SD card as a windows swap drive?

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mcgyver · #1 Post by **mcgyver** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 1:51 am

Since X4x/X60 have an SD card slot, can we use an SD card, say 512MB or 1GB as a windows swap drive instead of harddisk? Does anybody try it before? Will it speed up Windows?

christopher_wolf · #2 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 2:06 am

It would work as a swap drive; as to how much it would help performance? It depends on how much of a load you are putting on the system in terms of disk read/writes and potential fragmentation the process could introduce to the disk.

nickpoore · #3 Post by **nickpoore** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 8:16 pm

Take the alternative.

Put 2GB of RAM in your system and turn the Swapfile OFF.

That's what I did, and I haven't looked back.

They say that Vista will use such drives as swapfiles automatically, but I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Just do what I did - throw memory at it. Memory is cheap, I think I paid $150 per GB.

-=Nick=-

mcgyver · #4 Post by **mcgyver** » Mon Mar 27, 2006 9:42 pm

Thanks, nickpoore and christopher_wolf.

I'm gonna upgrade my soon-to-be-arrived 512mb x60 with one extra gb. Hope it will not need a swap file.

The reason I ask is because I have an sd card and thought it would help increase the performance if I use it. But I am not sure from technical point of view whether 1) Windows would see the SD card as a drive when it allocates a swap file during startup and 2) a throughput of the SD card access.

I had bad experience when I used a PCMCIA compact falsh card reader. It's very slow and takes 100% cpu while reading/writing data. Hope this is not the case for SD.

dorin · #5 Post by **dorin** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:17 am

hi guys, please a step by step instructions on how to do it?! hate the slow hdd, 1.5 gb helped abit but if anything else might help, willing to try!

thanks

dorin

christopher_wolf · #6 Post by **christopher_wolf** » Tue Mar 28, 2006 4:44 am

If you have a choice to inrease the memory or to add swap file space, always choose to increase the memory if you need it. Chances are, you will notice much more of an improvement.

em500 · #7 Post by **em500** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 5:41 am

Please don't even think about this. It is generally not a good idea to use flash memory as swap space.

Flash is really meant for storage, not for continuous writes. They can only be overwritten a limited number of times before they wear out. In modern flash, this is usually pretty high (around 100.000), so for everyday use of storing documents and music and such this isn't an issue. But a pagefile is exactly one of those things that will decrease the life of your SD card.

Second, swapping to SD is likely slower than even the slow X40 HD, and if you have an X60 a 7200rpm HD is a far better option. The only area where flash wins from HD in speed is seek times for reading. Throughput is generally lower, and writing to flash is dramatically slower than reading.

stgreek · #8 Post by **stgreek** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 6:50 am

nickpoore wrote:Take the alternative.

Put 2GB of RAM in your system and turn the Swapfile OFF.

That's what I did, and I haven't looked back.

They say that Vista will use such drives as swapfiles automatically, but I'm not sure if this is a good thing or not.

Just do what I did - throw memory at it. Memory is cheap, I think I paid $150 per GB.

-=Nick=-

You can never turn the windows swapfile completely "off". I can easily send you code that will use swap file even if you have more than double the available memory. Weird thing is, all other OSes I have tried it on allocate memory correctly, instead of creating a swap file although you told them not to :S

akao · #9 Post by **akao** » Thu Mar 30, 2006 4:17 pm

I tried using a 133x Corsair 2 GB SD card, for a similar purpose. What I did was install the commonly used software on the SD card. It was cool in that the hard drive didn't spin nearly as much, but the performance was also noticeably slower.

I assume it is only going to be worse with SWAP since writing is much slower on SD than reads.

In short, you will not see any speed improvements.

nickpoore · #10 Post by **nickpoore** » Fri Mar 31, 2006 11:53 pm

mcgyver wrote:I had bad experience when I used a PCMCIA compact falsh card reader. It's very slow and takes 100% cpu while reading/writing data. Hope this is not the case for SD.

PCMCIA is 16 bit and sucks.
You need to use a 32-bit cardbus adapter.

Delkin sell a really nice one. I can dump my 4GB CF card in about 20 minutes, with very little processor utilization.

