After recently being wowwed following RAM upgrade (to 2-GB), I am now curious about adding a USB 2.0 Flash drive (or two).

I know Vista has a feature (called Ready Boost) that lets you use up to 4 GB flash drive as

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ReadyBoost


Quote:

ReadyBoost is an operating system feature included with Microsoft's Windows Vista operating system. It works by using flash memory, USB 2.0 drive, SD card, CompactFlash or any kind of portable massive flash storage as a drive for disk cache. ReadyBoost is also used to facilitate SuperFetch, an updated version of Windows XP's prefetcher which performs analysis of boot-time disk usage patterns and creates a cache which is used in subsequent system boots.

But I have WXP. Anybody know if XP can be used like this?

Do you guys have these things? How do you use them?

They are pretty cheap .. 32-gig stick for $90 (free shipping):

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220261

Rad, to the best of my knowledge, ReadyBoost is available only with Windows Vista.

I read the following review at Newegg for one of their 16-GB flash drives:


Quote:

Pros: its big. 16G is big. Cons: There is no way this thing is 150X or 180X. Flash mem's speed X rating is derived from the old original CD rom drives. that is 150KB/s per X. so 180X should get about 27MB/s. 150X about 22MB/s I'm getting about 1MB/s right now. Yes I'm on USB2 and not a USB1.1 port. Other Thoughts: I'm pretty disappointed. I thought 27MB/s would be almost as fast as a notebook harddrive and possibly faster given the lack of seeks. I'm running a VMWare image off of it right now and it is DOG SLOW. I have not seen an OS run this slow in many many years.

This is what I was thinking of doing (running a WMware image). Any insight on getting my VMware images to run zippy-fast?

Here's the page: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductReview.aspx?Item=N82E16820220253

See review titled "no way is this 150 or 180X" on/at: 8/1/2008 7:15:48 PM

Here's another interesting review, same page:


Quote:

Pros: The drive is definitely faster than the other flash drives I have used in the past. The idea of having 16GB in a drive that is the same size as my 1GB thumb drive is also GREAT! I have partitioned the drive to have 5GB windows storage (programs and such) and the rest of the drive for a linux distro (5GB Suse, 2GB swap and the rest for VMware). Works like a charm. I love being able to carry my home computer in my pocket. No issues so far.

Quote:

Pros: First off, this drive is FAST. The reviewers before me ran benchmarks proving it, I would recommend formatting to NTFS using a utility, it gets even faster. This drive WILL format to NTFS if you use the right utilities, for some reason the windows format tool doesn't play well with this drive.

Quote:

Pros: I partitioned the unit into 3 partitions. I run one as FAT32 with PortableApps that I can just drop into any Windblows Machine... and the other two partitions run full blown Linux installs... Fedora 8 (soon to be 9) and Backtrack3. I can power off the local machine, plug this in, boot up and change the boot order to boot from the USB... then, it's like I'm sitting at my home computer... It's great cause I use this at work to 'bypass' some of the IT safeguards and browse the net as I please... also am not afraid to access my personal email or type in passwords or things... None of the history is stored on the local machine!!! What the routers log is another story.... but.... what no one monitors, no one needs to know.

Quote:

Other Thoughts: Results of testing the Patriot XT 16GB. Operating system is Windows Server 2008, computers Dell PowerEdge Server models 1800 & 2900 and interface USB 2.0. Software is QuickBench and Microsoft's file copy. QuickBench tests used file sizes of 20-100MB. The file copy was 6510 small and medium sized files which totaled 1.53 GB in size. FAT32 testing with QuickBench: Patriot XT Read 24.9 MB/sec Write 16.6 MB/sec. NTFS testing with QuickBench: Patriot XT Read 24.9 MB/sec Write 19.4 MB/sec. Writing 6510 files totaling 1.53 GB with MS file copy: Patriot XT started with 9.35 MB sec and progressively decreased to 1.79 MB/sec. Rate than increased to 2-3 MB/s Total copy time was 540 seconds for an average write rate of 2.83 MB/sec.

