As we see the ever increasing number of portable applications come into the inventory, we begin to see the computer becoming a flash drive, a USB port (especially when USB 3 comes on-line)and a box with RAM, CPU, keyboard, monitor and an OS. For this emerging computing environment, the physical characteristics of the Flash Drive hardware will become evermore important.
Is it time to set up a forum for interested parties to discuss successful hardware components that run portable applications and store data very well so that you really do have the knowledge on a stick and the brawn in a box?
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The topic of portable storage hardware is varied and complicated. My company just released software that addresses performance and durability issues with USB Flash Drives:
http://www.usb-supercharger.com
If you have an old 1GB stick laying around, the software is free, so give it a try.
Basically, this is a Windows driver that linearizes writes to flash media so that the full linear write speeds are available for randomly updating applications. With a dual-channel USB stick like a Patriot XP, this is > 3000 4K random write IOPS (about a 500x improvement).
Testing with PortableApps allows you to do interesting things like:
* Go ahead and let FireFox use the Flash stick for cache.
* Open 20+ tabs without waiting 2+ minutes.
...
Even the install of the PortableApps full suite goes from 22+ minutes to 130 seconds (10x faster) on a SanDisk cruzer micro.
Back to your original question. The issue with storage media is that there is are a lot more issue that just published specs. Actual live app performance is an interesting mix and USB 2.0 is NOT the bottleneck.
Doug Dumitru
EasyCo LLC
610 237-2000