I've noticed that apps that are taken from portableapps.com are usually slower when run from a flash drive (for example firefox 3 takes a whopping 30 seconds to load but on the hard drive firefox takes only a second to load). I have my own version of audacity on my flash drive and it loads faster than audacity portable from portableapps.com. Why? Maybe in the future you could make the programs run faster. Do you know why this happens?
EDIT: I mean on startup the apps are slow. Sorry for the confusion.
Visit the Community page
Join our forums
Subscribe to our email newsletter
Subscribe with RSS
Follow us on Facebook
Follow us on LinkedIn
Follow us on Twitter
Follow us on Mastodon
Follow us on BlueSky
Has to do things that make the app actually portable, and make it store all it's settings on the USB. These launchers do things like edit text files to change the paths to various items listed in them. They are slower than apps run from the hard drive because of slower read/write speeds.
your on the right track there my friend, it's actually because of the USB Drive (Thumb drive) is slower in speed than an actual hard drive, now say if you have an external Hard drive. it would be at a speed of 7200 rpm therefore the app runs at normal speed, but on a thumb drive speed is quiet slower due to the fact it isn't running on a rotational disk like a normal hard drive would
your friendly neighbourhood moderator Zach Thibeau
Actually seek time on flash is faster than a disk because there are no moving parts. Sadly, read and write speeds for flash are a lot slower than a disk and I don't understand why...
RAM is lightning-quick, though. The moving parts in a hard drive actually slow it down compared to solid state memory.
Flash-drive are using a cheap technology which isn't very fast, but it's better than to be stuck in the floppy disk era.
The main bottleneck would we the USB port, which isn't very fast compared to an IDE/S-ATA connection of an hard-drive. The USB 3.0 compliant devices should increase damatically the transfer speed, but you'll have to get a motherboard with a USB port and a USB device that support it in order to see an enhancement.
To give you an insight of the approximate speed of USB 2.0 versus a S-ATA drive:
USB 2.0 has a theoretical transfer speed of 480 Mbit/s (60MB/s). In real life, you might get around 15 to 20MB/s of transfer speed.
The S-ATA has a theoretical transfer speed of 3 Gbit/s (384MB/s). There is quite a difference, hence why the PortableApps version are slower when used from a thumbdrive in our current generation hardware.
Today's flash drives use less expensive (read: cheaper and slower) flash RAM and controllers so that they are affordable. While you could have a flash drive that fully maxes out USB 2.0 with lightning fast read *AND* write speeds, it would be so expensive that no one would buy it.
As an example, a 16GB SSD hard drive (internal) that supports 150Mbps costs over US$500. The 16GB flash drive I just picked up went for about US$40. There is a reason for the difference in cost there.
USB 3.0 will not speed up flash drives at all.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
So I guess a better solution would be to get a portable hard-drive (2,5" for portability), as they are cheaper to make, and the I/O speed is probably way better.
Slow or not, nothing beats the portability factor of a flash drive slung around your neck. Not only is a hard drive bulkier and not lanyard-friendly, but you also need to carry a USB cable too in most cases. Whereas the USB plug is built into a thumbdrive.
Decisions, decisions...
I just made the move towards a portable HD, cause I was getting frustrated with the speed of FireFox in combination with my flash drive and the slow computers at my school.
But indeed it's about what you want most, the speed or the portability.
I should totally get my landyard and put my portable hard drive around my neck...
iLike Macs, iPwn, However you put it... Apple is better ^_^
"Claiming that your operating system is the best in the world because more people use it is like saying McDonalds makes the best food in the world..."
It's funny, because I actually saw an employee in an Apple store one time carrying a full-sized iPod (the hard drive one) on a huge lanyard. THAT must have been uncomfortable!
I guess that's the geek version of bling, eh?
Jim
neutron1132 (at) usa (dot) com
Now that's a cultural trend I'd like to see : )
Instead of competing for most diamond carats on a neck piece its gigabytage
PortableApps.com Advocate
I run my PortableApps Menu from a 120 GB Western Digital Passport drive. All of the apps run extremely fast from it. I have no issues with apps being slow whatsoever. When I ran them from thumb drives though just about all of them ran slow.
hopefully will mean portable apps will be way faster
I am who I intend to be.
>hopefully will mean portable apps will be way faster
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
Check to see if your parrallel ports are set to spp or spp+epp. spp+epp adds a dma to your media and should speed things up.
I have absolutely no idea what you mean or how to my "parallel ports."
so no need that everybody keeps telling me this...
And yes I still use parport, viva parport, parport for ever...
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland
How do you enable this spp+epp? since I searched for parport and found windows info, I am thinking that there is a small program or some commandline stuff we can do?
E=MC²
remember, right now, the limit of transfer speed of flash drives is in the read/write speed of the drive itself!!!, not in the transfer rate of the USB port. This means that even with USB 3.0, although the transfer capacity will be way more than with USB 2.0, the flash drive will still limit the transfer rate. The speed of the port made no difference.
At the moment, almost no device can max out the full transfer capabilities of a USB 2.0,...now imagine USB 3.0......Now u kno what i mean!!!!!! It'll never happen for commercial, on-the-market consumer devices for AT LEAST 3 months after USB 3.0 is released.
Hopefully the faster memory chips will go down in prices eventually that they will be feasible for use in usb thumb drives.
They're not bad now. You can pick up an 8GB Kingston HyperX for $50. So, there's a relatively small premium on price for a drive with good performance.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
During the holiday specials I bought some 4GB OCZ Rally2 dual channel USB thumb drives for $7 each. They are nice and fast with the dual channels. Huge orange beacon on the end of the stick can be disabled with some "MacGyvering" (I pulled the end cap off and scraped the LED off of the PCB).
http://www.ocztechnology.com/products/flash_drives/ocz_rally2_turbo_usb_...
Cancer Survivors -- Remember the fight, celebrate the victory!
Help control the rugrat population -- have yourself spayed or neutered!
You can actually speed up your apps startup quite a bit at the cost of a bit of compatability. If you reformat your flash drive to NTFS, it loads up apps in a lot less time.
My main flash drive is a SuperTalent Pico 8Gb. It's very small and fairly cheap, so it runs really slow. With the drive formatted as Fat32, it took 105 seconds to load up OpenOffice. After I reformatted to NTFS and turned off indexing in Vista, it loads in 22 seconds.
Admittedly, now it won't work in some older computers, but you can't have everything.
I also have FAT32 but my only option to change it is FAT. I dont have NTFS. Is FAT faster than FAT32 as well?
No, I think FAT is probably slower. You should have an NTFS option, though. What OS are you using, and what type of flash drive is it?
Microsoft Windows XP Professional
Sandisk Cruzer U3 Micro Smart Drive 2GB (U3 Launchpad menu taken off)
for this subject:
http://www.uwe-sieber.de/usbstick_e.html
therefore one can not say this is better or faster, it depends on many other things.
I noticed for example long time ago, that compacting my TB mailfoder will take seconds on old w2k laptop, but migh take 30mins on the office XP machine.
Otto Sykora
Basel, Switzerland