Quote:

Pros: HD Tune 2.54 benchmark Transfer Rate Min:14.2MB/sec Max:33.3MB/sec Avg:32.5MB/sec Access Time:1.1 ms Burst Rate:27.8 MB/sec CPU Usage:5.2% vs my pqi 2gig intelligent stick 2.o plus Transfer Rate Min:.8MB/sec Max:17.8MB/sec Avg:10.4MB/sec Access Time:126.8 ms Burst Rate:11.4 MB/sec CPU Usage:1.6%

Quote:

Other Thoughts: From my quick tests, it's almost the same speed as the 8GB XT and the 16GB blue corsair (writes ~1.5MB/sec for 2000 files totalling 1GB). Overall, decent speed for a 16 Gigger. Although, many 4GB and 8GB drives get 3MB/sec for the same files. It will write 10MB/sec for large files. Reads at 30MB/sec.

Quote:

I reformatted to NTFS. My real-world tests show about 27.5MB/s read speed, and about 10MB/s write speed.

Quote:

Pros: Based of reviews I was getting mixed results with Read/Write speed. Drive is consistently reads between 30-33MB/sec and writes at 13MB/sec. Tested HDTACH, HDTUNE as well as TeraCopy.

That complaint you quoted is about the USB interface speed, not about the media; that person is not getting USB2 regardless of what they think.

I run VMWare images off USB2 hard disks and they are perfectly tolerable. For a notebook, either USB2 or FireWire drives can work, but it's important to bear in mind that the point of the exercise is to use storage that's faster than a 5400rpm notebook drive (so think about a larger enclosure, with power and cooling for a 7200rpm drive at least)! Either USB2 or FireWire or eSata (in order of preference from worst to best) works for this, and all those interfaces are fast enough that you can most of get the benefit of the faster drive in the external enclosure.

I don't personally own much of the larger type of Flash memory storage - unfortunately all this kind of gear is still pretty expensive down here, more than I can spend on myself. We do have some at work in the QA labs but a) it's Saturday morning, and b) it's all in use anyway testing our next release.

So, right now I'd be sticking with a hard drive enclosure; I need hard-drive capacities anyway since I don't run just one VM, but a lot of them and the hard-drive enclosures are way cheaper at those sizes and I'd expect they will be for awhile. The crossover point is coming, but it's a ways away yet.

wrote on Aug 8^th, 2008 at 4:39pm:

The crossover point is coming, but it's a ways away yet.

What do you see as the cross-over point. Nigel?

I have a 500-gig external 7200-rpm USB 2.0 drive (Seagate).

wrote on Aug 8^th, 2008 at 4:39pm:

unfortunately all this kind of gear is still pretty expensive down here

Can you have friends stateside buy and send to you? .. like an importer for yourself and friends? .. would that work? Or would the shipping be too expensive?

wrote on Aug 8^th, 2008 at 4:39pm:

all those interfaces are fast enough that you can most of get the benefit of the faster drive in the external enclosure

Uh, are you saying an external drive is "comparable" in SPEED to a Flash drive (memory)?

Speed (I thought) was the whole reason for going Flash. If it is not WAY faster, it would make little sense for me to get some. (USB HDD would yield far more capacity/$)

Rad.Test wrote on Aug 8^th, 2008 at 5:25pm:

Speed (I thought) was the whole reason for going Flash.

Nope. The point of things in Vista like ReadyBoost or hybrid drives is not raw performance, but power management.

Laptops, especially given things like Vista's gargantuan memory footprint, have real problems with power consumption. Although hard disk power management works well to some extent, laptops don't really get to do the equivalent of regenerative braking when spinning HDDs down. They suck power to keep 'em spinning and it sucks seconds (and even more precious juice) to spin 'em up. Hence the push to hybrid devices which promised to make this hurt less.

Flash memory costs no power when you're not accessing it, unlike DRAM, and even when you're accessing it uses not a huge amount. So, it's worth using it as cache in a laptop almost regardless of how slow it is if the alternative is spinning up a hard drive that you could leave idle. But if you are able (or have to) to keep a drive spinning, that's almost always better than current flash for raw speed.

