[mdlug] supplemental memory?

[Robert Citek]

On Tue, Mar 23, 2010 at 11:56 AM, Michael Mikowski <z_mikowski at yahoo.com> wrote:
> Now for random reads, seek time is much lower with memory cards, typically 1ms vs 10ms.  So putting swap on a USB stick will either improve your performance (if the disk is making many small reads), or hurt it.   Given the way Linux pages to swap to the disk, I would put odds on the latter.

If we assume the total write time is the seek time plus the actual
write time, then given 1 MB of data the total time for flash would be
201ms (=1ms + 200ms) and for my drive would be 50ms (=10ms + 40ms).
There would have to be a lot of very small writes for flash to improve
performance.

Has anyone seen a case where flash (i.e. USB stick or SD card or
similar) has faster write performance than a hard drive?

Even when reading data I get better speeds from a hard drive, although
the drive is now only 2x faster than flash.

Regards,
- Robert