Re: Is it possible to use a USB Pen Drive as the swapfile?
- From: Uwe Sieber <mail@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Fri, 08 Sep 2006 09:09:42 +0200
mydejamail@xxxxxxxxxxx wrote:
I am thinking about using a USB Pen Drive as the swapfile for Windows -
is this possible?
Not thru the dialog - it offers fixed drives only. But if
you mount it into an empty folder on an NTFS drive in
the disk management an enter then this path in the registry
under
HKLM\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Control\Session Manager\Memory Management
PagingFiles
e.g.
C:\MyPageFileFlashDrive\pagefile.sys 990 990
it may work. I've not tried it.
There also the issue of USB pen drives having a limit of the number of
times they can be read or written.
Yes, it's limited, but modern flash drives should have enough
reserve blocks.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wear_levelling
The main problem I see is that Windows uses the page file
in blocks of 4096 Bytes but flash memory usually has logical
blocks of 65536 Bytes and whenever a 4K block is written the
flash device has to erase and rewrite a whole 64K block.
It would be interesting to know more about the pageing internals.
I think that Windows tries to write as linear as possible because
it saves access times on harddisks and this would help to avoid
the described effect. But who knows...
If the former is possible how long might one last?
Depends on how heavy you Windows uses the pagefile :-)
So far all tries I heard about to kill a flash drive by endless
write accesses are failed.
Uwe
.
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