Faster Sl ?

Not shure if this is right place but im testing simple speed ups w. a memroy sick and sl.
So far i find on REZ when i sent my cache to a memory stick im getting at min 1/4 more speed .. IS can see textuers sooner than w. a hard drive. And at the very least sl is not killing my HD thrashing and so on.

BUT... windlight dont play nice actualy caused problems w. bad data .. mabey it was just a goof , let me know but for now im happly USB2 SL stick .. 4g is stil more than enough and fits in your pocket too

I'm guessing technical issues or a similar forum would be best, but since there's no really good fit I'll go ahead an answer here...

odds are some of the speed up your seeing is because as you noted, your HD is being thrashed... which means you probably need to defragment your HD.

there are lots of sugesttions for limiting HD fragmentation (which will speed up access) some of which are manually setting a pagefile size, keeping temp and pagefiles on a separate drive, keeping apps on a separate drive than the OS, etc... all these limit fragmentation, speed up acces to files and doesn't hurt filing....

being as I don't have any usb2 ports I can't guess whether access would be faster, but I do know it'll chew up more processor time (probably from within the explorer proccess) and that may not be what you want (it's a factor of how usb connections are processed)

Yeah, technical issues would probably be a better fit, or maybe even Resident Answers, but there really is no perfect fit for this topic.

Anyway, I'd suspect that any performance gains or losses from use of a memory stick vs. a hard drive would depend on several factors. All other things being equal, in no particular order, the factors to consider at the very least are the health of the hard drive, as Void already mentioned, the speed of the drive, and the speed of the connection.

USB 2 operates at 480 Mbps. That's megabits, not megabytes, per second. In megabytes, that's 60 per second. Giving the best possible benefit of the doubt on seek time for memory stick (I have no idea what it is, but I'm betting it's nearly instantaneous), I think we can safely say that the best possible transfer speed you're going to get from a USB 2 memory stick is 60 MBps.

Compare that with a SATA II, which operates at 150 MBps, or 300 MBps in certain RAID configurations. At first glance, that means you're getting 2.5 - 5 times the speed.

Now factor in the speed of the drive itself. If you're using a high performance drive, then you could have a rate as high as 3 Gbps, or 384 megabytes per second. That means the limiting factor is the SATA II interface, which puts you at a pretty solid 150 megabytes per second, or 300 if you're running RAID 0. (That's all assuming my understanding of how these things work is accurate, which it might not be. If I'm wrong, hopefully someone will explain.)

In that case, hard drive performance should beat the pants off what you're getting from that memory stick.

However, if you're using an older connection like IDE, then your transfer speeds are gonna be well below that of USB 2. The most common speeds with those were 8 MBps, 16 MBps, and 33 MBps. I think there were also some that went to 66 MPps and 133 MBps, which would be faster than USB 2, but I don't think they were all that common. I don't know off hand what speeds were available on IDE drives, but I'd imagine they were pretty slow by today's standards.

So if you've got an older drive setup, then almost undoubtedly your USB 2 stick is gonna be faster.

Again, this is all assuming my understanding of how these things really work is correct. I could be way off. Hopefully someone with more knowledge will chime in.

Also, it all assumes healthy hard drives. If your drive needs defragmenting, if it's too full, or if it has errors on it, then your performance could be severely degraded. For best results, perform routine hard drive maintenance at least once a week.

Also need to factor in that other things are happening on the system - SL isn't the only one touching the disk... I don't know what the seek time on a USB stick is but I'm betting it's less than that of a hard disk.

I havent re-posted my findings because i was aware of all mixed situatuons and have found instauilty .. To many factors to say that it is or is not better. There is a boost but. i have found that it also is corupid easly. so i would not recomend it.
I still see a gain in speed though but all 3 boxes under 3 differnt OS. same problems.Test seem to show AT times SL is trying to fill a bottle like its a bucket. other times its fine.
I have checked w. the MFG of "Memory storage devices" and none recomend defrag them as acoording to them MEMORY devices donot suffer from fragmitaion.
But thay are FAT32 format .. (never-re-format) you will void wtty.
SATA,IDE ect acess times are not evan close to the speed of a RAM drive. This why i thought to test it w. SL as it seemd a logical thing to try.
Faster YES , but makes way more problems due to coruption under otherwise normal use.
PPL gen run AV and firewalls ect. Possably causing issues in the timming of the data stream. I dont know this as a fact to the coruption, i assume tests under worst case.
LL dosent suport it, just lets me is all.

I install SL client (not lab-rat version) as normal on a local drive.
I then goto a ram drive and make a folder called SLcash.
I then set the prefferance to point to that ramdrive folder for cache.

I know i can dump all of it on ram drive but im assuming most dont have 8gig ones . Besides client loads b4 you can log in anyway.


Anyway just me in my mad lab ..

Mir <--dosent suggest anyone should try this (EVER)

PS: Same w. flash drive and SD cards (nothing fancy)

I seem to remember trying this once. I don't remember what the effect was but because I'm on a laptop with the only option being to only have one drive for both application and cache I remember thinking it would be a performance gainer. I hadn't thought about it again till this post. Was the reason I went back to HD cache the fact that my stick was only one gig and i could get a full gig out of the drive but not the stick? who knows? MY laptop DOES have a port for SDcards. Mayby that WOULD work. No harm in forking over for something that will also be usefull in my camera if this fails right?

the limiting factor on the speed of drives, is the drives themselves, not the connections. IDE were running at most commonly 100 or 133 for a year or so before they started phasing them out, and no drive at the time could consistently use the available bandwidth. the same is true today with sata drives, they get their speed boost not from a faster connection, but from other things like NCQ? queueing and such and more on board memory and basically little tricks to make sure the stuff it wants is ready when it's asked for, which is why the actual spindle speed and GB per inch are important. To my knowledge only WD with their 10k raptor drives are still the only no scsi drives over 7.2k rotational speed.

the reason I think you will find access time faster on a usb stick compared to HD is just plain and simple, the amount of other information it has to read through to find the pertinent bits. if you're using your USB for nothing BUT sl, then it's only gonna be reading the cache instead of having to read through the rest of the drive contents