Prev: Linksys WRTP54G-VR
Next: Ok, never seen this, looking for help
From: Good Night on 19 Mar 2010 22:06
Can anyone tell me why a 32 GB USB drive cannot be made the main boot drive
with Windows on it?

And if it can be made then why it wont be much faster than hard disk since
it has no moving parts.

Also isn't this new expensive SSD (Solid State Drive) just that? What's the
difference? Why the extra cost?



--- news://freenews.netfront.net/ - complaints: news(a)netfront.net ---
From: kony on 19 Mar 2010 22:15
On Sat, 20 Mar 2010 07:06:38 +0500, "Good Night"
<noEmail(a)earth.com> wrote:

>Can anyone tell me why a 32 GB USB drive cannot be made the main boot drive
>with Windows on it?
>

By default Windows isn't set up to run from removable
storage. There are ways to make it work, but you won't want
to once you see how slow it is.


>And if it can be made then why it wont be much faster than hard disk since
>it has no moving parts.

.... because USB is a slower bus than ATA66 or SATA, and
because flash drives are very poor at concurrent I/O like an
OS causes, and because even if the bus weren't a bottleneck,
semi-modern drives are still much faster than USB flash
drives.


>
>Also isn't this new expensive SSD (Solid State Drive) just that? What's the
>difference? Why the extra cost?

SSDs have a more sophisticated controller chip, PCB, memory
cache, and more elaborate casing all adding to cost, AND
several flash chips instead of only one or two so it can do
concurrent parallel access to the chips effectively
multiplying the total bandwidth... and the controller does
more intelligent access otherwise.

SSDs are also considered a luxury item in which much recent
development cost has to be recovered. Eventually I predict
there won't be much difference in cost besides the multiple
of cost per capacity seen from USB2 flash drives, plus cost
of the controller and cache plus a small casing cost.

However both markets have stagnated somewhat due to flash
memory not dropping in price:capacity nearly as rapidly as
it used to. Recall a few short years ago when it seemed the
amount of flash you could get per dollar seemed to double
every 18 months while it has not done so in the last 18
months.
From: Trimble Bracegirdle on 20 Mar 2010 11:25
USB restricts drives to about 1/2 the internal HD transfer.
Then Flash drives..the best of them... are a lot slower than Hard Drives.

SSD is attractive but the price & performance varies enormously
(\__/)
(='.'=) This is Bunny. Copy and paste Bunny into your
(")_(") signature to help him gain world domination.


From: ~misfit~ on 20 Mar 2010 18:23
Somewhere on teh intarwebs Trimble Bracegirdle wrote:
> USB restricts drives to about 1/2 the internal HD transfer.
> Then Flash drives..the best of them... are a lot slower than Hard
> Drives.
> SSD is attractive but the price & performance varies enormously

Yeah, and the place where SSD will do the most good (IMO) is older laptops
(like my R51 ThinkPad for instance) that have reasonable computing power
[1.8GHz Pentium M Dothan, 2MB L2 cache], 2GB of RAM and an awesome 1400 x
1050 IPS display but the HDD is the bottleneck. Problem is, that laptop has
an IDE interface and the IDE SSDs are seemingly vanishing from the market
before the price drops low enough to make it a viable option. I mean, yes it
would make the computer [subjectively] seem twice as fast but at the moment
the IDE SSDs, even the small ones, cost as much as, or more than, the
laptop's worth. :-(

I just hope that, down the track when the tech isn't so expensive, one of
the SSD / HDD makers realises the potential for this market and puts out a
line of 2.5" IDE SSDs. (If it's a desktop that's IDE only it's no big deal,
you can always drop in a PCI - SATA adapter card [Can't do that with a
laptop]... and desktops of that age are hardly worth preserving anyway...)

There was a period in the laptop's evolution, post P4, when the awesome
Pentium M was used but pre-SATA, and there are some still very useful
machines around that could use an SSD boost, if the price is right.
--
Cheers,
Shaun.

Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day...


 | 
Pages: 1
Prev: Linksys WRTP54G-VR
Next: Ok, never seen this, looking for help