[Gllug] performance boost for linux

[Jose Luis Martinez]

On Wed, Feb 11, 2009 at 1:45 PM, Chris Bell
<chrisbell at overview.demon.co.uk> wrote:
> On Wed 11 Feb, Lucy Peters wrote:
>>  I was thinking more of an usb drive to increase performance like
>> www.eboostr.com/ for Linux.
>>
>> Lucy
>
> Using a USB connected device may slow your system rather than speed it up.

That  is true, I will throw around a few numbers to illustrate the
difference in speeds:

I found the quotes below after a bit of googling:

"Modern USB flash drives claim speeds of as high as 30 megabytes per
second (MBps) when reading, and 15 MBps while writing. USB 2.0 ports
have the potential for greater speeds, up to 60 MBps, but limits in
the flash technology do not currently allow it to make full use of
this." ( http://www.flashmemory.cc/usb-flash-drive.php )

>From Wikipedia, the current speeds of SATA disks is 300 MB/s give or
take ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serial_ATA ).

As for RAM, I found 1.2GB/s access times ( nice clear  calculation in
http://www.computermemoryupgrade.net/measuring-ram-speed.html ).

Given all this information it would be very interesting to know how
the Windows product can boost performance at all. I am sure Windows
could be speeded up somehow (are there RAM disks in Windows?) but it
is not clear how it could be done with a USB drive and software...
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