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Will a faster read/write speed on USB drive = faster performance?

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Zeedok
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Will a faster read/write speed on USB drive = faster performance?

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?

John T. Haller
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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!

Zeedok
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Thanks

Portable Apps are great, but my set up speed had discouraged me a little. Will get a faster drive and go for it!!

elbel86
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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?

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