[geeks] Flash drive questions

[Mike Meredith]

On Sun, 6 Aug 2006 07:59:52 -0400, James Fogg wrote:
> Sounds like a bad solution to a non-problem.
> 
> Virtual memory swap space on a fixed disk is much faster than
> flash-anything could ever be. And if you unplugged your thumbdrive
> you'd have to world's most unstable system, no matter what OS you run.

Can you explain that ? After all :-

1: fixed disks are *slow* and they're getting slower relative to the
   rest of the computer's speed.

2: Moving parts (fixed disks) are inherently slower than solid state
   parts (flash). I haven't spent much time researching, but consumer
   flash devices seem to be within reaching distance of fixed disk
   speed; flash-based enterprise SSD solutions are almost certainly
   faster. Of course I'm talking about transfer speed here ... seek
   time for flash is about 1,000 times faster.

3: Because of the write limits, you would be very unlikely to use
   flash-based storage for "swap space"; a cache for most frequently
   paged in stuff makes more sense (mostly reads).

4: A USB thumbdrive is fine enough for testing. Obviously if you want
   reliability you'd want something more like an internal flash SATA
   drive.