[Ti] Flash Drive for VM?

[Dennis Fazio]

On Jan 11, 2007, at 7:38 AM, Dr. Trevor J. Hutley wrote:

> Is it possible to put Mac OS X virtual memory (VM) files on a flash  
> drive, to speed up our Powerbooks ?

It's not clear it would be faster. Certainly the new SATA devices can  
do 1.5 or 3.0 GBit/s compared to the USB 2.0 normal flashdrive max  
throughput of 240Mbit/s (obtained from a USB info site).

Though this is faster than the older ATA interface, SCSI, IDE, EIDE  
and SATA interfaces are designed specifically for high-speed disk  
access, usually with direct memory access (DMA), which is a fast pipe  
into memory. USB was designed for peripheral use, so it's not going  
to have the same kind of drivers and hardware data paths into memory  
that rotating mass storage has.

This all assumes there would be enough room on the flash drive to  
even work. If you're the experimental type and have a multi-Gig flash  
drive, there are instructions on how to move your VM volume on the  
Internet.

--
Dennis Fazio
dfz at mac.com