external hard drive

[Bot]

I'm thinking about buying a 160GB or 80GB hard drive for backing up the important stuff, maybe using a Linux distro, and possibly for a performance boost. By performace boost I mean using RAM from the external hard drive.

My question is about the performance boost, I believe the external hard drive is hooked to a computer via USB2.0 and I know USB is slower compared to other wires, so will using an external hard drive for a RAM boost slow down my computer, keep it just how it is, or will I see a subtle increase in performance?

My RAM is only 1.4GB.

(I really like watching Hak .5 and seeing what Darren and Wess will come up with next, keep the episodes rolling.)

Thanks for help and advice.

[cooper]

I'm thinking about buying a 160GB or 80GB hard drive for backing up the important stuff, maybe using a Linux distro, and possibly for a performance boost. By performace boost I mean using RAM from the external hard drive.

Woah. You just hit a 9.4 on the Noobsterscale.

You see, there's RAM, which is the reasonably fast Random Access Memory.

On the other side of the equation there's the venerable harddisk. Slow as dirt, especially compared to RAM, but available and affordable in way, WAY larger capacities. When you use (part of) that harddisk as expansion space to your system's memory, the space you use for this is called 'swap space', or simply 'swap'.

Having more swap will let you run programs that are such memory hogs they don't fit in your current amount of RAM. It will, however, not speed up your machiine, and might actually even slow it down a notch.

My question is about the performance boost, I believe the external hard drive is hooked to a computer via USB2.0 and I know USB is slower compared to other wires, so will using an external hard drive for a RAM boost slow down my computer, keep it just how it is, or will I see a subtle increase in performance?

The fastest form of USB does 480 MBit/s or 60 mb/s theoretically. Current quality harddisks can reach that off of their platters, and greatly surpass that when working from their cache. Firewire might be faster, but it's not so standard on machines.

The thing you seem to be forgetting is that going through USB will introduce additional lantencies, and the one thiing you want in anything that will be used as a memory replacement is really low latencies. You clicked someething on the screen, you want instant response, right? That's how you 'feel' performance. Well, it just got longer compared to just going through an internal harddrive.

My RAM is only 1.4GB.

I've got 1 gig and no swapspace and I'm not complaining.

My laptop has (and needs) 2 though, but it runs a database, application server, dev environment and 2 instances of VMWare with a full Windows OS in each.

[wetelectric]

n00b factor ten captain! delete delete delete!(ok so one would only get the delete thing if u ever saw Doctor who' cyber men,meh)

But i think this is the new gereation of spam bots. Ask a dumb question gets replies then add links later?.... maybe the bots have made us all paranoid meh. 8)

[jool]

Wow that was... wow! Are you a screenwriter or something? Just wondering since you normally don't see someone string together random techy-sounding words with proper grammer and still make no sense outside of television or movies.

Not trying to be mean but that was just exceptional.

[Bot]

I have no idea when it comes to hardware and hardware related things. I guess I'll just use my hard drive for backups and maybe for running Ubuntu... but one thing in Ubuntu I never seem to get working is WIFI on my Broadcom card, messing with Ndiswrapper doesn't work, installing drivers doesn't work. I know a member here experienced the same problems. I'll check and see if that'll work for me.

[cooper]

No worries, mate.

Just kindly make a new thread should you need help with the WIFI bit.