You know you're PC is fast when...

skywake · June 19, 2016

On 18/06/2016 at 4:06 AM, daniielrp said:

Well readyboost used to be a way of supplementing RAM - the theory being that flash storage over USB was somehow faster than an internal HDD. I never really understood the logic honestly as most USB flash drives aren't that fast.

I just benchmarked my SSD, 2.5" HDD and a cheap $10 thumbdrive. For writes there's no contest but this is for boot so writes don't really matter. It's all about read speed. And on that note, for sequential reads you're right:

Flash: 15MB/s

HDD: 80MB/s

SSD: 540MB/s

But when it comes to random reads aka the metric that matters for boot speeds? The HDD tanks

Flash: 7MB/s

HDD: 1.6MB/s

SSD: 380MB/s

PianoPlayer88Key · June 19, 2016

8 hours ago, skywake said:

But when it comes to random reads aka the metric that matters for boot speeds? The HDD tanks

Flash: 7MB/s

HDD: 1.6MB/s

SSD: 380MB/s

I wonder what a comparison of the random read/write speeds would be like, for example between a

Early model tape drive (maybe a cassette like was used in to the early 1980s or so on some computers)
5 1/4" or 8" floppy
Broadwell-EP Xeon E7 level 1 CPU Cache

I bet it'd be a huge difference.

daniielrp · June 19, 2016

11 hours ago, skywake said:

I just benchmarked my SSD, 2.5" HDD and a cheap $10 thumbdrive. For writes there's no contest but this is for boot so writes don't really matter. It's all about read speed. And on that note, for sequential reads you're right:

Flash: 15MB/s

HDD: 80MB/s

SSD: 540MB/s

But when it comes to random reads aka the metric that matters for boot speeds? The HDD tanks

Flash: 7MB/s

HDD: 1.6MB/s

SSD: 380MB/s

Readyboost wasn't used for boots.

skywake · June 20, 2016

10 hours ago, daniielrp said:

Readyboost wasn't used for boots.

My mistake and you're right it was used basically as extra swap space. For some reason I was thinking of Intel's SRT and Readyboost at the same time. Still, the point remains. The sort of loads that you'd be putting on the Thumbdrive cache are mostly random small reads. A workload that HDDs are terrible at. It's why on old machines with not much RAM you'd hit a performance brick wall hard. Of course these days with lots of RAM and SSDs it's not an issue.