usb stick to speed up win7

[archonforest]

Does anybody using Win7 with an added usb stick to speed up the system? Does it actually helps at all? Seems to me nothing changed on my pc.

[matrix2003]

I tried that a few times and never noticed any difference.

[archonforest]

yeah me neither...
friend of my told me that windows only putting the swap files there and with usb2 connection most probably it will give nothing at all. Probably with USB3...

[masonspappy]

I think you sort of have to understand the machine characteristics to see any improvement.  Something like this has been tried where I work, occasionally, but using a high-speed SSD, not a USB stick. And the programs were creating a sh*tload of small temporary files that were constantly being read and written.  So all this adds up to some noticeable performance improvement if the circumstances are right.   But it's a big 'if' and you probably won't see it on the machine like the ones most of us use in our personal lives.

[bla bla 2]

Bottom myself. I procure a ssd and I do not see rapiditer except for open software, a little shorter.

[archonforest]

Thx guys fir the input.
Seems that I will get an SSD in this case or this new hybrid drive that is a normal hdd with 8 gig of ssd in there

[jaf]

I would take some time to decide how to use a SSD.  I mean, what do you want to run faster?  If it's "everything", you may need a relatively large SSD.  Myself, simply wanted Win7 to boot quicker, so I purchased a 128 gb drive for the operating system and use a regular hard drive for most of my applications.  I put a few applications on the SSD though (there are some installers that don't give a choice and go automatically to the boot drive.)  Someone in the win7 forum said "never install an application of the boot drive", but I haven't noticed a problem doing this.  And it doesn't bother me if it takes 4 seconds to load Word instead of 1 second.

My SSD is a couple years old.  At the time I bought it there was a lot of talk about failure rates and limited read/write's on SSD's.  It was typical to see comments like "don't defrag your SSD because it will increase the chance of early failure."  I moved my page file to one of my hard drives because of that and I don't run into a low memory problem very often with 16 gb.

I haven't kept up with the technology so maybe (likely) the failure rate has improved and the concerns I had aren't that big of a deal anymore.

[archonforest]

Thx Jaf.
I saw a test of a Samsung SSD. They wanted to see how long it will last so a special program was keep writing random data on it 24/7 no stops. The drive lasted for more than a month. Then they calculated the amount data that was written on the drive and divided with an arbitrary number(like how much an average user will write per day) and like this the life span of the drive was 70 something years. That is not bad at all. So eve some keep writes several gigs per day the SSD should not fail for many many years.

[Oshyan]

Just to be clear, a USB stick is going to be a lot slower than an internal SSD drive, even with USB 3.0 on the external memory device (assuming similar speed memory chips and controller inside each device). An SSD *will* speed up Windows load and application load, as well as any data that you have on that drive and access. It will not noticeably speed up renders in most cases though. The "Readyboost" (that's what it was called, right?) thing was never really that great, and since SSDs are now fairly affordable, it's really not a useful option anymore IMO.

- Oshyan

[archonforest]

Just to be clear, a USB stick is going to be a lot slower than an internal SSD drive, even with USB 3.0 on the external memory device (assuming similar speed memory chips and controller inside each device). An SSD *will* speed up Windows load and application load, as well as any data that you have on that drive and access. It will not noticeably speed up renders in most cases though. The "Readyboost" (that's what it was called, right?) thing was never really that great, and since SSDs are now fairly affordable, it's really not a useful option anymore IMO.

- Oshyan

Yes I was talking about the readyboost. Someone told me that Win7 can use a stick as memory extension and I was thinking if I put an 8gb stick into my pc I will have 16gb "ram"....hehehe....i was so wrong