[geeks] Flash drive questions

[James Fogg]

> 1: fixed disks are *slow* and they're getting slower relative to the
>    rest of the computer's speed.

Fixed disks are rather fast compared to flash devices. And flash devices
can only be written/erased a certain number of times before they die.

> 2: Moving parts (fixed disks) are inherently slower than solid state
>    parts (flash). I haven't spent much time researching, but consumer
>    flash devices seem to be within reaching distance of fixed disk
>    speed; flash-based enterprise SSD solutions are almost certainly
>    faster. Of course I'm talking about transfer speed here ... seek
>    time for flash is about 1,000 times faster.

Fixed disks aren't as fast as system memory, true, but are faster than
flash memory. As for read speed, USB devices cannot read as fast as a
fixed disk due to the faster interface for disks.

> 3: Because of the write limits, you would be very unlikely to use
>    flash-based storage for "swap space"; a cache for most frequently
>    paged in stuff makes more sense (mostly reads).

Not true swap, but it would end up doing the job of swap space. And if
you think you want to keep the most reusable info in the USB faux-system
memory, you'd have to re-write all your OS's to do that, especially
since you'd be talking about the highest memory addresses.

> 4: A USB thumbdrive is fine enough for testing. Obviously if you want
>    reliability you'd want something more like an internal flash SATA
>    drive.

Um, flash is still slow.