Incidentally, take a look here.

The other small advantage of flash is that there's not the same penalty for seeking the heads you get on hard drives, but that's less of a win than you might think because filesystems and programs have been tuned and tuned and tuned for decades to be really really good at not generating random access patterns.

The point of all the work on SSDs is to get better performance without hard disks for environments where hard disks are by their nature problematic, either due to lack of mechanical ruggedness (for portable and mobile devices) or due to the need to manage power consumption. What you should be comparing a full-SSD device to is not a 7200rpm 3.5" hard disk, but a 1.8"-type like say this one. What matters for many applications of such things is balancing that W/Gb consumption figure against capacity and the one-time cost of the device itself.

Rad.Test wrote on Aug 8^th, 2008 at 4:45pm:

Can you have friends stateside buy and send to you? .. like an importer for yourself and friends? .. would that work? Or would the shipping be too expensive?

Well, this leads to a lengthy digression.

First, it's important to bear in mind the distinction between market exchange rates to compare the "value" of things, and an approach which looks at actual prices - measuring at purchasing power parity, most famously demonstrated by The Economist in its Burgernomics index, which isn't entirely serious but not entirely lighthearted either.

But there is also a similar issue which arises in labour, which means that pay rates for equivalent work are different in different countries too. This also varies by industry so it's hard to point at a good-quality data series on this, but for instance pay at many multinationals is set using survey methods to compare pay rates in bands between countries. I believe the end result is that Symantec gets quite a good deal: at market exchange rates we're paid something in the range of about 25% more than developers in India in the same "bands", and I think it's overall (roughly) at 75% of US rates at the market exchange rate of the currencies (leaving aside the question of personal choice of location, and assuming the band assignments are correct - which they aren't, but that's the way the game is played).

Now, the burgernomics index (which is still a useful one) plays to New Zealand's strength, so the PPP readings of discretionary purchases of high-tech or other manufactured goods don't read the same. Cars, for instance.

Let's take my dream automobile (the one I at least had a hope of one day affording, so I annoyed the wife quite a bit dreaming about one before I turned 40 - kinda given up on it now): a Nissan 350Z. According to Yahoo, US average MSRP of a base 6-speed manual is USD 28,510 versus (NZD 71,000 from Nissan NZ including 12.5% sales tax which is about USD 50,000 at current market exchange rates.

In terms of actual end affordability though, that figure is also affected by the relatively lower wages here, differences in tax structure and the amount of money consumed by non-discretionary expenses (food, utilities, rent/property taxes, and the like). Adjusting back for wage structure makes the equivalent price in a USD 66,000-USD 75,000 band, which makes it a pretty major luxury purchase.

[ The end result is that NZ doesn't have a very large new-car market. Most cars in New Zealand are actually (being right-hand drive) purchased in Japan as second-hand vehicles at the age when they start failing mandatory emissions tests and can no longer be legally driven there. So they crate 'em up and ship 'em here. I know very few people who have ever owned a genuinely new car. ]

Electronics such as TVs, computers and the like aren't quite that extreme, but still spendy. A brand new Sony 40V4000 series TV is USD 1,500 MSRP, NZD 2,800 MSRP (i.e., USD2,000 at market exchange rate, USD2,500-3000 adjusting for wage differentials) even though the shipping distance from the actual point of manufacture is lower to get here.

The thing is that with cars, the differential on a single item is enough to make it worth shipping (containers on boats being comparatively efficient). To achieve that with electronics you're shipping small items that either need expensive shipping methods (FedEx/UPS rates via air = ouch), or be rugged enough to ship via plain old surface post.

The net result is that, since we're talking about a) luxuries rather than the necessities of life, it's better just to do without, especially when b) electronics get cheaper at a staggering rate. Yeah, I'd love one of those HDTVs (and PS3, and time to play the games), but it's better to be patient and wait and save.

