I tested the flash drives I own, and found that the one I was using for portable apps wasn't the one with the fastest read/write times & access times by a fair margin. So, I moved all my portable apps to the faster drive.
However, when I used the new drive (using Firefox), I actually found it to be slower. There seemed to be more & longer pauses in using Firefox while it accessed the flash drive.
This doesn't make sense, unless there's more to it than read/write speed. Can anyone comment? Is this all in my head or is there more to it?
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-than the raw read/write speed :
are the drives formated the same way (FAT/16/32 or even NTFS) ?
also, how did you test the drives ? In my experience many test-programs don't
perform to well on flash-drives and often give results that contradict experience.
I tested the drives with the free version of HDTune (I think that's the name).
I checked and found that the old flash drive (a Imation 512Mb clip drive) was formatted as FAT, and that the new one (a Corsair Flash Voyager, 8Gb) was formatted as FAT32.
Why would a flash drive with faster read/write/access times be slower executing the same program just because its formatted as FAT32 instead of FAT?
The discussion referenced in other posts below imply that a flash drive formatted as NTFS could be faster, but at the expense of shortening the flash drive's life. Any idea if the speed increase would be noticeable? How about the shortened drive life?
Thanks for the help.
file-system matters is VERY technical but theres a good
comparison, not to technical, on the performance of FAT/16/32 on flash-drives here :
http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=2549&p=5
Ok, so from that link, it is quite possible (although not guaranteed) to get a significant read/write performance advantage with FAT vs FAT32. In general, the smaller the file to read/write, the more of an advantage it is to have FAT (vs FAT32).
So assuming my read/write cycles are usually involving small files, I'd be better off formatting my (2G & smaller) flash drives with FAT?
..as you mention yourself the problem with FAT16 is that max volume-size is
"2GB on all OS and 4GB on some OS" as you can see in this comparison of filesystems :
http://www.ntfs.com/ntfs_vs_fat.htm .
as another poster here wrote :
"the way windows handles filesystems on pen-drives is brain-dead"
https://portableapps.com/node/11565#comment-66823
I am interested by that question..... I use a Sony Micro Vault Midi 4 Go USB 2.0 and it is particularly slow when using Firefox or Thunderbird.
I was wondering what to get to have all my portable Apps functional.
Thanks for help
I sell ice in the winter
I sell fire in hell
I am a hustler baby, I sold water to a well...
this might help -
https://portableapps.com/node/11283
- Also, read the article attached to bencoman's comment for information about optimizing USB sticks.
-MDP
There are multiple factors. The speed of the flash ram. How many banks. The controller chip. Single vs dual channel. Some drives read just great but have horrible write speeds. Unfortunately, there is no solid benchmark for them at the moment.
Sometimes, the impossible can become possible, if you're awesome!
and another thing, just because you get that redicculusly hight read/write speed, doesn't mean that you will ever get it to work that high.
Zoop