I’ve heard rumblings of being able to load Windows onto a reasonably large USB flash drive (32 or 64gb). I don’t know why exactly, but it seems like it would be kind of a cool thing to do, in a strange computer geek sort of way.
Has anyone tried this?
This is a feature designed into Windows 8, but won’t work on Windows 7.
There are still issues probably going to be issues with it - Flash memory is very good at some thing and very poor at others, which means performance won’t be the same as on a HDD or SSD.
but it seems like it would be kind of a cool thing to do, in a strange computer geek sort of way.
I agree.
Here is my plan though… in the next week or two I’m going to pick up a “60ish” GB Solid State Disk hard drive for my Windows 7 workstation, to add to the 2 TB I currently have. I’m going to reserve the SSD only for the operating system and program files. The first generation of SSDs can be picked up on newegg or similar for super low price since the 2nd generations are out now.
Since the disk won’t need to physically read or write data for all OS/program related tasks, it will appear that the processing speed of the computer has increased exponentially.
I suppose an internal SSD would be better than a USB flash drive in terms of performance. I thought SSD’s were supposed to be the wave of the future in terms of speeding computing. Why would an HDD be better for an OS?
An SSD is the best choice for the OS drive. USB Flash sticks do not have the same overall performance as a SATA hard disk, so it would cause issue when running certain types of programs that prefer random writes, etc.