Just a question about flash drives. I love using these portable apps, but a few of the heftier ones--namely OOo--run unacceptably slow on my flash drive. Is there a way to speed them up? Or is there a recommended kind of USB drive that will work best? Thanks in advance for your answers.
PS--thanks a ton to the developers who make these available at no charge to me.
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It's probably low random write speed that is slowing Open Office. You might look into something like the SuperTalent Express RAM Cache thumb drive or the Kingston DataTraveler Ultimate USB 3.0 drive, but they're very expensive and kind of bulky. You won't have much luck finding a reasonably priced thumb drive with fast random write; there just aren't any.
If you have admin access to your PCs, I'll cautiously suggest USB SuperCharger from EasyCo. It vastly improved the performance of apps on my thumb drives. I've been using it on Win7 for a little over 4 months now without issue, but I did have problems with it when I was using it on Vista and XP.
I just noticed LaCie also has a fast thumb drive - the LaCie FastKey USB 3.0 Solid State Drive.
It's in the same size and price category as the SuperTalent drive, but we can hope with more and more ssd-like thumb drives coming on the market that eventually both the bulk and the price will come down.
I had a Sandisk Cruzer Titanium 4 gb and it was fast enough. Sadly they dont make them anymore and I lost mine.
"What about Love?" - "Overrated. Biochemically no different than eating large quantities of chocolate." - Al Pacino in The Devils Advocate
I use a "Corsair Voyager GT 16GB" which is a good, fast USB stick, and not too expensive.
There is also the "Voyager GTR" which boasts very speedy performance, but for a very big price.
The Corsair Voyager GTR does appear to be very fast, but I think it suffers the same problem as other flash drives - really poor random write speeds.
See the 4K write performance here for example. Its random write speed is hundredths of a MB/s. While some apps are relatively immune, I think it's these really low random write speeds that hurt apps like Open Office, Thunderbird and Gimp.
Good point. I didn't mention SLC thumb drives because they are virtually non-existent these days.
Another user (Moonbase) mentioned in another thread that you can still find SLC based Compact Flash cards. Put PortableApps onto an SLC Compact Flash card, plug it into a good USB card reader and you'd probably see better performance. It'd be even bulkier than the SSD thumb drives I mentioned, and not nearly as fast, but probably a lot cheaper. Personally I won't go that route because it's too bulky and you might have to hunt around to find what works (wasting money buying things that don't).
I love my Titanium 8gb, that I got 2 back in the day and am still just on my first one for years. It's going great. If it ever dies, or if I never use the other one as my main, I'll have a great backup.
Still in it's plastic packaging.
Don't be an uberPr∅. They are stinky.
Thanks for the responses everybody. I guess it's true that you get what you pay for. A $10 Walmart stick is going to run like a $10 Walmart stick.
I don't suppose burning portable OOo to a cd will be any better?
I've already done the research. I just couldn't take the pain anymore.
THE Fastest currently available: SuperTalent USB 3.0 SuperCrypt drive (8 channel)
Available in two flavors: 128bit or 256bit encryption.
2nd Fastest currently available: Supertalent USB 3.0 ExpressRam Cache drive (4 channel)
The above have the fastest performance for small block random read/writes.
FYI: The larger the capacity of the drive, the faster it is, although beyond 32GB the performance gain is not significant, but is measurable. Just don't buy the 16GB versions for reasons I won't go into here. I think both drives are reasonably priced considering you won't be pounding your head against the wall anymore.
The best prices for the above drives are at:
http://www.superbiiz.com
Be sure to watch these videos:
http://www.youtube.com/gosupertalent#p/u/7/Ta-b3zO8ecg
http://www.youtube.com/gosupertalent#p/u/27/UZES5IpYQco
Futurist. Enthusiast.
According to my knowledge Kingston is one of the fasted usb its comes up with HyperX supports 3.0 tech and you can save data up to 256GB
here is list of top 5 fastest usb
http://www.etechmag.com/2012/01/04/fastest-five-usb-flash-drives.html
The Kingston HyperX USB drives have impressive sequential speeds (160 MB/s), but its random write performance is embarrassing (less than 0.1 MB/s on 4K writes). A cheap 8 GB Patriot XT USB 2 drive easily kicks its butt on random writes.
Some portable apps really suffer on thumb drives with poor random write speeds, and I don't think many of them benefit much from huge sequential speeds.