Speeding up XP w/ flash memory

[jessee]

I'm looking for a way to use an SD card (or what ever is laying around) to speed up my computer. Vista will be using this kind of technique with flash drives and I was wondering if you could do something like it in XP?

If you have a fast card, could you put some of the operating system on it? How about the pagefile.sys file? How about temp files? How about some programs?

Now that you can get a "Lexar 1GB Compact Flash Card $34.97 shipped free", why not extend the system memory and spread the drive access to over more forms of storage?

 

[Matthias99]

Please search; this gets suggested or asked about, oh, once a month or so.

Flash memory has very low access times compared to a hard drive, but it usually has slower STR. Capacities are also low, and cost per GB is very high compared with magnetic hard disks.

Putting the OS or applications on a drive like this (or any sort of SSD) could improve disk-bound performance, but the cost is very high. It's unlikely to be worth it for most users.

For temp/swapfiles... in practice, increasing the amount of system RAM will probably be more effective. Putting the swapfile on a drive like this could help somewhat when you are swapping to disk, but it would be FAR better to just have more RAM to begin with, as it is still significantly slower than DRAM.

 

[jessee]

I agree that the cost per gigabyte is higher than disk drives but if it's just sitting around... Also, once you have maxed-out system ram, what to do with your money?

Flash memory does have one important attribute that system memory doesn't and that's that it doesn't go away on reboot. I'm also looking for a way to also speed up the boot process.

Would flash speed up hibernating?

 

[batmanuel]

Another option is the new Gigabyte iRAM cards, which turn sticks of normal DDR RAM into high speed storage space. This card would be a much better solution if you want a way to speed up your swapfile. It's especially nice if you are maxed out at 4GB on your 32-bit windows graphics workstation and you want to make a relatively cheap, but fast Adobe scratch disk for ultra-high resolution photo editing.

Using a flash memory card for a swapfile isn't such a great idea, becuase the swap file gets written to so often that you wind up actually wearing out the flash memory card really fast (flash memory only has relatively small number of times they can be written to compared to SDRAM).

 

[Jiggz]

I-Ram!

 

[GrammatonJP]

Get 2 IRAM, one for your boot and one for your swap.. 4gb each..

You can even make a 8gb raid 0 array, partition it to 6gb os and 2gb swap or 5 & 3..

Sometimes you just need a little more room on the os partition..

or no partition at all since it's all solid state.. no drive latency to worry about....