USB pagefile?

[Xylob the Destroyer]

now that relatively large USB2.0 flash-drives have become fairly cheap, I've been toying with the idea of sticking a 1G stick into one of my rear USB slots and formatting it as NTSF, then telling Windoze to use the whole thing for the pagefile.

what, if any, would be the drawbacks of using a set up like this?
as it is, Photoshop is constantly bitching at me about have the 'scratch' file on the same volume as my pagefile (i'm not talking about the PC in my profile), but I only have one HD, so I really have no choice in the matter.

[redwudz]

Give it a try, though putting the pagefile on a external drive is unlikely to speed up anything. Unless your boot drive is really slow, I doubt there will be a difference.

Photoshop likes to hold files in RAM, so more memory would be the biggest improvement.

But someone else may have better information.

[darkknight145]

Windows Vista can use flash drives in a similar manner.
Point to remember, flash drives have a limited number of rewrites before they start failing and having errors.

[Xylob the Destroyer]

...
Point to remember, flash drives have a limited number of rewrites before they start failing and having errors.

I did not know that! However, the same is true of magnetic storage too.

[TBoneit]

Also USB2 is much slower than the hard drive so you will slow down everything that pages, including booting windows. Test it copy a 500meg file to another hard drive in the computer and then copy it to the flash drive and time it. Much slower. Especially if you page file drive is a SATA or SATA 300. The only time it might help is in a older P3 with the BX chipset for example. Even a Ultra 66 hard drive should be faster than USB2. Most IDE these days are Ultra 100 or Ultra 133.

[ntscuser]

Buying extra RAM so the page file doesn't have to be accessed so often is probably a better investment than a USB stick.