[Nottingham] re: FLASH vs HDD (Martin)

[Jim Moore]

(interspersed)

OK Folks,

Continuing my deliberations for an 'ultimate PC'  :-) 

... Next question (not that I've finalised the earlier questions yet...)

Will I gain much of a speedup by using a USB flash drive for storing the
OS and applications?

(not really given the speed of SATAII (300MB/sec burst, that's 2.4GBit to binary purists), almost double in RAID0. USB2.0 runs at 480MBit. USB2.0 would have been a viable option if we were still on ATA33.)

I've seen a 4GB pendrive advertised at "x150" speed. What is that x150 of?!

(I have no idea, it's more than likely just marketese.)

Anyone tried this?

And what is the best fs for flash?

(FAT32, which is how they usually come. Any journaling-type FS can potentially brick a USB flash drive, so I'd advise against it.)


Or am I wasting my time?...

(I would consider high-speed Compact Flash which can run through a CFIDE controller and a IDE-SATA converter. A few of those babies in parallel would give a consistently bus-speed RAID0 which would blow any platter-based, or even USB-based storage, right out of the water in terms of raw throughput speed and seek times.)

Any comments?

Cheers,
Martin