PortableApps.com wins big in the 2009 Community Choice Awards and hits 100 million app downloads!
ApplicationsUser loginFollow & Connect With Us   
What is a portable app?
Find out on the What is a portable app? page.
Sponsored Links |
Will a faster read/write speed on USB drive = faster performance?Submitted by Zeedok on July 13, 2006 - 6:57am
Guess it seems obvious, huh? Is it true though? Been using old CF cards etc at work and hadn't really considered that this is probably a real bottleneck. Any thoughts? »
( categories: )
|
Yup
As long as you're using USB 2.0, the biggest bottle neck is the speed of the actual drive as they don't come anywhere near hitting USB 2.0's limit. And, compared to a local hard drive (where you usually run apps), flash RAM is SLOW. Read speed is important (for reading DLLs and EXEs and such), but write speed is very important, as apps will be writing bits here and there (like cookies, config changes, etc). So, you need a drive that has fast read and write speeds... and has a fast controller so that an individual read or write is handled quickly. That's why, even a drive that can read or write a large MP3 file quickly may still be slow with portable apps.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
Thanks
Portable Apps are great, but my set up speed had discouraged me a little. Will get a faster drive and go for it!!
Look out for "Buffalo
Look out for "Buffalo Firestix Type R".
They are the fastest sticks on the market with 32MB/s read & 27MB/s write rates.
And yes, faster speeds of your USB stick will increase performance of your apps.
I tested my Maxfield G-Flash MP3 player with a PE2USB'd version of UBCD4Win and it was slow as hell.
What about card readers?
I use an SD card and reader as a portable drive, and was looking to upgrade the card to a faster (and bigger) one. My card reader is USB 2.0, but does the reader have a speed of its own that could create another bottleneck or is it just the speed of the card that counts?