Can flash drives improve PC performance?

[sundevil777 102]

I've seen some flash drives that make some vague claim implying that it will improve the performance of a computer. I remember hearing something about it performing something like internal RAM. If true, do you have to be running Vista to get the good effect? Does getting the good effect depend on some software or something that comes with the flash drive?

I have a several year old 1.5 GHz pentium 4 with only 384 MB of RAM, running Windows XP, so if this is a decent poor man's way to increase performance, I'm definitely interested. I realize it cannot be as effective as regular internal memory, but at $15 for 1 GB, at least it is cheap.

Thanks for your help.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[Foster 0]

I've heard about this but it is only for Vista if my info is correct. From what I've heard its a gimick at best. Do a google search I'm sure there is lots out there about it.

[normiss 897]

SSD

"SanDisk SSD UATA 5000 achieves a sustained read rate of 67-megabyte (MB)*/sec and a random read rate of over 7000 inputs/outputs per second (IOPS) for a 512-byte transfer2 – more than 100 times faster than any hard disk drive. "

[kelpdiver 2]

the flash drives that will improve performance are rather expensive, and not cost effective for what you intend.

The hybrid hard drives with a flash drive add on so far have proven to offer no real performance gains.

If you can score cheap dimms for the 384M machines, you'd get a much bigger gain bumping to 512 or higher.

[normiss 897]

64 GB for $1500 is expensive if it's 100 times faster???

[denete 3]

Over what bus?

[kelpdiver 2]

Quote

64 GB for $1500 is expensive if it's 100 times faster???

It is when you're the one paying for it!

Or if you're plugging it into a P4 that's worth only a couple hundred bucks now.

I was really interested in this SSD drives for a low power file server, but once I realized that notebook drives only consume 1W of power, I stopped thinking about paying that cost premium.

[billvon 3,119]

> 64 GB for $1500 is expensive if it's 100 times faster???

Well, "100 times faster" is somewhat misleading. If it's over a standard IDE bus, it may indeed have a read/write speed 100 times greater than rotary media, but only get a 1.5x improvement because you're maxing out the interface. If your memory size is such that it's paging a lot, all the mass storage in the world won't speed things up much.

Most speed problems are due to multiple problems. Increasing your RAM is probably the easiest way to see a speed increase.

[SuFantasma 0]

Good point Billvon... to answer the question: "Can Flash Drives Improve PC Performance?", the answer is :

Yes, if and only if the PC has not achieved it's full input/output performance (I/O).

I assume the post is referring to Solid-State-Drives (SDD) and not the USB-type flash drive.

Whether a SSD will meet YOUR performance expectations, that's another story. In today's environment the primary use for SSD is to reduce server-class OS access latency associated with mechanical drives. In this respect, yes, the SSD are a quantum leap in performance . However, this performance improvement is palpable when the southbridge I/O components are to blame ....

For consumer-level machines (other than recovering gamers), SSDs will not deliver the bang for the buck. They do defragment in about 15 seconds! Try that with your 7200 RPM 64 Gig drive :-)

Cheers

Y yo, pa' vivir con miedo, prefiero morir sonriendo, con el recuerdo vivo".
- Ruben Blades, "Adan Garcia"

[sundevil777 102]

Quote

the flash drives that will improve performance are rather expensive, and not cost effective for what you intend.

The hybrid hard drives with a flash drive add on so far have proven to offer no real performance gains.

If you can score cheap dimms for the 384M machines, you'd get a much bigger gain bumping to 512 or higher.

The 1 GB flash drives with the "windows enhancer" (I think that is what it was called) were only $15. Since I was looking for another flash drive anyway, I thought it was worth checking out. The drive itself had no specifics at all about the supposed benefit.

People are sick and tired of being told that ordinary and decent people are fed up in this country with being sick and tired. I’m certainly not, and I’m sick and tired of being told that I am

[DrewEckhardt 0]

Quote

> 64 GB for $1500 is expensive if it's 100 times faster???
Well, "100 times faster" is somewhat misleading. If it's over a standard IDE bus, it may indeed have a read/write speed 100 times greater than rotary media, but only get a 1.5x improvement because you're maxing out the interface. If your memory size is such that it's paging a lot, all the mass storage in the world won't speed things up much.

It's workload dependent.

With spinning media you have to accelerate and decelerate the heads to line up with the cylinder of interest and wait for the sectors to come around. When you're interested in random disk locations even a fast disk and reasonable queue depth are unlikely to yield 150 operations per second.

With no moving parts its the same cost to hit any address and you might get 15000 IOPs out of a solid state drive.

At 4K per IOP (as in database B+ tree pages for small records) total bandwidth is under 60M/sec and you have a 100X speedup.

When your workload consists of large sequential transfers you're going to bottleneck on an IDE bus and would spend less per gigabyte achieving a desired transfer rate by striping across more spindles.

In a PC running bloated software you need more RAM. Things have gotten so big that you can have a 1000M memory foot print. When available RAM is smaller than the working set things get copied to and from mass storage which is much slower (flash) or much much slower (disk - you only get 400K/second vs 1000000K/second)