Comments for Will my system be faster if I make my C: drive a flash drive?

Comment from Bill on 2008-12-23

2008-12-23T15:04:22Z

I've seen some improvement with one flash drive, and degradation with another. Not all flash drives are fast enough. If you do this sort of thing, make sure to get a fast flash drive and benchmark it. I have one drive that's great for sequential read, but terrible for random reads and it was very slow for readyboost.

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A comment on: Will my system be faster if I make my C: drive a flash drive?

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Comment from Eli Coten on 2007-06-16

2007-06-16T22:25:51Z

I have experience of running software programmes from a USB flash-drive and have always found them to be slower in comparison to running them off a hard drive.

I have tried both Firefox & Thunderbird portable, as well as storing & using Outlook.pst files on a flash drive and whilst Outlook was unbearably slow, Firefox & Thunderbird run much slower from a thumb-drive than they do from a magnetic-hard drive profile.

Therefore I would extend that to say that booting off a flash drive would not only wear out the flash-drive incredibly rapidly, but in addition would likely slow everything down as well.

I believe flash drives are good for long continuous writes but if you are reading and writing lots of tiny bits of data all over the place the access time or delay between each individual read and write operation becomes noticeable.

This is only my theory based on what I've seen in practice, so it may be wrong but certainly my experience shows that flash drives are no good for running software of any kind from.

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A comment on: Will my system be faster if I make my C: drive a flash drive?

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Comment from Dave B on 2007-06-11

2007-06-11T21:46:50Z

Everything I've found has shown that Readyboost has limited influence on the system's performance. If the computer has less than 1 gigabyte of RAM (perhaps 512M), Readyboost can enhance the system performance. However, the same machine will see dramatically faster performance by increasing the system memory (RAM) to at least 1G and even more at 2G. One of our family's machines only has 1G of RAM, some of which is allocated to use by video, so the available RAM is less than 1G. I jammed a USB thumbdrive into the back of the machine - but I don't have any measurable results to show it is any faster.

Folks interested in reading more, can find an interesting article over on AnandTech:

http://www.anandtech.com/systems/showdoc.aspx?i=2917&p=5

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A comment on: Will my system be faster if I make my C: drive a flash drive?

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