-=Nick=-

dorin · #11 Post by **dorin** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 4:01 am

nickpoore, can you pls give me a link of the exact product you use? i will get next week an slr camera and will run with compact flash. i was thinking of an pcmcia reader, but now i have doubts!

thanks alot,

dorin

PTzero · #12 Post by **PTzero** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 11:30 am

dorin wrote:nickpoore, can you pls give me a link of the exact product you use? i will get next week an slr camera and will run with compact flash. i was thinking of an pcmcia reader, but now i have doubts!

thanks alot,

dorin

I think this is the adapter that nickpoore was referring to. I have the same one and it works very well.

http://www.delkin.com/store/customer/pr ... cat=&page=

dorin · #13 Post by **dorin** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 3:37 pm

thanks! had no idea about the 32 bit one!i was soo lucky i checked the forum today, cause i planed tomorrow to make the oder for the camera.

once again, thanks

dorin

mcgyver · #14 Post by **mcgyver** » Sat Apr 01, 2006 5:20 pm

I should have asked this question *before* I bought the pcmcia adapter. This one sucks, it takes 100% cpu while slowly transferring files. (Luckily it took 100% of one core, I still had another core to do other things. In my previous T41, I couldn't do anything while copying photos.)

I tested the CF adapter speed with HDTune, it's only 1MB/sec compared with 30+ MB/sec transfer speed of the internal harddisk. The access time is much faster though (1ms vs 10+ms). I don't have CF cardbus adapter to test. If anyone who has it care to report, I'd appreciate.

I will be getting the SD card next Monday. I will report the result later.

mcgyver · #15 Post by **mcgyver** » Sun Apr 02, 2006 1:54 am

An update. I got the SD card this evening. After a few tries, the x60 builtin card reader shows double transfer rate (2 MB/sec) compared to CF PCMICA adapter card. But it's still very slow (15x slower) then the internal harddisk. So it cannot be used for any performance improvement.

nickpoore · #16 Post by **nickpoore** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 8:47 pm

stgreek wrote:You can never turn the windows swapfile completely "off". I can easily send you code that will use swap file even if you have more than double the available memory. Weird thing is, all other OSes I have tried it on allocate memory correctly, instead of creating a swap file although you told them not to :S

I'm not sure that you're right.
My System Preferences show that the swapfile is indeed OFF.
When I look at my C: drive (with hidden/system files enabled) I cannot see any swapfile.

Here is a screenshot of exactly that.
http://www.nicholaspoore.com/noswap.jpg

nickpoore · #17 Post by **nickpoore** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 8:49 pm

PTzero wrote:I think this is the adapter that nickpoore was referring to. I have the same one and it works very well.

http://www.delkin.com/store/customer/pr ... cat=&page=

Yep, that's the one.
It works great.

Reggie · #18 Post by **Reggie** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 9:44 pm

Has anyone tried these? I'm thinking of getting one.

www.u3.com

portable software to your usb drive.

dfumento · #19 Post by **dfumento** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 10:15 pm

Different flash memory devices have different speeds. There is a considerable difference in speeds. Check the specs.

mcgyver · #20 Post by **mcgyver** » Tue Apr 04, 2006 11:22 pm

dfumento wrote:Different flash memory devices have different speeds. There is a considerable difference in speeds. Check the specs.

I guess the bottleneck is also at the bus controller. My Kingston compact flash is fast but my pcmcia card adapter is slow. Be sure that you have no bottleneck in any of this.

The delkin cardbus32 adapter is very expensive ($47.99). I believe I bout my card adapter for less than $10. I hope there is a better deal for the cardbus32.

nickpoore · #21 Post by **nickpoore** » Sat Apr 08, 2006 4:46 pm

mcgyver wrote:The delkin cardbus32 adapter is very expensive ($47.99). I believe I bout my card adapter for less than $10. I hope there is a better deal for the cardbus32.

My $50 Delkin card is 10x faster than your $10 card.
I could point you in the direction of a cheap ACER laptop as well if you like..

mcgyver · #22 Post by **mcgyver** » Sun Apr 09, 2006 12:14 am

nickpoore wrote:I could point you in the direction of a cheap ACER laptop as well if you like..

Heheh, No, thank you. I have owned 5 laptops in my life and all of them are thinkpads. Unless Lenovo screws up with Thinkpad, my future laptop will be it.

Anyway, even though I used the cardbus32, I think my Kingston elite pro (45x) may not be fast enough anyhow.

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