Flash drive for Photoshop scratch disk?

D
Posted By
d23
Apr 8, 2005
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1472
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2
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Those keychain sized flash drives are being sold for less and less. Since they are all electronic–no moving parts– shouldn’t they be faster than a regular hard drive? Shouldin’t I be able to use one (pluged into a USB 2 port) as the scratch disk and gain some speed?
Thanks in advance.
Charles Portland OR

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S
SpaceGirl
Apr 8, 2005
d23 wrote:
Those keychain sized flash drives are being sold for less and less. Since they are all electronic–no moving parts– shouldn’t they be faster than a regular hard drive? Shouldin’t I be able to use one (pluged into a USB 2 port) as the scratch disk and gain some speed?
Thanks in advance.
Charles Portland OR

You’d think so, but no. Take a compactFlash memory card for example. Single speed is 150kb/ps. Only the really high-speed stuff (60x or faster) even comes close to hard-disk speed, and even then they have no cache or queing so the write speed is only really relevant to linea stuff (such as photos). Random access is very slow.

I have some 66x CF memory in my Canon Digital Rebel camera to runs about 9,500kb/ps on reads, and 8,000kb/ps while writing. The hard drive in this computer runs at 244,000kb/ps on read and write. As you can see, quite a difference!

You then have to look at the BUS speed – USB 2.0 is limited to 2mbit I think – that’s not even as fast as some broadband internet these days. You wouldn’t want to write your scratch files at internet speed 🙂

Solid state memory is the way to go, but we’re not quite there yet. The average hard disk is 10 times faster than a fast memory stick.



x theSpaceGirl (miranda)

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D
d23
Apr 8, 2005
Thanks spacegirl! Charles

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