Applications on flash drives

[regal196]

Lets say i want to install BF2 on a flashdrive. Would i get any speed advantages, or would it be limited by PCI transport speeds? Would there be a problem with the read/write amounts (wear) on the drive?

-Pennell

[Popup]

Lets say i want to install BF2 on a flashdrive. Would i get any speed advantages, or would it be limited by PCI transport speeds? Would there be a problem with the read/write amounts (wear) on the drive?

It all depends on what kind of flash drive, and what kind of accesses. In general, however, flash is very fast for small files. Flash memory is (as close as possible to) completely random access, i.e. no seek time. On the other hand, the raw transfer rate is often disappointing, compared to todays large HDDs. Depending on how the flash is organized, you're unlikely to have a sustained data rate of more then a few tens of Mb/s, maximum.

There are (at least) three ways of attaching a flash drive:
-USB
-PATA
-SATA

There are advantages and disadvantages with all of them (availability/price/compatibility/performance), but I won't go into any details here.

The only way to find out if there's a performance impact in your particular case is to try (or find someone with a similar enough system who's already run some benchmarks.)

In theory flash has a limited number of writes (or more accurately erase cycles), but with modern algorithms for wear leveling and with todays huge chips that's pretty much an academical issue.