raptor vs usb flash

drak3

drak3

drak3

Associate
Joined
26 Jan 2006
Posts
1,502
How faster is the USB stick compared to the raptor or raided raptors? Is it really worth it to get one for vista readyboost thing?

discuss!
 
The fastest pen drives manage about 22MB/sec sustained read. A single raptor will do about 90MB/sec. I think memory sticks are too slow to be useful. Especially as it's easy to find a free GB on your drive to use as swap space.

Out of interest, 8 raptors can manage 533MB/s sustained. Pretty crazy.
 
Random seek times are only one part fo the equation. If you need to read 2Mb off both a raptor and a flash drive, the fact that the flash drive finds the appropriate data in nanoseconds as opposed to miliseconds for the Raptor is pretty much irrelevant if it takes the flash drive about 0.1s to transfer the data as opposed to about 0.025s for the Raptor.


*Yes, these are rough numbers and ignore caching and burst transfers etc but it illustrates the point.
 
The Vista Readyboost function does rely on seek times, this is why fast external hard drives won't work with it.

The idea is that Windows recognises files that require long, sequential reads and stores them on the HDD, but for files that require short burst, non-sequential reads are stored on the Flash memory.

For these small files, a fast HDD would struggle to sustain a throughput anywhere near a Flash device with a near-zero access time, even if the Flash device can only transfer a maximum of ~3MBps.

Supposedly Readyboost can really shave 5 or more seconds off of a full boot, and as Flash devices get faster and Vista receives updates it should pay off to use Readyboost USB drives or Hybrid Hard Disks.
 
Well explained mosfet
icon14.gif
More sensible than I thought.

Also, hyperdrive4 for the win :D
 
600 quid you get only the Hyperdrive4 whithout the sticks :p?

ps: Do you guys belive an i-Ram (because is cheap) can be used to host the pagefile and thus increase performance? (since the pagefile is lost when you turn off the machine)
 
Last edited:
this may sounds stupid and its a "outta there" kinda idea, but if they could come up with say RAID with Flash drives wouldnt that increase the transfer rate to a standard IDE/SATA drive bandwidth but keep the access times really low?
 
drak3 said:
600 quid you get only the Hyperdrive4 whithout the sticks :p?

ps: Do you guys belive an i-Ram (because is cheap) can be used to host the pagefile and thus increase performance? (since the pagefile is lost when you turn off the machine)
Click to expand...

This is one of the main reasons that people use Ramdisks like the I-RAM, there are lots of sites out there with benchmarks and guides if you're interested in it.

this may sounds stupid and its a "outta there" kinda idea, but if they could come up with say RAID with Flash drives wouldnt that increase the transfer rate to a standard IDE/SATA drive bandwidth but keep the access times really low?
Click to expand...

This is in fact how nearly all large SSDs work. The largest single-chip flash memory devices top out at several gigabits (somewhere around 32Gb) so to create SSDs with capacities of 4GB and above multiple chips feed a controller which runs a RAID-like setup, in addition to load-balancing writes across the whole drive.
 
Skandisk have a new 32GB SSD drive coming out in a few weeks with pretty decent transfer rates, 65MB/s read 35MB/s write and 0.12ms access time...Its RAID 0 performance increase should be near linear too! A-DATA also have 64 and 128GB SSD drives coming out soon, with SATA-II connectors.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom