Windows on a USB key?

kanezfan

I was on another forum and someone mentioned installing WinXP on a 1GB USB key drive to troubleshoot whether some problem is because of a faulty hard drive or whatnot. Wouldn't this be blazing fast? I'm sure it would be faster than any hard drive wouldn't it? You could run Windows off the USB key and install all your apps on hard drives. hell, you could even get another key and put your page file on that. I know apps and games would obviously take longer to load, but I think this would make boot up and general Windows operation much quicker. Unless I'm out of my mind. To be honest I really don't know how a USB drive compares to a hard drive in terms of transfer rates, I could be totally wrong. Thoughts?

primesuspect

USB keys are pretty much way slower than HDs

CB

That and sometime USB drives don't function until after windows is loaded.

madmat

If we're talking USB 1.x the transfer rate is like 1.2MB/s and for USB 2.0 it's around 48MB/s and that's theorectical maximum. You'll have losses associated with controller overhead, physical interface issues such as resistance to electrical flow and other assorted sundries that escape me at the moment.

Add to this the fact that flash media has a limited lifespan of X number of I/O operations (reads and writes) and you'll end up with an OS stored on a medium that will become less and less reliable every time you boot up the PC.

I know that it takes millions of reads and writes to kill flash media but an OS will do several thousand such operations on one bootup alone and add to that the paging file constantly being accessed by the OS and it all adds up in a hurry.

Yes, you could run the pagefile on another stick and have it use the main stick less but that means you'll end up with the paging stick dying before the os stick does which could happen at any time so, unless you have a third stick set up as a paging drive to slap in it's place, the OS might be unusable the next time you try to boot from it after the paging stick dies.

So, we're talking about 3x1GB USB keys as an initial investment (if you're planning to run the OS solely off them) plus replacing the keys as they die from overuse...you might want to have a fourth key to keep the OS key backed up to as well because eventually it's day will come and it'll be destined to return to the silicate that spawned it.

Personally I'd rather look for a used hardware ramdrive and run 4 gigs of PC133 in it to act as my OS. The throughput in terms of sustained reads and writes would be close to the same as a fast raid array but the random reads and writes and seek times would be the bomb.