Anyone else try this? Using flash drive for swap file?

[LePaul]

My computer is older (Pentium 4 2.8ghz w/ 4gb ram) and is a Dell box, so upgrading the video card from AGP to something modern would require a new power supply and lots of hassles.

But I was watching some of the video clips on cNet the other night and saw where they had put a flash drive into the PC and set it up as the swap file. 

With my hard drives being pre-SATA I figure it wouldnt hurt to try.

Over the Christmas sales I bought a 8gb 9mb per sec thumb drive.  I went into System Properties, Advanced Settings and Performance settings and took the swap file off my C: drive (set to 0 in both boxes as I had a set page file).  I then highlighted the flash drive and set it to let the system manage it.  It took a reboot or two for the settings to all take.

However for not a lot of money, I got a nice little boost.

I've also gone through and turned off every annoying little program that launches on startup, such as the iTunes helper thingy.  All said, after boot up, my system is only using 296mb of RAM....according to the Taskmanager and performance graph.

I'm now defragmenting the drive the swap file used to be on...and am going to jump into Aces High to see if I gained anything worth noting there.

Just wanted to know if anyone had thought to try this ?

[Bino]

Since your machine has 4 GB of main system RAM, I doubt you'll hit the swap file all that much.  But now that flash drives (solid state drives) are coming down in price, an idea like this might make sense in some applications. (I recently saw a BBS thread about putting the journal files for a Linux ext3 file system on SSD.)  Hey, what about putting all the Aces High files on SSD?  At least skins would load quickly.

[gpwurzel]

Personally, I'd be reinstalling my game onto the ssd lol........then again, i'm like that.

Wurzel

[LePaul]

Id think the throughput is faster on the hdd than the usb system/flash speed (9mb per sec versus the 133mb of a hdd)?

[MrRiplEy[H]]

Yep USB thumb is only going to slow you down nothing else. Far more effective solution is to add a second fast harddrive to put your swap and games on.

[Chalenge]

Its much better to have more hard drives and page files on every drive in my experience. The more memory you have the more page file you want and not less.

[Bino]

Oops, missed the "USB thumb drive" part.  My bad.  I thought you meant a real SSD, as in SATA-connected.  That's what I was talking about. Sorry.   

[Chalenge]

As someone that has SSDs I cant report they add much speed to the equation. No matter what your setup it would be a mistake to remove the 'swap file' (page file). Windows was designed to have a swap file that is 1-1/2 times RAM size at minimum and 3 times RAM size or more for a maximum and if you put a page file on every hard drive along those recommendations you will see performance improvements.