moving page file to USB 2.0 flashdrive?

[carl feredeck]

so reading the pagefile from the flashdrive is faster?why did he say usb is
slow then?

 

[Gary S. Terhune]

All except... Why is it that the USB drive is faster than the HD in this
particular case?

 

[Mike]

someone asked if moving the pagefile to a second drive would be better...

Definitely, as long as it's really a 2nd drive and not a 2nd partition on
the same drive.

and now I am asking if putting it on a usb flashdrive would be even
better?

I would doubt it. A real drive is faster than any USB 2.0 device,
particulary today's 7200 RPM, 8/16 meg cache drives.

Mike

 

[R. McCarty]

A hard drive has a much longer access time, typically in the range of
8-11 mSeconds. A USB drive has a quick access time like a 1.0 mS.
So for reads a USB is faster than a hard drive. It's the sustained data
rate that is much slower on a USB drive.

 

[Gary S. Terhune]

Thanks!

 

[Ron Martell]

The transfer rates to "Any" USB peripheral would be significantly
lower than any mass storage devices in the PC. On it's best day
a USB device is going to be hard pressed to reach/exceed a data
transfer rate of 28-30 Megabytes-per-Second. You would likely
see rates of an internal drive in excess of 60-90 Megabytes so
even if it was feasible to put the Pagefile on a USB device the loss
in performance would be very noticeable.

A read from the page file can be for as little as a single memory page
(4 kilobytes) and for small amounts such as this the drive mechanism
repositioning time (seek time) will be by far the largest single
component of the total time required. USB devices have zero seek
time.

Furthermore, if multiple pages are required from the page file in a
single operation there is no guarantee that the required pages will be
located in a contiguous area on the disk even if the page file is
totally unfragmented. So there is a distinct possibility that the
drive heads will have to be repositioned during the operation.

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada
--
Microsoft MVP (1997 - 2008)
On-Line Help Computer Service
http://onlinehelp.bc.ca

"Anyone who thinks that they are too small to make a difference
has never been in bed with a mosquito."

 

[Terry R.]

I've never seen a pagefile being used "if" it was needed. Whether a
workstation has 256 meg of RAM or 4 gig, the pagefile is always used by
Windows. For light to medium duty users with a lot of RAM, a
performance gain can be seen w/o a pagefile, but obviously the reasons
you stated come into play.

See my reply to John. Most of the "PF Usage" reported by Task
Manager represents unused portions of memory allocation requests.

To see how much actual valid memory content has been moved to the page
file you need a special utility such as
http://www.dougknox.com/xp/utils/xp_pagefilemon.htm

Ron Martell Duncan B.C. Canada[/QUOTE]

Regardless, it wasn't "IF" the swap file is being used. If a swap is
there, Windows WILL use it. That's what I was saying.

--
Terry R.

***Reply Note***
Anti-spam measures are included in my email address.
Delete NOSPAM from the email address after clicking Reply.

 

[ray]

If USB is slow why then does vista have READYBOOST?

Something fishy is going on here

It is a demonstrable fact that USB is much slower than a decent hard disk.
Why MS chose that route, I have no idea.

 

[Ken Blake, MVP]

Mike, I can assure you that I am doing on the machine I am using right
now and have been for a long time with no problems.

You may have no problems, but you are wasting much of the RAM you
have. Read here: http://aumha.org/win5/a/xpvm.htm

 

[carl feredeck]

MVP... the psalm of the Vista user says:

Vista uses ram better that's why its always full: there is no good in having
empty ram!

on that same page you gave "The adage is: 'Free RAM is wasted RAM'."

Therefore according to idiotic vista user logic.. you should cram every bit
of ram as much as you can.
And now comes MVP ken Blake saying something totally different..

"full ram is wasted ram!"

Can you illogical Vista users decide what you want already?
Is the shell/user referring to clams? Seems so!

 

[Bob I]

MVP... the psalm of the Vista user says:

Vista uses ram better that's why its always full: there is no good in having
empty ram!

on that same page you gave "The adage is: 'Free RAM is wasted RAM'."

Therefore according to idiotic vista user logic.. you should cram every bit
of ram as much as you can.
And now comes MVP ken Blake saying something totally different..

"full ram is wasted ram!"

ONLY if the user deleted the pagefile and forced windows to use physical
memory to allocate program demands to reserve swapfile space.

Can you illogical Vista users decide what you want already?
Is the shell/user referring to clams? Seems so!