Re: nifty swapspace trick

A "typical" flash drive will not exceed the read/write speed of
a "typical" SATA drive. The theoretical *maximum* of a flash drive on USB
2.0 is 60MB/s, but I suspect 30MB/s is more realistic for typical drives.
A typical 7200rpm SATA drive might average 45MB/s. If you have relatively
low disk I/O (though high RAM usage) to begin with, you might be losing
speed by using a flash drive for swap space. I'm curious what Microsoft
has to say on the matter, but am too lazy to look it up. Can anyone offer
better numbers than I have or refute it?

-Jamie

__
Jamie Hushower
Rent-A-Geek
http://alaska-geeks.com
223-9136

-----Original Message-----
From: bryanm@acsalaska.net
To: aklug@aklug.org
Date: Mon, 29 Oct 2007 02:43:33 -0800 (AKDT)
Subject: nifty swapspace trick

> I don't know if this is common knowledge or not, but I had
> never heard of the idea before.
>
> While listening in on my boss teaching a computer class, I
> heard him mention that Windows Vista has a new feature that
> allows you to use a flash drive as virtual memory. Since
> USB (and especially USB 2.0) runs faster than a hard drive,
> a flash drive is an easy way to boost your memory performance.
>
> After rolling the idea around in my head a bit, I decided that
> it might be easy to do the same thing in Linux using common
> built-in tools. I had to try it to be sure, but it works!
>
> All you have to do is:
> 1) plug in the flash drive and get the system to recognize it
> 2) run mkswap to quickly format it
> 3) run swapon to start using it
>
> Running 'free' will show you that you have extra memory available.
>
> --
> Bryan Medsker
> bryanm@acsalaska.net
>
>
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Received on Mon Oct 29 08:47:14 2007