Increasing RAM with USB thumb-drive

What ho,

I have a Dell dimension 9200 with XP Pro. Although the computer will handle 64 bit, it will not handle more than 4 gb of RAM, so there is next to no point in upgrading my software and OS.

However, I have been reading that I can use a USB thumb-drive to increase the RAM. Am thinking of buying a 32 gb USB3 drive although the computer only has USB2 sockets.

For most use, I probably don't need the extra RAM but I do a lot of photo processing with about 100mb files and I'm hoping that increasing the RAM with a USB will speed things up.

As an example, I have been timing a 99mb file that I have applied four filters from Nik Colour Effects Pro. Hit the OK button and it takes almost 2 minutes before the layer becomes available in Photoshop. Would a 32 gb thumb-drive, configured in virtual memory, speed things up?

Thanks

Toodle Pip,

Rex

windows Vista and Win 7 have something called Readyboost where you can insert a USB thumb drive (or any number of them you care to) and use that as quasi RAM. I recall looking for something similar for my old XP laptop a while back and found nothing similar.

Having said that I experimented with my Win 7 pro w/4 Gigs of ram and USB 2.0 by inserting one (and later two) 16 Gig USB sticks and setting them up with Readyboost. I found absolutely no difference at all. It's possible that if I had less actual ram I would have seen some improvement or if I'd had USB 3.0 available then that likely would have helped a lot too but as it was nada.

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Am thinking of buying a 32 gb USB3 drive although the computer only has USB2 sockets.

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Your computer will need USB 3.0 sockets to take advantage of the faster drive.


If you're going to put some of your pagefile/virtual memory onto the USB stick I tried that too and found it also made no noticeable difference on my xp laptop that has 756 Gigs of actual ram. You could try it though and see what happens. I'd leave some of the allotted VM on the hard drive and put the rest on the USB stick. You could experiment with percentages.. start with 50/50. Also USB sticks have different read write speeds so you'd want to do a little research to find a better/faster one.

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I have a Dell dimension 9200 with XP Pro. Although the computer will handle 64 bit, it will not handle more than 4 gb of RAM, so there is next to no point in upgrading my software and OS.

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XP 32-bit wouldn't support more than about 3.25GB RAM anyways.

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However, I have been reading that I can use a USB thumb-drive to increase the RAM. Am thinking of buying a 32 gb USB3 drive although the computer only has USB2 sockets.

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XP doesn't support Readyboost. It's not the same as adding real RAM. It's basically a cache drive.

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Would a 32 gb thumb-drive, configured in virtual memory, speed things up?

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I highly doubt that would help. A USB 2.0 flash drive would still be slower than your hard drive.

Go with a PCIe SSD which is much faster than USB.
Example:
Crucial M500 - solid state drive - 240 GB - PCI Express M.2 Card
Crucial m500 240 gb internal solid state drive - M.2 - 500 mbps maximum read transfer rate - 250 mbps maximum write transfer rate - 72000iops random 4kb read - 60000iops random 4kb write (ct240m500ssd4)
https://www.google.com/shopping/prod...d=0CMELEKYrMCo

The usb 3.0 sticks I have top out a 70 MB writes, 40 with big files and they average about 10 MB on USB 2.0.

Better yet Get a SSD for C: drive. I loved the difference it made. Paid about $90 for a 240 GB sdd.

Running Win 10 build 9926, 32-bit, on a Dell Optiplex 755 with 2 GB or ram and a 240 GB ssd and it is doing just fine. Lots faster than XP ever was.

Your best option by far is to replace the whole computer or everything inside the case far newer and much faster parts along with Windows 7 64 or 8.1 64 operating systems. The 9200 is 8 years old now and that's an eternity in the computer world. Attempting to use a USB flash drive for anything other than storage is a total waste of time, especially on what you currently have.

Gentlemen,

Thanks for the replies and suggestions. Derp, I do agree with you but I really cannot justify the expense for a new computer, OS and the latest Adobe software, just to get things running faster. What would I do with all the extra seconds saved?

