Four 2GB flash drives vs. one 8GB flash drive?
By perth1415 | January 2nd, 2009 | 2:17 am
Hi,
As the title says it, I was wondering which of the two would give me more mileage? and, why?
Sorry if this’s a wrong place to ask such queries.
Thnaks,
Partha
Jan 02, 2009
I don’t think it’s wise to use 4 different USB devices for this purpose as it would consume more power & CPU cycles than a single device would.
Jan 02, 2009
If power is a factor, yes one 8GB flash drive would be better. However, with lots of continuous I/O requests, it is possible that somewhere along the way, a bottleneck appears, particularly within the flash drive itself. Rarely will a USB 2.0 bus (480 mbp/s) be used to it’s full potential, ergo, four 2GB drives would offer more performance, at the cost of putting more strain on the computer.
Jan 02, 2009
My 2 cents –
1. To be honest, I won’t bother much about power on a Desktop PC (esp, if it’s in my workplace;)) .. a typical Intel 6-8 port controller draws approx 3W, that might be something to worry about for a laptop guy though.
2. Let’s not forget ACPI in XP, Vista; if the pagefile is not being used, the drive could go to sleep. The USB bus driver should handle that. Also, eBoostr could implement some clever techniques to leverage power-save mechanism.
3. The main issue here is not how many drives or how large a pagefile you’re using, but whether your system is using those extra pagefiles cleverly. For an average user, it’s a pain to get into all that details;
[ONeill: perhaps eBoostr could do this dirty job i.e. configure the pagefile allocations behind the scene? I don’t know how efficient is Vista in pagefile handling, but for XP, it might be a good idea.]
Thanks,
Partha
Jan 03, 2009
This brings up the question on how eBoostr was designed to handle multiple flash devices, like does it handle the devices like a RAID0 configuration where the data is striped across multiple disks, or are the files written to specific flash devices?
I suppose the question for the developers would be what the main purpose of eBoostr is with regards to being able to handle multiple cache devices, would it be for performance or just making use of different devices simultaneously to be able to increase the cache pool? Or is it both?
Jan 04, 2009
i have 2x8GB and a 32GB usb drive all running about 22,000. i like the idea that all of my games ie; Far Cry 2, Call of Duty 4, Overlord, X3 Terran Conflict and Black & White 2 all run much faster. not to mention Vista’s own HD chewin’.
Jan 07, 2009
eBoostr uses source files and USB devices at a some type of RAID1. So adding additional device typically will increase speed. But I think there will not be much difference for 3 and 4 devices.