Using a thumb drive for a hd

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flooberjobby

Limp Gawd
Joined
Apr 4, 2008
Messages
268
I been wondering since I saw thumb drives and flash drives, if you could use them for a primary hd.

You like the solid state drives.

I am pretty sure you can install your os on a thumb drive or a flash drive and boot from them, but is there any benifit in doing that? Also what would be the minimum size needed for a fast system?

Of course I would have a another Hd in the system for installing stuff on and using the thumb drive just to run the os off of.

What do you think?
 
You can't use a thumb drive as an OS drive. You need one of those expensive SSD that were made for it. That cheap flash memory just isn't good enough.
 
I've used a Memery stick duo PRO for running my OS on accident once. I was formatting my system as usuall and selected my 4 gig memry stick duo pro instead. Ran great, but I wanted the os on my hd and I lost all my info on the duo pro.

Also what is the difference between a ssd and a like a flash drive and thumb drives other than the connecter it uses to hook up to the mobo?
 
Modern SSDs have a SATA interface and are engineered to handle the massive read write requirements of an operating system.

On the other hand, thumb drives hook in through a USB interface, which is ridiculously slow and inefficient (USB bandwidth vs SATA bandwidth) The write operations on a thumb drive/memory card required for OS operation would tear it apart, as well. It just isn't intended for an operating system.

That's why readyboost exists. They only use thumb drives to cache tiny files to take advantage of the super fast access rates of the usb flash drive, but it doesn't put any of the larger files on there because it's actually slower than the spinning disk hard drive.
 
While it is possible to boot from and run an OS from a thumb drive, flash ram, particularly cheap flash ram has limited rewrite life. Running an OS from a flash USB drive would quickly wear it out. It is a popular option for prople who set up dedicated FOLDING boxes that then run mainly out of main memory.

SSD drives have a better life cycle, run through the faster SATA or IDE interface, but are expensive.

Don
 
But what if I installed the os on the thumb drive, had an interneral stat 2 drive, and just copyed the program files over to the interal drive.

I'm pretty sure it would increase boot times to that of a ssd. Or would the usb speed hamper the speed of the boot, and still have a not so high life cycle.
 
You aren't going to get the same bandwidth out of a usb drive that you would out of a ssd... all flash memory isn't created equal, and as has been said, the writes involved in most operating systems would burn out a flash drive very quickly.

There is a reason it isn't a popular thing to do...
 
Allright, well thanks for the help. Dang was looking for a cheap alternative to ssd drives, and booting faster. Don't have much income lol.
 
Get a second physical hard drive and put a max/min 4096mb/4096mb page file on the second hard drive as well as the OS hard drive (4gigs means the OS will never have to resize the page file). Also if you use photoshop, move the photoshop scratch disk to the second physical drive. That will significantly improve your operating system times by gigantic leaps and bounds. SSD isn't entirely about speed, but power reduction, noise reduction and such. You're going to be better served with a second drive for a second page file, I promise you. It'll give you the boost you've been looking for. XP and Vista know how to prioritize paging between multiple drives and access the one that's under least demand at that moment. If you're stuck using Parallel ATA, make sure you put the two physical drives on separate channels.

Edit:
A second physical hard drive is cheap and would also provide you with lots of extra storage in addition to the giant performance boost from a second page file. You would also get to put to use a second IDE channel. With a USB drive you're using USB bandwidth which is shared between all of your USB devices. Not only is this slower than pATA or sATA, you're taking away from the available USB bandwidth of other devices.

In as simple terms as possible, this works to speed everything up because the system can read/write to windows at the same time as it read/writes to the page file via two different pools of bandwidth.
 
The best alternative for this kind of thing is a CF to IDE adapter with a fast CF flash drive.

USB 2 is only 480 mbits/sec which will give you less than 50 mBYTES/sec in real world useage. Since my current 7200.11 drive gives around 80 mBYTES/sec, a USB drive would be a backward step for me. That is also a limitation for cheap flash ram. The cheaper stuff is also the slower stuff. The only advantage I could see would be a much faster access time.

Don
 
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