Especially when there is also the issue of retirement saving to deal with, same here as everywhere (hard to value precisely, see this Economist note on this, but still an assload of money).

Since I mentioned retirement savings as an issue above, I thought I'd toss in a link to today's entry in the Economist Book Club which has reached Milton Friedman's discussion of how such things affect policy. Thoughtful, as always, and the post just before it also ends up taking on Friedman's policy legacy as well.

Since I'm throwing out linkage, fierce genius and raging lunatic Richard Stallman got half an hour of interview time on New Zealand National Radio this weekend. Kim gave him a pretty easy ride, and it's the same old tired half-truths that are the stock in trade of his pseudophilosophy, but the opening section on the Printer and "no locked doors" at MIT are useful in understanding the background to his world view.

Nothing of any genuine value was said there, of course, whereas the very next interview that day with James Flynn, for whom the Flynn Effect is named, is rather better and more informative. Recommended!

On the subject of Flash Drives....(like the title of this thread)
I'm glad that competition has forced the prices down as the drive sizes continue to go up.  My own FD collection ranges from 64 meg up to 8 gig.
I use the little 64 meg drives to Boot to Ghost and PM8 and the bigger ones, my 6 gig and 8 gig for Ghost backups of my C: drive. (XP)

I just bought an 8 gig PNY Flash drive for less than I paid for a 4 gig drive, a year ago.  I keep this new 8 gig drive for the express purpose of doing Ghost backups without having to sacrifice a DVD or take up a hard drive.

I'm curious though, what flash drives are selling for in other parts of the world.  :-?

I recently visited a "Comp USA" store and saw huge bins of 1 gig Flash Drives for $9.95 ea.  I think that's about what I paid for my first 64 meg drive, a couple of years ago.

I thank God and HP for that little utility that makes a Flash Drive Bootable.

I'm doing this post on my Dial Up ISP, because Tropical Storm FAY has my Satellite ISP DOWN, due to the heavy cloud cover.  Cheeeech!

Y'all have a great day now, Y'hear?
The Shadow (damp in Florida)

TheShadow wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2008 at 6:26pm:

I thank God and HP for that little utility that makes a Flash Drive Bootable.

Linkage?

I recently purchased a SanDisk Extreme Cruzer Contour USB Flash Drive (16GB), and it is fast:  rated at 18 MB/sec for write, I’m seeing 16-17 MB/sec.

The sliding cover that retracts into the body to reveal/expose the USB connector is very nice (replacing a standard flash drive cap).

Rad wrote on Aug 22^nd, 2008 at 9:52pm:

TheShadow wrote on Aug 22nd, 2008 at 6:26pm: I thank God and HP for that little utility that makes a Flash Drive Bootable. Linkage?

By "Linkage" do you mean "Where do I get that program?"
I can tell you it's from HP.

It's called the "HP USB Disk Storage Format Tool, Ver 2.1.8"

Give this location a try.  Works for me!
http://files.extremeoverclocking.com/file.php?f=197

This is actually a later version than the one I've been using.
I'm downloading the newer version NOW!

The Shadow  8-)

What does this utility do, exactly?  You should be able to boot of most any flash drive formatted with FAT, assuming you have a BIOS that supports it.  Most computers made in the last 5 years should support it.  Am I missing something?

Duh,,,,yeah!  
In your description you're missing a boot sector with the DOS boot files,
Command.com
IO.sys
MSDOS.sys

which must be present to boot the system.

OK, by the numbers.....you must download the program from the link I gave you.  Then you must run the program to install the HP program in your "Program Files" folder.
Then you must run the program and fill in the blanks, like where is the USB device you want to format and where are you getting the DOS boot files from?

If you don't have DOS boot files (and I really can't imagine why you wouldn't), you can download those from the site too.  But they are Windows 98 and I use Windows ME.

In my case, which I just did,  I selected my SD card slot as the receiver of the DOS boot info and my Floppy Disk Drive (A: ) as the source of the files.  Then the HP program formatted the SD card I had inserted in the SD slot and then read the Ghost Boot disk that I had placed in my Floppy Drive and copied the three boot files, that I listed above, to the SD card.
(an SD card is used in Kodak and many other digital Cameras)

I then booted my system from the SD card and it came up to the DOS prompt.  

