USB Drives - Inexpensive SS Drive

[Jidis]

Originally Posted by gooki

If you want cheap and fair performance SSD go for compact flash via IDE or SATA adapter.

Word of warning on this- I went that route for an older laptop using CF to IDE and the performance is horrid. It's still in that machine, but my memory on all the stuff I read up on is now fading. It was something to do with the way the BIOS detects and accesses the CF/adapter combo, where it bumps into some slow access mode and it's something you can't really change. Both machines I tried were older (a P3 and a P4), so I guess it's possible that newer rigs have resolved that, but look into it beforehand if you're considering it.

FWIW- The CF card had tolerable performance in a card reader, but as an IDE, it benchmarked way down, probably in the range of those really old, slow IDE drives. It can barely handle 44.1/16bit stereo work if there's any processing happening.

Take Care

[star882]

Some BIOS firmware detects CF cards as removable media. It is sometimes possible to force it to detect as a normal hard drive. My friend had to do that for a pfSense router with an old 128MB card as a boot drive.

[PB2]

Originally Posted by gooki

Unless you use EWF (enhanced write filter). It should completely stop windows from writing to the disk.

Yes, that would be the plan.

[PB2]

Originally Posted by sangram

USB drives make for terrible Windows OS drives. Their random write performance is among the slowest of all kinds of drives (except CD-RW) and Windows needs to hit the disk very often (pretty much continuously, even if pagefile and System Restore are switched off).

It can boot quickly enough, but that's about it. It is possible to run XP off a single 4GB stick, FWIW, so $10 may be a worthwhile sacrifice to see how well it works out for you.

I mentioned in the first post that the plan would be to do a software RAID, which makes a lot of sense since the flash memory does not have rotational latency. However, there are some low cost high bandwidth SSD's that I had not noticed when I first posted and I plan to try one of those soon.

[PB2]

Originally Posted by star882

Some BIOS firmware detects CF cards as removable media. It is sometimes possible to force it to detect as a normal hard drive. My friend had to do that for a pfSense router with an old 128MB card as a boot drive.

Thanks for the tip Star. I'm going to try it and I doubt if some of my older systems will boot from a CF card or USB stick. My plan is to use one of the lower cost SSD drives so it should not be an issue, but it still might be interesting to try it with a USB stick just out of curiosity.

[PB2]

I'm trying an Intel X25-V since they were out of stock of the lower cost PQI - this thing is FAST!:
Newegg.com - Intel X25-V SSDSA2MP040G2R5 2.5" 40GB SATA II MLC Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) - SSD

I was thinking of large USB drives in a RAID config at the start of this thread, but with the SSD's coming down in price and their high bandwidth, it makes no sense.

[gooki]

As a boot drive I agree, but for a content drive, even cheap USB memory sticks may well be quick enough to serve audio content.