Better USB stick....

itmike · #1 15th August 2009, 05:42 AM

Right now I'm using a cruzer micro 4gb drive as live usb stick for fedora 11. Though I notice that it'll have a hiccup in performance like as I'm typing sometimes it'll freeze or switching from firefox to another app or just tabs can take a few moments. I mean it never totally locks up just a hiccup like. So if I upgrade to one of the high speed thumb drives will it possibly make my live os perform better. If so is there one that you recommend for running an os from. Any light shed on this will be greatly appreciated. I do have usb 2.0 ports just so that's not in question.

zackf · #2 15th August 2009, 06:10 AM

Keep in mind a live system operates from RAM so you may encounter such hiccups since it won't use the HDD to cache any information. Even a high speed USB stick won't be as fast as an Internal drive, but I don't think that's where your bottleneck is coming from. I prefer using a USB stick for the live system because it's much faster than a CD.

itmike · #3 15th August 2009, 06:20 AM

Well I highly doubt it is that, no offense to you. I have 6gb of ram, though I know all of it is not being used because I'm using a 32-bit version I believe, the F11 i686 live and I have a quad core processor.

CSchwangler · #4 15th August 2009, 07:01 AM

The PAE kernel should be able to address 6GB of RAM. Are you using your usb drive in the way a live CD is used, i. e. instead of a CD, or did you a regular installation on a usb drive instead of a hdd? If you did a regular installation, F11 will write back to your drive. The problem with usb drives is that reading is fast but writing is slow. My guess is that during the hickups, Fedora writes to disk, for instance log files. If you have that much memory, it may be worth trying to create a RAM disk and put /var and /tmp on it. Log and temp files would then be written to RAM, which is much faster than writing on the USB stick.

itmike · #5 15th August 2009, 07:03 AM

Yeah it is only recognizing 3gb of it. Turns out that I was actually filling my persitent drive to maximum capacity with updates and killed the cache and had to start over.

zackf · #6 15th August 2009, 05:40 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by CSchwangler

The PAE kernel should be able to address 6GB of RAM. Are you using your usb drive in the way a live CD is used, i. e. instead of a CD, or did you a regular installation on a usb drive instead of a hdd? If you did a regular installation, F11 will write back to your drive. The problem with usb drives is that reading is fast but writing is slow. My guess is that during the hickups, Fedora writes to disk, for instance log files. If you have that much memory, it may be worth trying to create a RAM disk and put /var and /tmp on it. Log and temp files would then be written to RAM, which is much faster than writing on the USB stick.

I think you're right, if persistence is enabled. It may also be accessing the disk too for information.