Putting your entire pagefile on a flash drive?

LoneWolf121188 · Jul 2, 2008

So with this whole ready boost thing...is it possible to put your entire pagefile on a flash drive, so that it doesn't eat up space on your HDD (and possibly run faster)? I ask because I'm out of space on my windows partition on my macbook pro and I was thinking of getting a 4GB high speed flash drive to just stick my pagefile on.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

Just tried it, and yes, you can. At least on Vista it works, not sure about XP.

vlaszlo · Jul 2, 2008

You cant put pagefile on removable drive, or USB drive. I also tried with PCMCIA CF adapter + card, but that also dont work. Just put your large files on cheap flash drive if you can.

from other forums:

I can see why you'd want to put the page file on the flash drive, but its not such a good idea for a few different reasons. Vista doesn't see the flash drive during boot most likely, this leads to Vista wanting to re-create the page file on a hard drive. Vista (and all MS OS's) first place to look for the page file is a hard drive. Even if the page file was on the flash drive, Vista is always going to look at the hard drive first then the flash drive even tho it knows the page file is on the flash drive to begin with.

In this case, the egg must come before the chicken. XP is already
attempting to implement the swapfile before it implements the driver for USB
and so forth for the removable flash drive. Its a bit more complicated than
that, but that's it in a nutshell.

vlaszlo · Jul 2, 2008

usp8riot said:
Just tried it, and yes, you can. At least on Vista it works, not sure about XP.

please check after reboot, if it stays there, and can you find the pagefile.sys in explorer.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

vlaszlo said:
You cant put pagefile on removable drive, or USB drive. I also tried with PCMCIA CF adapter + card, but that also dont work. Just put your large files on cheap flash drive if you can.

from other forums:

Works just fine after reboot on Vista x64 using my old Lexar 256mb jumpdrive. I have a 2 gig one but it's full so didn't try it. Although I do have a paging file on my C: drive, I assume it would still work whether I had that paging file or not.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

I set C: drive for no paging file, rebooted, and there is no paging file on C. I am running off 84mb's of paging file on my flash drive. Perhaps I done the impossible, what is said can't be done? Or maybe meaning "you" means you can't do it.

Question is, is OP running Vista, XP, ....? Being a Macbook Pro, I assume XP, which I haven't tested.

vlaszlo · Jul 2, 2008

usp8riot said:
I set C: drive for no paging file, rebooted, and there is no paging file on C. I am running off 84mb's of paging file on my flash drive. Perhaps I done the impossible, what is said can't be done? Or maybe meaning "you" means you can't do it.

Question is, is OP running Vista, XP, ....? Being a Macbook Pro, I assume XP, which I haven't tested.

That is great ! I was using XP, if vista x64 can put pagefile on flash drive, that is one more reason for me to try it out.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

That is great ! I was using XP, if vista x64 can put pagefile on flash drive, that is one more reason for me to try it out.

You could try it. I don't think there would be any performance gains, not for me anyways with my old flash drive and I rarely see the light on the flash drive coming on anyway to let me know it's accessing it. But with the light on to let me know when the paging file is being accessed, it does make me curious to watch it and see. With 4 gigs and 84mb pagefile.sys, I've no problems even running Crysis so far so I'll take my paging file down from a whopping 6 gb's i had before to something a little smaller.

science man · Jul 2, 2008

LoneWolf121188 said:
So with this whole ready boost thing...is it possible to put your entire pagefile on a flash drive, so that it doesn't eat up space on your HDD (and possibly run faster)? I ask because I'm out of space on my windows partition on my macbook pro and I was thinking of getting a 4GB high speed flash drive to just stick my pagefile on.

You should be able to put anything on a flash drive and run from there.

johnz · Jul 2, 2008

ReadyBoost isn't simply "pagefile on a stick". It intelligently analyzes the data, and places smaller files that would benefit from flash memory on the flash drive. Large contiguous files would be slower on a thumb drive due to slow sustained transfer rates. Small files work better due to faster seeks. You also have the issue of burning out flash memory, but I don't think that's as big a problem as people make it out to be. Flash memory's cheap enough, and if the performance gains merited it(I don't think they do), it would be feasible to buy a new drive every year or whatever.

science man · Jul 2, 2008

johnz said:
ReadyBoost isn't simply "pagefile on a stick". It intelligently analyzes the data, and places smaller files that would benefit from flash memory on the flash drive. Large contiguous files would be slower on a thumb drive due to slow sustained transfer rates. Small files work better due to faster seeks. You also have the issue of burning out flash memory, but I don't think that's as big a problem as people make it out to be. Flash memory's cheap enough, and if the performance gains merited it(I don't think they do), it would be feasible to buy a new drive every year or whatever.

what do you mean by burn out memory and if the transfer rate is so slow why did SanDisk make a piece of software designed to put and run software from the flash drive?

johnz · Jul 2, 2008

science man said:
what do you mean by burn out memory and if the transfer rate is so slow why did SanDisk make a piece of software designed to put and run software from the flash drive?

