Has anyone tried putting your Windows "Page file" on a SD card or USB flash drive?

This could potentially speed Windows performance up if you got a 80x + flash card or fast USB2.0 device?? The random read times would be so much faster than a typical hard-drive.

Has anyone tried this?

With what OSes is this even possible?

I was reading that with Vista's Ready Boost it isn't quite like putting your page file on the device and there is no real benefit if you have more than 2GB of RAM. I would think that with a 8GB or perhaps even a 4GB flash drive putting the page file on the USB2.0 device might actually be sound practice.

I would think that the constant reading/writing would wear the drive down in short order.

USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mbps, SATA at 3GBps, so I don't think that USB really has the bandwidth.

But eventually, the fastest secondary storage devices will be flash RAM based, there already coming on line, and the way flash prices dive, flash based hard drives should become more and more common.

Solid state drives have the potential to dramatically change computing for the better.

heatlesssun said:

USB 2.0 is rated at 480Mbps, SATA at 3GBps, so I don't think that USB really has the bandwidth.

But eventually, the fastest secondary storage devices will be flash RAM based, there already coming on line, and the way flash prices dive, flash based hard drives should become more and more common.

Solid state drives have the potential to dramatically change computing for the better.

Click to expand...

USB2.0 doesn't have the continous bandwidth available, but it has almost instant random read and write abilities.

Archaea said:

USB2.0 doesn't have the continous bandwidth available, but it has almost instant random read and write abilities.

Click to expand...

Bulk transfer across USB is great if it's a single data stream, unidirectional. But adding multiple streams and bidirectionality (not a word, don't care) increase the CPU's participation. Read; perf hit.

Bulk transfers are only guaranteed in an "as available" bandwidth state, so Isoch and Interrupt operations performed on USB will usurp your Bulk transfer.

Bulk is treated as a non-time sensitive data transfer, that is guaranteed to complete, but only when it is allowed to.


1394b would be a better choice here, it's a peer to peer device connection

Kevlarman said:

I would think that the constant reading/writing would wear the drive down in short order.

Click to expand...

From what I have read thats one of the major problems. The drives only have a limited number of writes and after that they wear out. The new SSD's have a way of coping with that problem they alternate where they store the info so that no part of the drive is being excessively written to. I don't think usb drives do that so I bet they would wear out very quickly.