Page and Hiberfile.sys re-route to Flash Drive?

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SpenceQ

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On a XP system, wouldn't RAM performance be better if the swap file were resident on a Flash drive?

Would the notorious write limits for these devices impose a risk in any way.?

Where in the system setup can I configure these to re-route?

Thanks.

Spence
 
Actually no. It would take longer since the Flahs drive would be external and that depends on your USB speeds. At the same time the system wouldnt allow it for the fact that it doesnt know if or when the USB Flahs drive would ever be disconnected. Espically when it comes to Hibernate. That is stored right on your hard drive.It takes up the amount of RAM you have and saves taht space on your hard drive and when you go to hibernate it puts the info from your RAM on your hard drive for when you come back.

You cant re-route it. Sorry. Yes the write limits would cause a issue. Becuase you wouldnt know how often the system would write to the drive. You could waste 10,000 cycles in a few months time.
 
Write times to Flash Media are slower than hard drives and therefore would not cause a boost in performance. If you have another hard drive, install it as a slave and throw the page file on that drive. Doing so will cause an increase in performance as the first drive can focus on running the operating system. Performance gains appear minimal to the human eye and a waste of time at this point in my opinion.
 
Makaveli,Shawn:

Thanks for the post.

You could be right, but as far as hard drives go, I have a hard time accepting mechanical read/write head positioning taking a shorter time than direct electonic accessing. I'm with you on the write limit problem.

As far as the system knowing the type of storage device, I'm not so sure if the program queries this. As far as I know flash drives are a valid replacement for all intents and purposes, in fact I think I saw a recommendation for it for security reasons. One way to find out, change the location.

I'm not familiar with USB technology to venture an opinion.

I'll reserve my decision until I see some benchmark comparisons. Should be an easy enuff test using fixed parameters.

Where do we change the location.?

Spence
 
The limit with flash is that is is volatile. It is ever changing. Flash media is good for short uses but constant uses show no performance gain. Look at Vista ReadyBoost. You need twice as much flash as RAM to even get a 5% performance gain. That is with using the Flash as RAM. Since you dont even get a boost with anything over 1GB basically ReadyBoost is a waste.

That just shows that trying to use flash as a constant source of anything isnt going to net you any gain. Yes while Flash can be faster at some things it isnt when it comes to system processes.

Yes the system would know if the flash drive is a flash drive. Becuase it is considered REMOVABLE media compared to a regular hard drive. Removebale media is handled differently becuase of the fact that it can be removed at any time. So the system has to accoutn for that. It can not write sensative info to that drive at certain intervals like it can with a hard drive. The hard drive is always there and therefor the system can make changes to that when it is necessary. With a flash drive you would have to write to it everytime a change was made for the fact the system doesn know if it will be there for the next change.

Flash is also limited by your system. If you only haev a USB 1.1 then you are actually gonig slower because the read/write speeds are so slow. While USB 2.0 is faster it is limited by what i described above.

Also as i stated in the top post of mine. You can not change the location of the place where the hibernation files are located. As i stated a space is saved on you hard drive for this. There is no way to change that location. Windows only allows fo ryou to enable or disable hibernation. They do not give you any more control over it.

The only thing you can change the loaction of is your pagefile. That is located at

Start>Right click on Computer>Properties>System Protection>Advanced>Performance>Advanced>Change

This is in Vista. In XP i dont remember off hand.
 
The limit with flash is that is is volatile. It is ever changing. Flash media is good for short uses but constant uses show no performance gain. Look at Vista ReadyBoost. You need twice as much flash as RAM to even get a 5% performance gain. That is with using the Flash as RAM. Since you dont even get a boost with anything over 1GB basically ReadyBoost is a waste.

That just shows that trying to use flash as a constant source of anything isnt going to net you any gain. Yes while Flash can be faster at some things it isnt when it comes to system processes.

Yes the system would know if the flash drive is a flash drive. Becuase it is considered REMOVABLE media compared to a regular hard drive. Removebale media is handled differently becuase of the fact that it can be removed at any time. So the system has to accoutn for that. It can not write sensative info to that drive at certain intervals like it can with a hard drive. The hard drive is always there and therefor the system can make changes to that when it is necessary. With a flash drive you would have to write to it everytime a change was made for the fact the system doesn know if it will be there for the next change.

Flash is also limited by your system. If you only haev a USB 1.1 then you are actually gonig slower because the read/write speeds are so slow. While USB 2.0 is faster it is limited by what i described above.

Also as i stated in the top post of mine. You can not change the location of the place where the hibernation files are located. As i stated a space is saved on you hard drive for this. There is no way to change that location. Windows only allows fo ryou to enable or disable hibernation. They do not give you any more control over it.

The only thing you can change the loaction of is your pagefile. That is located at

Start>Right click on Computer>Properties>System Protection>Advanced>Performance>Advanced>Change

This is in Vista. In XP i dont remember off hand.

Thanks for the information!

I wonder if Hiber location could be changed by digging into the innards of the kernel using low level assembler for this particular chip technology, far from my 8088 days I'm afraid!. :D

Spence
 
Yes you would need an assembler or other such hacking applicaiton to find out where the Hibernation files are stored and how to change them. ;)
 
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