Flash memory has a limited number of writes, you can read from it a unlimited number of times. The number of writes is quite huge(100s of thousands afaik), but if you're using it as a page file you'll eat through them pretty quickly.

As far as running apps from flash memory...You do that for convenience. It'll almost always be slower than running them off of a HD. The biggest benefit is the almost instantaneous seek times. That beats HDs by a large margin, but if the files accessed are large, the hd will beat it for sustained transfer rates.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

The quick access times of flash drives makes me wonder what the standard I/O read/write size is for a paging file. I benchmarked my 4 drives plus 2 flash drives and made my swap on the fastest HDD. But since access time is so fast for flash drives, which were around 1 ms, iirc, for my flash dries, if i'd be better off using one.

Then again, maybe it's not worth being very pedantic about the paging drive. In gaming, I don't think you could tell the difference when using a flash drive, or hard drive, or if varying hard drive speeds used for the paging file would really show up in a benchmark. I'd love to see one somewhere if it's been done.

johnz · Jul 2, 2008

usp8riot said:
Then again, maybe it's not worth being very pedantic about the paging drive. In gaming, I don't think you could tell the difference when using a flash drive, or hard drive, or if varying hard drive speeds used for the paging file would really show up in a benchmark. I'd love to see one somewhere if it's been done.

If you have a suitable amount of ram(most enthusiasts do) the page file doesn't really make a bit of difference. I keep 2 pagefiles on my system. A smallish one on my primary drive for error dumps in case of crash, and a large one on my secondary drive that I use as my primary pagefile. I did that because it's theoretically faster, but I don't think it makes a bit of difference in the end.

usp8riot · Jul 2, 2008

Correct. By "don't think you could tell the difference", I was meaning if you had sufficient ram as most of us do. I suppose with as many paging file reads/writes my XP machine makes with only 128mb's SDRAM, the speed of the pagine file would make a lot more difference.

LoneWolf121188 · Jul 2, 2008

usp8riot said:
IQuestion is, is OP running Vista, XP, ....? Being a Macbook Pro, I assume XP, which I haven't tested.

*points to sig* Vista. And I have 4GB RAM, so the point about large memory requiring less pagefile is certainly valid.

I suppose one workaround is to set one tiny pagefile on your boot drive, like 100MB or so, just to satisfy windows on boot. Then, when it loads the USB drivers, it can see the much larger pagefile on your flash drive.

El<(')>Maxi · Jul 2, 2008

The question is why? Performance test your flash drive and you'll have your answer.

science man · Jul 2, 2008

johnz said:
Flash memory has a limited number of writes, you can read from it a unlimited number of times. The number of writes is quite huge(100s of thousands afaik), but if you're using it as a page file you'll eat through them pretty quickly.

As far as running apps from flash memory...You do that for convenience. It'll almost always be slower than running them off of a HD. The biggest benefit is the almost instantaneous seek times. That beats HDs by a large margin, but if the files accessed are large, the hd will beat it for sustained transfer rates.

OMG I can't believe there is a limited number of writes. That sucks. Ok well I guess it won't work. Also, is there a limiit on the number of writes to CD/RW/ DVD/RW and Blu-ray/RW?

johnz · Jul 3, 2008

science man said:
OMG I can't believe there is a limited number of writes. That sucks. Ok well I guess it won't work. Also, is there a limiit on the number of writes to CD/RW/ DVD/RW and Blu-ray/RW?

They're limited also, at least CD and DVD. I'm not familiar with Blu-Ray. The figure I've read is about 1,000 writes. I've found optical media to be generally unreliable though, and I've had CD R/Ws go bad after a couple of writes.

science man · Jul 3, 2008

That really scuks, why doesn't it have unlimited writes like an HD?

Putting your entire pagefile on a flash drive?

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