
that I have found another page file bug. Would someone confirm my
discovery?

Not a bug. The idea is quite stupid, since the Thumb drive is slower
then you hard disk, and is primarily designed to store data and not be
as active as a page file.
A page file must exist on a local device, removable device.

 

[Holz]

A page file must exist on a local device, removable device.

A page file must exist on a local device, NOT removable device.

 

[b11_]

I thought a thumb drive is faster than a hard drive!
______________________________________________________________

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

You don't want to put the page file on a removable drive. Think about it.

 

[DL]

no

I thought a thumb drive is faster than a hard drive!
______________________________________________________________

 

[b11_]

The thumb drive would be attached to the computer whenever I use the computer!
___________________________________________________________________

 

[b11_]

The hard drive is a mechanical device. The thumb drive is basicly a stick of
memory so it should be faster then the hard drive.
_________________________________________________________________

 

[LVTravel]

But the transfer speed (USB) is less and thumb drives have a "limited
lifetime". They will only read and write so many times before they die or
so I have heard.

 

[Holz]

The hard drive is a mechanical device. The thumb drive is basicly a
stick of memory so it should be faster then the hard drive.

You need to Google and learn a little bit.

 

[Colin Barnhorst]

The usb bus cannot support the transfer speed (nor I think the bandwidth)
that you want for the pagefile. If you are going to use a separate drive
for the pagefile, be sure it is on a separate controller from the system so
that you can take advantage of asynchronius reads and writes. The ideal is
a second SATA drive if you have SATA controllers on your mobo because of the
higher transfer rate over IDE drives. If you are running out of space on
the system drive and your second drive is on the IDE cable to which the
system drive is also attached, the solution is to move files to the second
drive and leave the pagefile alone.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

I thought a thumb drive is faster than a hard drive!

No, it's slower. Even though it's electronic, rather than mechanical,
the limitations of the USB bus make it slower.

Also note that a thumb has a relatively low number of read/write
cycles it can handle. You would quickly wear out the thumb drive this
way. When it fails, Murphy predicts that it will fail at the worst
time possible, and you will lose the document you were working on,
your financial records, etc.

It's a very bad idea, in my view. If you are paging significantly, the
best thing you can do is add more RAM. That's much more effective than
*any* tweaking of page files devices or settings.




______________________________________________________________

 

[HeyBub]

I thought a thumb drive is faster than a hard drive!
______________________________________________________________

It is. But the USB connection is slow, 480Mbps. Hard drives transfer data at
up to 600MBps, about ten times faster (note difference between "bits" and
"Bytes").

Further, USB device access is not optimized, either by the OS or the
hardware. There's usually no pre-fetch, cache, buffering or any other
tweaks.

 

[PD43]

The hard drive is a mechanical device. The thumb drive is basicly a stick of
memory so it should be faster then the hard drive.

YOU are the only one championing your position - despite all the
replies to the contrary - when YOU came here asking for assistance.

Know what that makes you?

 

[M.I.5¾]

The hard drive is a mechanical device. The thumb drive is basicly a stick
of
memory so it should be faster then the hard drive.

Reading the FLASH memory drive should be faster than a hard disk. But
writing to a FLASH memory is much slower because of the way FLASH memory is
written. Basically the whole block has to be read, modified and written
back. But this is entirely academic as the USB interface is vastly slower
than the IDE or SATA interface of your hard disk.