Absolutely true.
Anyway, Windows users don’t use to configure their USB storages for the quickest performance. By default, the USB properties sets the optimization for quick extraction.
Changing this parameter, the difference is astonishing.
Personally I’ve never needed more than 2GB on a flash drive, but that’s because I don’t use them except for short-term backups or moving things from one computer to another. I love that the 2GB ones are so cheap—they’re practically disposable, you don’t have to invest any love in the individual stick at all.
Software is like porn, it is better when you have it on the palm of your hand.
For anyone considering running an operating system from a flash drive, there is this article in InformationWeek, “How To Run Linux From A USB Flash Drive”
http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=207800392
To quote the article: “What’s more, there are ways to run Linux from a flash drive that don’t even require an OS reboot, especially if you’re running Windows.”
How do people find the reliability of the larger capacity Flash drives? I’ve been considering either an 8GB or 16GB, but the number of stories I’ve read about them crapping out has me hesitant to spend that kind of money.
I’ve been bringing my OS around with me for about a year now. Puppy Linux on flash, with a supplemental CD-ROM booter for comps that won’t boot straight to USB.
I even have an emulator in there so I can run it in Windows.
I’m very happy with my 4GB Kingston pendrive.
Hi Jeff,
I’ve been using OCZ USB drives for a few years now, and there’s definitely a large difference. Especially when you compare it to those cheap $10-20 variations!
We also looked at offering our software on a USB key, such as the OCZ, but the performance was noticeable with larger databases. It wasn’t atrocious, but it was noticeable. Of course for the average consumer it’s probably not that big an issue, we still have many customers using P2 and P3’s with under 512MB Ram running XP with antivirus, etc. The OS alone is a crawl and they’re willing to accept that.
Something else to note, most USB keys have limited read/writes before they fail, some pretty low. So for example if you’re planning to run an application, especially one with a database that gets queried often, be careful and backup often. Biggest tip I can offer.
“I’m not in the hard drive performance matters camp” - You got a page file?
The strength of the USB is in random seek/read/write which utterly KILLS your average HD. (well as long as you dont get the cheap flash drives)
Which is the whole Vista ReadyBoost feature. Ready boost will use the usb drive as a cache for your paging. A real geek doesnt need ReadyBoost as a real geek knows how to put the page file onto the USB drive… But it’s good for general users.
If you got a 1 or 2 gig laptop with a standard 5k rpm HD, seriously try sticking a GOOD USB drive in and using ReadyBoost. You will notice a difference.
It’s really noticable on low memory machines. 'cause Paging happens.
There is a huge hype about SSD drives, and for portable devices I can see the attraction. But for a desktop? Desktop doesn’t have the same problem with power-consumption as laptops. SSD is not that fast, it can compete with normal 3.5" 7200 rmp drives, but if we stick them up against 15k rpm SAS drives they fade in comparison.
For running an os, assuming you run your swap/pagetable files on the same hd, it’s not the transfer speed that counts, but the seek time. If you need to read 2 files are the same time, you will read 1 block(4k usually) of each file at a time, and you will have to seek in between them to get to the other file. This is specially funny when your drive is fragmented.
This post came along pretty perfectly. I was just getting ready to look for a new flash drive.
Jeff,
I just thought I should point you to the current king of SSD’s:
The MTRON Pro
http://www.king-cart.com/cgi-bin/cart.cgi?store=dvnationproduct_name=MTRON+PRO+2.5+16GB+SATA+SSDexact_match=exact
This thing trumps the Raptors but are still pretty pricey…
They were able to get 860 MB/s in a 4X RAID array. Now that’s extreme ;-]
On Security Now #135 they discussed two different types of memory for USB flash drives in the Ironkey interview:
Jeff,
Do you know if the storage technology in USB drives is the same as in SSDs, such as those that ship in the Apple Air?
This is totally discounting el-cheapo USB drives, of course. I remember winning a free USB stick (I think it was a Microstore one?) from the University that has an absolutely abysmal read/write speed.
Copying my textures over to the disk (roughly 500, each around 1MB) took well over an hour on the disk. And thats not even counting Vista’s caching, which refused to let me eject the disk for another ten or so minutes.
Don’t buy the $10 2GB USB drives. Bad, bad idea!
I’m all for bigger, faster hard drives - but there is a tipping point looming out there.
How much data can I afford to have attached to a small device that I can drop in a puddle? or leave behind in my hotel room?
I’m sure there are lots of good practices to keep these devices attached to items you aren’t likely to forget - but a USB drive is yet another small, expensive easy-to-lose item. Add in the ever-increasing capacity for storage and you have the makings of a device that will encourage you to store more and more stuff - and then it will fall down a sewer grate.
There’s undeniable appeal to small and portable - but stand alone portable storage has risks that networked storage doesn’t have.
A while back, I came across an interview with Linus Torvalds, in which he said something like, “file systems on non-rotating media will be different”. This led me to quote him on a thread on comp.databases.theory. I mused that such storage, combined with multi-core, multi-processor machines would lead to the resurrection of the relational (fully normalized) database. Since such a database is by definition without redundant data, its data footprint is at least an order of magnitude smaller than the xml flat file stuff now in vogue.
Anyway, Joe Celko chimed in, in agreement and said his soon to be published book (“Thinking in Sets”, get it) discussed such.
Texas Memory Systems has been building SSD machines for a while. Industrial strength SSDs with MC/MP cpus. Oracle claims to be doing work with just such. It’ll be interesting.
SanDisk’s U3 is about taking your system everywhere on a USB memory
SuperTalent DH series deserves kudos. Its probably as fast as our second place contender, yet costs less than any of these.
On the subject of USB key speeds…
Anyone has any idea why Flash keys (in general) seems to have difficulty writing as fast as they can when downloading something off a HTTP(S) server?
i.e. why do, when I try to download a 500MB file directly to my USB key using HTTPS, it takes 25-30 minutes (300KB/s), but when I download the same file, from the same server, to my local HDD, it takes 2 minutes (4MB/s), and copying the same file from my local HDD to the USB key takes about 2 minutes too… It’s as if there was something that throttled the download speed when downloading directly to a USB key…
Also, I tried downloading the same file to a USB HDD, and I get speed similar to downloading to a local HDD…
(Only tested on Windows; not sure if Linux / Mac has similar problems…)