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thumb drive= page file?
- Thread starter TBJ
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Zardoz
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also if the drive came out it would be bad.
How so?
Zardoz
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The swap file was not made to put on a temp/removable storage device. If the device was to be removed Windows would more then likely error or even blue screen. I have also seen where some people have reported hangs and pausing when they moved the swap file to a USB flash drive. I am not sure if this was due to the flash drives speed, or other factors, but it has been reported.
The only time you use a thumb drive for any sort of "swapping" is with Vista's ReadyBoost. Thumb drives aren't meant for constant read-write cycles and you will kill the drive quickly with such use. ReadyBoost is supposed to be different, but I don't think Vista has been around long enough for us to tell if ReadyBoost is going to start doing in flash drives.
I tried it out and never got any error or blue screen. I agree it's not a good idea to do this either way but while just to see if it worked or not I had 0 issues.
Zardoz
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mmm, are you sure you moved it to just the usb stick only or added a second location?
I'm quite positive the only pagefile was on the thumbdrive. No error, no bluescreen. I did expect something to happen but nothing.
Uhhmmm... this is a falacy. If it wasn't, why would Vista be using Flash-RAM based products for ReadyBoost?
Flash-RAM can easily handle 10 million read/write passes or more in its lifetime, so even with daily use of such a device as a pagefile or for any temporary file storage whatsoever, it'll be a really long damned time before someone does 10 million or more read/write cycles on such a device.
To quote a snippet of the ReadyBoost FAQ written by one of the people that created the ReadyBoost subsystem in Vista (located at: ReadyBoost Q&A):
Pretty sure when those folks created ReadyBoost they more than likely devised some test or application that would do nothing but sit there and read/write/read/write to a Flash-RAM based device for weeks if not many months 24/7 and then they could extrapolate out how long such a device should last for such purposes. Even if you got a year of usage out of it, and you got enhanced system performance the entire time, isn't that worth a few bucks considering how cheap USB sticks are these days, then go buy another one a year from now when they'll probably cost even less?
10 years sounds like a pretty long fuckin' time to me. I say if you wanna use a USB Flash-RAM stick for some extra pagefile space or even as the primary pagefile storage location, go for it. You'll get fast random access times, but you'll hurt on the actual read/write speeds; a real hard drive will probably outperform it.
Won't hurt to do some testing on this... Hrmmm... testing...
calebb
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Readyboost does not write data to your flash drive very often - especially after it has adapted to your normal usage patterns.
Think of it as a write-occasionally, read-often cache.
This is much different than your page file!