Read/Write speeds Hard Drive vs USB

[Martin]

Having only 256MB RAM and unable to increase it, I have been experimenting
relocating my pagefile on an external drive in the form of a USB memory
stick (leaving a small-size pagefile on the C drive for safety etc).

What I don't know is how the read/write speeds via USB1.1 and USB2 compare
with the read/write speeds of my hard drive (to gauge whether or not this is
a good idea) and I don't know how to measure the read/write speeds of my
hard drive.

Any thoughts on this topic would be gratefully appreciated.

Thanks.

 

[John John]

You can use drive benchmarking software to verify the speed of your
drives. Typically USB drives are slower than hard drives.

It is not a good idea or reccommended practice to place the pagefile on
these removable storage drives. Quite possibly Windows will moan at
startup and without a doubt, even if Windows doesn't complain, paging
performance will decrease.

John

 

[Martin]

Many thanks. I had a suspicion it might not be a bright idea. I
appreciate your kind help - and your not shooting me down in flames.

Martin

 

[John John]

You're welcome. It is a good idea to move the pagfile off the drive
that hold the boot volume (Operating System) and if you have room for an
extra hard drive in your computer you could consider adding another
drive for the pagefile but keep these points in mind.

1- Move the file to a separate hard drive on a separate controller. Do
not move the file to another drive on the same controller (a slaved
drive to the boot volume or operating system drive). IDE controllers
can only handle data from one drive at a time and performance will
suffer if you place the pagefile on a slaved drive to a busy drive.

2- Don't move the pagefile to a different partition on the boot volume.
This will only increase seek time to the pagefile and performance will
degrade.

3- If you cannot arrange your IDE devices and hard drives around the
motherboard's IDE controllers so that the boot volume and pagefile
volume are on their separate controllers consider using an IDE
controller card.

John

 

[Martin]

Many thanks, John. I failed to mention that my "computer" is actually a
laptop, so some of your advice doesn't apply. I think that's why I came
up with the idea of trying a USB drive.

I've been similarly caught out in the past, forgetting that laptops and
computers aren't necessarily the same thing.

Thanks again, though, for the sound advice.

Martin