Question about flash drives and gaming

[eastmen]

Okay , Here is a question. Can you get a flash drive and have it work like a raid drive for games. I.e installing the game to both the hardrive and flash drive to get it to load faster ?

 

[Davros]

no you cant raid a flash drive and a hard drive
the best you could possibly do is for a game that streams stuff like video off the dvd is make it stream off the flash drive instead
or if you have the ram install to a ram drive

is loading that slow for you ?

 

[chavvdarrr]

to enhance your speed under XP, you can use eBoostr (eboostr.com) - it simply allows Vista-like speed up utilising flash drives for caching, splitting read/write requests between a USB and Hdd, supported devices are flash media or external (usb) hard disks.
I use for a month it the new v.2.0 does seem to improve performance, now multitasking does feel smoother.

 

[eastmen]

I'm under vista and have a 4 gig flash drive. Loading is kinda slow for me in age of conan. I only ask because I recently got one of these babys http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820220261 for free. I don't really need to carry around 32 gigs of info. I have 2 4 gigs that are more than neough. So I figured mabye i could do something were I load age of conan to that and the hardrive and get a speed increase.

I wonder if ready boost will give me an advantage with 32 gigs devoted to it

 

[BRiT]

ReadyBoost is limited to 4Gigs.

 

[eastmen]

ReadyBoost is limited to 4Gigs.

meh thats kinda pointless . Oh well. Guess I will use the drive for porn

 

[BRiT]

Yes, sort of. Though an 8GB flash drive fits nicely for a 4GB ReadyBoost section with the other 4GB used for swap-like activities (browser cache, %TEMP%/%TMP%, log files, etc).

 

[eastmen]

anywhere i can read up more on the swap like activities . I have a 32 gig drive that i have no use for . Everything i need fits on a 4 or 8 gig drive

 

[Davros]

ReadyBoost is limited to 4Gigs.

is that because most flash drives are formatted as fat32 ? would changeing the drive to ntfs help or is it a limit with readyboost

 

[pcchen]

FAT32 is not limited to 4GB. So I'd guess it a limitation of current ReadyBoost.

 

[Davros]

i mean 4gb for a single file

 

[Berek]

At this time the more economical and simplistic solution for those building a new system is to simply establish 8GB of DDR2 main memory. This is more than enough than Vista and combined apps will use at this time. Having a ReadyBoost drive with this, or more main memory, is virtually useless.

Hopefully you aren't wasting your money just yet on DDR3, but if you insist on this upgrade than 8GB will cost you a lot more and you may want to limit to a lower amount (and which at this point you should be asking yourself if DDR3 is what I want if I'm forced to go lower and deal with a flash drive anyway).

ReadyBoost is especially effective when a user has 2GB or less memory on-board, although having 4GB may still provide "some" limited benefits.

If you do get a flash drive regardless of your intended uses of it, ensure it is "Readyboost" capable. Readyboost drives are often certified with higher read, and more importantly write speeds that Readyboost likes.

 

[khelben1979]

To get an insight of how fast the current usb flash drives is today you might look at this link.

I know you already have your usb flash drive now, but the next time you buy another one you might be interested to know about the performance comparisons.

 

[Berek]

To get an insight of how fast the current usb flash drives is today you might look at this link.

I know you already have your usb flash drive now, but the next time you buy another one you might be interested to know about the performance comparisons.

Thank you much! I have been searching a long time actually for something like this. Good flash drive reviews are hard to come by, and I'm in the market for a few drives right now, but I want the ones that will work with Readyboost the most efficiently.