Korean Job Discussion Forums

mithridates

Do usb flash memory devices speed up your computer?

RobinH · Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 6:27 am Post subject:

I've never heard that.

Demophobe · Joined: 17 May 2004

Umm...I think I know what you're asking....

No, they don't.

Speed up? In what way, mith?

mithridates · Posted: Thu Aug 03, 2006 6:34 am Post subject:

I was reading today about how Windows Vista would incorporate something that did that and thought perhaps there's already a piece of software that does. Using them to create a larger cache or something along those lines.

Juregen · Joined: 30 May 2006

rocklee · Joined: 04 Oct 2005 Location: Seoul

You can boot from a USB stick and run windows on it, and they can be faster than IDE based hard disks. Only problem is USB doesn't always utilise its theoretical bandwidth of 480 Mbit per second (60mb per second). Because of its shared nature, they usually max out at 20mb per second. Hard disks in comparison peaks at around 60-65mb per second.

Windows Vista also has another interesting feature, computers on a network can share their memories to the active computer, giving it more RAM to work on (I believe the 4GB cap on Windows 2000 and maybe XP is no more on Vista). So if you have 10 computers and they all have 1GB of RAM each, the sole active PC can have up to 10GB of memory due to this shared memory feature.