As USB Memory Sticks Grow...

[Abaddon]

Ok, 16GB Memory sticks are now ~£20

I could fit all my music on one.
I could fit all my Games on another.

In all these cases, would the games run slower?
Itunes grunt a bit more?


My laptop is modern, but cheap, it only came with a 60GB harddrive (not my purchase!)
I've filled it, and more.
If I could move stuff into little USB pens, yet performance would be unaffected, that would be GREAT.

Is this possible?

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

In my personal experience, games and software run slower on USB drives. Whether it's a bit slow or really slow depends on the USB port (2.0 is faster) and possibly the quality of the drive too. And the programs -- ones that write a lot to the stick are really bad.

Haven't had trouble with music. I don't know if iTunes would work right, though.

If you can afford it, I'd recommend an external drive -- I've heard those run great with firewire. If you don't find one to your liking, get a drive you like and a nifty external case.

 

[Abaddon]

In my personal experience, games and software run slower on USB drives. Whether it's a bit slow or really slow depends on the USB port (2.0 is faster) and possibly the quality of the drive too. And the programs -- ones that write a lot to the stick are really bad.

Haven't had trouble with music. I don't know if iTunes would work right, though.

If you can afford it, I'd recommend an external drive -- I've heard those run great with firewire. If you don't find one to your liking, get a drive you like and a nifty external case.

Oh i've already got a nifty lil 80GB external HD. Just liked the idea of shoving everything onto usb's

 

[Macha]

If your getting an external drive for music, and use iTunes, get one you plug into your computer, not a NAS drive. iTunes chokes HORRIBLY on network drives in my experience. Other media players aren't as bad, but importing your library into another is a lot of work.

EDIT: Didn't see your second post.

USB sticks can be slow (depending on your type of USB slots, mobo, stick etc.), and generally have a much shorter lifespan than normal HDDs.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Also, if you're having HDD space issues, here's something that may help:
http://www.rotebetasoftware.net/wp/freeware/folder-size/

 

[Zuffox]

Kingston make different USB keys, some being "high-speed" versions, whatever that may be. Might be worth looking into.

 

[aimeeandbeatles]

Kingston make different USB keys, some being "high-speed" versions, whatever that may be. Might be worth looking into.

My 1gig USB drive is a Kingston. It's pretty speedy on good computers (for accessing documents and stuff) but on the USB 1.0 ports it makes a sloth look fast.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

Kingston make different USB keys, some being "high-speed" versions, whatever that may be. Might be worth looking into.

They cant go faster than USB's 480Mbit/s limit though, which technically all USB drives support if they have an even half-decent controller (Im looking at you Jmicron)

USB drives are fine for music, not so good for games or software. If you really dont have room on your desktop/laptop, get an ESATA addin card and an ESATA external drive. It will be just as fast as internal SATA.

 

[Perfection]

I'd be suspicious of using a flash drive for games, games often rewrite to their directory and since flash drives have limited read/write cycles that might not be the best thing.

I'm probably just being paranoid, though.

 

[Zelig]

They cant go faster than USB's 480Mbit/s limit though, which technically all USB drives support if they have an even half-decent controller (Im looking at you Jmicron)

USB drives are fine for music, not so good for games or software. If you really dont have room on your desktop/laptop, get an ESATA addin card and an ESATA external drive. It will be just as fast as internal SATA.

Yeah, if you're using external devices through USB, anything decent is going to max out the port, so it doesn't really matter what you go with in terms of performance. (Although flash devices are going to give better access times than HDD's)

Anything external other than esata isn't really appropriate for anything other than storage and/or media streaming.

 

[Genocidicbunny]

I'd be suspicious of using a flash drive for games, games often rewrite to their directory and since flash drives have limited read/write cycles that might not be the best thing.

I'm probably just being paranoid, though.

it would still take a while for the flash drive to go bad ( months, a year?), so if its a cheapo little flash drive, it wont matter much. If its a big expensive, 8+GB one though, its not a good idea.

I have AoEII on my flash drive that I always have with me. Nice to relax with a little AoEII when there's nothing to do. I wouldnt do it with a newer game though.

 

[taper]

I ran a write speed test with Labview on my laptop hard drive and a newish Kingston 4GB stick a few weeks ago. I got ~20MB/s write to the hard drive, and less than 1MB/s on the flash drive.

 

[Zelig]

I ran a write speed test with Labview on my laptop hard drive and a newish Kingston 4GB stick a few weeks ago. I got ~20MB/s write to the hard drive, and less than 1MB/s on the flash drive.

That's brutal, modern 2.5" drives should easily be hitting 50 MB/s, and flash drives from 2 years ago were close to maxing out the 30 MB/s of USB 2.0.

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/storage/display/320gb-hdd-roundup_4.html#sect1
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/memory/display/4gb-usbflash-roundup_11.html#sect2

edit: Looking at those speeds make laptops seem so... slow. My main computer is a 4 year old desktop, and I never see speeds below 100 MB/s on my internal drives.

 

[LucyDuke]

If its a big expensive, 8+GB one though, its not a good idea.

Expensive? Those (8gb) are less than $20 already, 16gb only $~30. Besides, by the time a 64GB wore out, they'd probably be down to $20 or so to replace too.

 

[Mise]

If running programs over 100mbit ethernet works fine, then surely running programs over even 20MB/s flash drives should work too?

 

[Zelig]

If running programs over 100mbit ethernet works fine, then surely running programs over even 20MB/s flash drives should work too?

Depends what you mean by "fine". 100mbit ethernet is fine for streaming media or running small programs, but games, or any programs that frequently write large amounts to the drive work much better locally.

 

[Speedo]

The typical flash drive transfers data at about 30% of the speed of an average home computer HDD. Even the best flash drives that I've seen benchmarked only hit about 50% of the average drive speed. For any kind of modern game you are going to get rediculously long load times, and if it's one that does a lot of on the fly loading (Oblivion, FO3, many MMOs), it's likely going to be near unplayable.

If running programs over 100mbit ethernet works fine, then surely running programs over even 20MB/s flash drives should work too?

That's "programs" versus "games". The average program -Word, Firefox, those kinds of things- needs to load only a small handful of resources, perhaps 10-20 MB worth or so (much less for most programs). The average modern game needs to load hundreds of MB worth of resources (primarily textures) before you can play. There's no comparison between them.

 

[GenMarshall]

Expensive? Those (8gb) are less than $20 already

Well then, better grab me them 8 gig memory sticks then!

 

[Abaddon]

OK, lets scrap games..

But Itunes is a runner?

 

[nonconformist]

Itunes is waay too resource heavy imho. Foobar or even WMP are safer bets