Is that what you wanted? ;)

8-)

TheShadow wrote on Oct 1^st, 2008 at 11:54am:

In your description you're missing a boot sector with the DOS boot files, which must be present to boot the system.

Ah, so this makes a bootable DOS disk.  Thanks for clearing that up.

This process isn't necessary to boot Windows or Linux or some other OS from the disk.  

I know nothing about Linus.....ooops I mean Linux, but you won't be booting Windows from a flash drive.
At least within my own experience, you'll boot to DOS and that's it.
That's what the HP program is for.
I have one flash drive set up to boot into my custom Ghost menu and another one to boot into "Partition Magic 8".  Another one is set up to boot into my custom Windows ME Utilities disk.

Yesterday, I did download the new version of the HP Format tool and I did format my SD Flash Memory Card.  It's a one gig'er.
Then after the HP program put the three DOS, system files, on the little SD card and set up the boot sector, I went ahead and copied the rest of the files from my Ghost boot floppy to that SD card, thus making it a copy of my Ghost boot floppy disk.

Since floppy disks are subject to cosmic rays and all sorts of other things that can cause them to fail, I like having my Ghost boot info on other non-magnetic media.  I also have it on every Ghost Backup DVD that I've made for the past several years.  They all boot into my custom Ghost menu.  Here it is:

[1;33;44m                  

       
                      [41m   GHOST 2003 Menu   [44m

  1.  Run Ghost to make a new image. (Windows XP Only)
       This program will delete all temp files, cookies, histories, etc.
       The Cleanup works only on a FAT-32 partition.

  2.  Run Ghost
       This program runs Ghost alone, with NO cleanup being done.
       Use this version to do Ghost Restores or Ghost image without cleanup.
       You must use this option on any NTFS partition.

  3.  Run Ghost on Windows 98 or ME (del the Swapfile and all temp's, etc.)
 
  4.  Delete all Restore points (Windows XP. Works on FAT-32 partition only)

  5.  Delete Windows "Pagefile" (Windows XP. Works on FAT-32 partitions only)

  6.  Remove all the old Restore files in Windows ME.

 
 Type in a number at the DOS Prompt and press ENTER.

********************************
The weird codes are Ansi Color codes for the menu screen.
I made this for Me, so it may not be to everyone else's liking.
But, with this one disk, I can back up anything from DOS to XP (NTFS).

On a flash drive I can also add any other Utilities that I may wish to have handy, like NTFS4DOS or my Windows ME Utilities, which would never fit on a floppy disk.

When someone says to me, "Flash Drive" I automatically think of the little gadget that looks a lot like a Bic lighter or package of Juicy Fruit Gum.
 
I understand that they may also be referring to the new "Solid State Hard Drives".  I think we need a very definitive name for those new drives so there is no confusion with the older Flash or Thumb Drives.

The title of this thread "USB 2.0 Flash Drives" pretty much excludes those new internal 'Solid State Hard Drives' from the conversation.

I've found the new Flash Drives to be very useful, but awfully slow on a fast system with SATA2 hard drives.  I wouldn't want to be using one for a replacement for a very fast HD.  That would just be Sooooooo counter productive. :(

I wish there were something faster than SATA2 HD's, for a like price. ::)
It's fast, but still the biggest bottle-neck in a really fast system.
The CPU just sits there twiddling its thumbs (do CPU's really have thumbs?) while the drive is finding the data that's required.
I like to load the kernel into RAM and get it up off of the VERY Slow HD to eliminate one very serious road block to system performance.

Oh well, that's a topic for another day.

Sorry this ran so long.  Old folks tend to ramble........on......and on! :-X

Shadow 8-)

TheShadow wrote on Oct 2^nd, 2008 at 9:24am:

I know nothing about Linus.....ooops I mean Linux, but you won't be booting Windows from a flash drive.

