USB Swap Drive?

[Rabid Badger]

I was reading an article on how it is advantageous to have a second small hard drive dedicated to handling the Windows swap file. I'm not really interested in installing an old 4GB IDE hard disk in my machine, but I was wondering:

What if I picked up a decent sized USB flash drive? I know they can be set up as bootable drives, could I set one up to hold my swap file? Has anyone done this?

 

[Dew]

Flash drives have a limited number of writes before they die. Putting a swap file on one would kill it in a matter of months if not weeks. Plus they are slow. Sure you could do it, but you would see a system DEGRADATION from doing it.

 

[defakto]

Though, they might be as equally fast as an old 4 gig drive..

In all seriousness, it's better to just add a new drive to the system if you want the most perofmance possible.

 

[kenham40]

Replace your system drive with a raptor 150gb 10,000rpm drive and call it a day.

 

[unhappy_mage]

Where was that article? I think I want to write them a letter and call them idiots.

A small second drive means lower density. Lower density means slow. Slow means really, really bad at swapping. Like really bad.

 

[Rabid Badger]

It was in PC Magazine. They said it boosts performance by eliminating situations where the drive needs to read or write something while the OS is requesting something from the swap file. I knew the performance advantage wouldn't be great which is why I was wondering if I could find a cheaper and easier way to do it.

BTW: I didn't subscribe to the magazine, it just started showing up at my house one day. I think Newegg signed me up for it or something.