Flash drive vs Hard Drive
 

What do you guys think is more reliable for everday 24 hour a day use?

I am thinking about using a usb flash drive as a hard drive instead of a hard drive. Mostly for its compact size. But I am wondering if it will last as long as a normal hard drive?

I tried it today and all my software went on just fine. But it seemed to run slower. Does flash drives read slower than hard drives?

USB 2.0 is much slower than SCSI/IDE/SATA, the standards for internal Hard Drives.

However, flash memory has a MTTF (mean time to failure) about ten times as long as a physical hard drive. They last FOREVER; there's no moving magnetic heads, like an ordinary drive. Samsung is actually working on a laptop which uses flash for the entire system drive. It's Shock resistant (500 Gs), has low low low energy consumption, and has an even lower rate of failure.

For speed, USB2.0 (and thumbdrive) is not the solution. An internal 7200 or 10k drive will be faster. For security and data integrity, a thumb drive isn't a bad choice. And look for Flash drives in the future.

Is there diffrent speed flash drives? Seems like it slows down everything. Even the computer response time. I hit right and it takes a second to go right. Do you think this would effect stuff like it sending information threw the com port?

I just had a portable harddrive fail on me >_< Flash drive is way more durable.

How exactly are you implimenting the flash drive? You can get a CF to IDE adapter, and run off a solid state compact flash card, with, if anything, a speed increase.

http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...ad44midecf.asp

How much of a speed increase would that be? Would it be anywhere close to 7200 rpm hard drive?

Check out this site. Shows a video (at the bottom of the page) of the boot time for for a Sony TZ91 with XP Boot with 200GB 5400RPM HD and the same laptop with 64GB SSD

http://www.dynamism.com/tz90/main.shtml

So a SSD card would be faster than a normal usb2.0 flash drive?

This is what you are talking about right?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820191056

That adapter you linked earler said it was for flash cards. These are SSD Card. Will that adapter you linked earler work with that SSD card I linked to hook up to a IDE cable?

Dell already has a completely flash based computer out.

Would something like this work as fast a HD but last longer and more reliable?
http://cgi.ebay.com/GigaByte-i-Ram-H...QQcmdZViewItem

yes there are solid state hard drives available now... pricey but supposedly very speedy.

$429 for 32Gb SATA Internal Solid state disk

$3,399.00 128GB SATA Internal Solid state disk

I dont need a huge drive. something like 1gb or even 500mb would work. as long as its as fast as a normal HD.

Say I was to buy something like this.
http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...der/adsacf.asp

And add a 2gb
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820134118

How would the speeds be compared to normal hard drives.

On the website for the sata adapter it says it boots windows media center 2005 in 40 seconds. Not sure if that is fast or not. I booted my windows xp pro computer and it took around 45 seconds.

I would advise against using any form of flash for 24/7 usage. Flash memory has a maximum number of write cycles. In other words each bit of memory can only be changed a certain number of times before it can not be changed anymore and gets "stuck".

As far as peformance of the parts you listed, they would be decently below the performance of a desktop 7200rpm drive. The limiting factor would be the compact flash. For example if you used the Kingston Ultimate 266X drive, the performance would be a little below that of a cheap 5400 rpm drive (you would not have any seek time with the flash so the flash could appear faster depending on the size/type of files).

These files on the computer are really small. The entire Hard drive has 32mb of used space.

The limits on flash memory write cycles are much greater than they used to be - USB flash drives and compact flash cards using current technology are in theory able to perform approximately 1 000 000 cycles before failure. While real-world performance probably won't even come close to that, even 300 000 - 400 000 cycles ought to last several years. Add in the error correction and wear-leveling that all Flash devices include these days and it's very probable that you'll be upgrading long before the drive actually fails.

In terms of speed, flash memory reads at a much greater speed than magnetic media. Write times are slower, but even so I would expect a significant speed advantage. The primary bottleneck on most flash devices is the interface; that is to say, USB. Connecting it to a SATA bus ought to make for some wicked fast storage.

I actually just asked a guy who I go to school with about these drives. He works heavily in the computer industry and sets up networks and actual computer systems for cooperations. He always has the top of the line everything, newest gizmo out, all for free. Anyways he has one of these in his computer and he said that for single readings it is blindingly fast, but for constant writes it slows down to slower than a regular harddrive. So while it would boot your computer faster, open your documents faster, scan through your computer files faster if you were ever running a program off of it (like a game or a video or picture editor) it will slow right down.

Well I ended up going with the CF card SATA adapter and it worked well. It is slower than a normal 7200rpm hd. But that aint that big of a issue. Now I am looking at setting up a second system the same way. Sept this time id like to make it faster. So I am going to go with faster CF cards. I am also going to attept to run 2 CF cards in a RAID 0 array. Here are my questions.

What do you guys think of this idea?

How much speed do you think I will gain by going from X33 Speed CF to X266 Speed flash and running 2 cards in RAID 0?

Also what is the best way of doing this. I am unsure of how to even setup something like this. Not even sure if my mobo in my shuttle system has raid support. Below is a link of all the products I would like to use.

And how reliable is a system like this. I am not looking for something I half to fix all the time.

shuttle PC:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16856101029R

Compact Flash:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820134520

Compact Flash to SATA Adapter:
http://www.addonics.com/products/fla...der/adsacf.asp

Just use hard drives and some sort of redundancy/backup solution for reliability.