Booting to Windows is possible.  It would run a little slow, but sometimes its nice for recovery efforts.

Booting to Linux is not only possible, its very useful.  My firewall runs off a USB drive.  Since its just OpenBSD and its only used as a firewall, I can run it of a 2GB flash drive.  The flash drive replaced an old hard drive.  It was quieter, cheaper, generates less heat, and uses less energy than a replacement HD would have.

One tip I have if you do plan to run an OS off a flash drive is to get a drive that uses Single Level Cells.  They are faster and last about 10x longer than flash disks based on Multi-Level Cells.  The SLC disks will be slightly more expensive for the same size disk, but the extra longevity is important when you are doing something involving a lot of writes to the disk (such as running an OS.)

If anyone who happens to read this thread is interested in building an OpenBSD based firewall on a USB disk, I keep my most recent notes on how to get it done online:

http://magooswisewords.com/MagoosBook/openbsdflash/openbsd-usb-1.htm

I love this forum, because I can learn something new every day that I come here. ;)

8-)

Quote:

Am I missing something?

Duh, YES!

Formatting a Flash Drive does NOT make it bootable nor would it put your choice of OS on the flash Drive.  I use only Windows ME DOS for all my Ghost boot disks.

In my case, I want to make an exact copy of my Ghost 2003 boot disk on a suitable flash drive.  I can copy the files, no problem.  But how to get the boot sector and OS files from the floppy to the flash drive?

That's where the HP program comes into play.
You really have to get the program and run it to get the full effect and understand what it does and how it does it.

But it asks you where you want it to get the boot information for it to put on the Flash Drive.  I tell it to get the boot files from my Ghost boot floppy in Drive A:.

Then after it's made the Flash Drive bootable with the three DOS boot files, I just copy the rest of the files from A: to the flash drive and I'm done.

Now, with all the extra space on the Flash Drive, I can add all sorts of extra HD utilities and any other programs I want.
Once I've got everything I want on the flash drive, I can use "Nero" to burn it to a CD,,,, then I have a Ghost boot CD with all my HD Utilities on it.

In XP, for instance, put in a Flash Drive or Flash Card and right click on it in MyComputer and select Format, and there is NO option to make it bootable.  Again, that's why you need the HP program.

I now have Ghost 2003 on a bootable SD Flash Memory card.  Neat!

And, I just put that SD Flash Memory Card in my Kodak digital camera and saved a picture to it.  Putting DOS and Ghost on that card, didn't do anything to make it less useful in the camera.  The little SD Card I'm using for this test is a 1 gig card, so there's plenty of room for Ghost and a whole bunch of pictures.  ;)

I hope that clears up some of the cobwebs. :-/

EDIT:  I strongly suggest that anyone who's interested in this topic, get a flash drive and get the program from HP (I already gave you the link) and play around with it yourself.  Try this,,,,try that....get inventive, "Get Giggy With It".  And, when you find some feature or use that's not been already given here....come on in and tell us about it.
I've been playing around with Flash Drives and Flash Memory Cards since they first hit the stores and even though I've found many ways to use them, I've probably NOT found every use, yet.

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  8-)

If you don't have the HP tool, another way of making your flash drive bootable is to boot from a Win98 floppy (I gather a WinME floppy won't work as its sys.com is incompatible) and sys C: the USB flash drive.

In that exercise, you're assuming that the flash drive will be seen in DOS, from the Windows 98 boot disk's DOS prompt.
On many computers that may turn out to be an erroneous assumption.

There is NO drawback to using the little utility from HP.  It's very small and downloads in just seconds on most PC's.  It's FREE as well.
It runs from within Windows, so there is NO problem for it to see the same Flash Drive that's seen by Windows.

If you don't have a DOS boot disk or even a floppy disk drive, the three dos files that you need to put on the flash drive, can be downloaded as well from the same site as the HP program.
Or, get them from a friend. ::)

There is absolutely Nothing complicated or impossible with the task of making a Flash Drive bootable, so just get in there and DO IT. ;)

Cheers Mates!
The Shadow  8-)