USB flash drive as hard disk?

[Intrepid]

I was wondering if using a USB2 flash driver as a hard drive would be possible, and if it would see a boost over standard platter drives on SATAII. I konw SATAII is faster than USB2 (by an order of magnitude according to the numbers, but only by about 30% according to a thread on TomsHardware). So I know that the SATAII platter drive would have one advantage, a wider buss, but a USB2 flash drive would be much much faster in terms of read/write speed of the drive itself.

So my question is, which would win? a 32/64GB USB2.0 flash drive, or a 10,000RPM SATAII platter drive?

 

[Endgame124]

My initial guess is that a single flash USB 2 drive can't beat a single 10,000 RPM HDD, even an old 36GB Raptor.

I'm working on Raid 0ing 4l 4GB USB 2 flash drives currently, and its looking like 4 of them in Raid 0 across 2 controllers is somewhere between a Raptor 150 and a Velicraptor on reads, but writes are still going to be poor.

 

[Ben333]

Well I bet a better way to test it with flash is to get some cheap CF and a $10 IDE to compact flash adapter. That would be the same idea and cost as a flash drive and work better as a hard drive. I doubt it will be as fast as a wicked expensive SSD but I don't know whether or not a modern 10k drive would beat it but I think the 10k drive would probably be faster than any CF or USB drive.

 

[terran2k]

read/write speed of a sata drive is much faster than a USB 2.0 drive. random reads would be faster on the thumbdrive b/c no head to seek the data I would think.

 

[UglyChild]

You can get a internal/external enclosure that uses 2 CF cards that lets you run them as SSD. But its still SATA.

http://www.engadget.com/2008/05/24/sans-digitals-cs1t-and-cr2t-turn-cf-cards-into-2-5-inch-enclosu/


But i doubt it would be faster what you are trying to do.

 

[Know Nuttin]

other than access time, the SATA drive would win. There aren't many large USB flash drives that can handle 25-30MB/sec writes sustained sequentially, never mind random. Read speeds, you're still handicapped significantly by both the technology of the flash drive (they don't use high speed since they were more designed for convenience than all out performance) and the interface itself (how often do you see 40MB/sec across USB 2.0?).

 

[netjunkie]

yeah but as a dedicated DC rig , I think that would suffice , infact I plan on using my wd 6gb usb drive for that .

 

[MR-FIX-IT]

I was wondering if using a USB2 flash driver as a hard drive would be possible, and if it would see a boost over standard platter drives on SATAII. I konw SATAII is faster than USB2 (by an order of magnitude according to the numbers, but only by about 30% according to a thread on TomsHardware). So I know that the SATAII platter drive would have one advantage, a wider buss, but a USB2 flash drive would be much much faster in terms of read/write speed of the drive itself.

So my question is, which would win? a 32/64GB USB2.0 flash drive, or a 10,000RPM SATAII platter drive?

Well the fastest USB drive is the PNY XLR8 4gig. Does over 35MB/s read. Never raided USB drives. seems like a pretty cool idea. But if I were to do it. I would use 4 of these drives, and hope I get 140MB/s in RAID 0. A single 16gig USB would be much slower than four 4gig USB drive in RAID 0.. Well I would hope so... But who knows if each usb channel is Independent from each other...