However, I have been running a test using a very old 1gb USB2 stick, a 2gb USB2 stick and a new 64 gb USB3 stick. I currently have 4800mb set as the page file size on C: and with the 64gb stcik, I could not allocate more than 4800. To be honest, I don't know what any of that actually means anyway.

I ran the same 99mb image in PhotoShop CS3 with the same five Nik Color Efecs filters and timed them. I ran each image twice just to check the times. What I got was as follows: no USB stick took 2m30s to open in PS as a layer; 1gb took 1m40s; 2gb took 1m45s and the 64gb stick set to 4800 mb as virtual memory also took 1m40s.

So I will put the 1gb in and assuming that it is actually doing something, save approx 50 seconds when using the Nik software.

Toodle pip.

Rex

How much ram is there installed in your computer? You might see a greater performance gain by maxing-out your ram.

The Dell Dimension 9200 has 4 sockets RAM expansion slots, where you may install new memory, either by removing the existing installed RAM or adding memory to the free slot available. 1 GB of ram per slot. So the 4 GB he says he has is the max.

I know 4gB is the max amount of ram this computer can handle, but the op never said that he had 4gB of installed ram.

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Originally Posted by glussier

I know 4gB is the max amount of ram this computer can handle, but the op never said that he had 4gB of installed ram.

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Got it now!

As above, only have 3 gb installed. At the time of buying, I was not so familiar with the ins and out of XP but also, I was not aware that a Dell limitation on this computer was 4 gb.

It's a PIA since the computer, old as it is, will run 64 bit and I would happily upgrade to W7, but there is not point if I cannot also increase the RAM beyond 4gb

Note that the Dell Dimension 9200, even if Dell doesn't say so, can be upgraded to 8GB of ram. I upgraded at least 4 of them to 8GB without any issue.

Glussier,

Presumably, installing 8gb RAM with 32 bit XP is a waste of time?

I would happily upgrade to W7 and install 8gb RAM. Given that the computer is not the fastest kid on the block, would that considerably improve the speed?

Not really, but if you could find a used Intel Q6600 or Q6700 quad processor, the speed would then be considerably improved. Just adding ram and replacing the o/s won't significantly improve the speed of your computer.

Thanks. Already have a 2.40 gigahertz Intel Core2 Quad Q6600.

Then, except for a small ssd, there is no way you will dramatically increase the speed of this computer.

In which case, there is a reasonable chance that it is running as fast as it will go. But it 100 mb image files with five filters probably puts a lot of processing load on the processor.

May be I'm clutching at straws but ......... I don't specifically need a faster computer but it would be nice if the processing of *.tif files wihtin PhotoShop with filters, etc, was faster. If the timed 1m40 secs could be brought down to 1m or 30s. Probably not likely, however.

I was browsing a photo mag today and there was an article about speeding up image processing. One suggestion was to install a small SSD, dedicated as the PhotoShop scratch disk. Does that seem reasonable? I currently have three HDD installed, with the second one having a 12gb first partition as the PS scratch. If I could install a SSD with two partitions, one for PS scratch, the other for XP page file, is that a/ possible and b/ likely to make a significant improvement?

Thanks

Rex

Now that should be worth while.

Actually C drive and that would speed things up.

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DRAM-based SSD is the faster of the two but NAND is faster than hard drives by a range of 80-87% -- a very narrow range between low-end consumer SSDs and high-end enterprise SSDs. The root of the faster performance lies in how quickly SSDs and HDDs can access and move data: SSDs have no physical tracks or sectors and thus no physical seek limits. The SSD can reach memory addresses much faster than the HDD can move its heads.

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Now the final storage, you will want that on a regular hdd.

Worth reading
http://www.storagereview.com/ssd_vs_hdd

You can get a 120gB ssd drive for next to nothing now (roughly $60.00). Just install winxp on it and leave the pagefile and Photoshop scratch pace on the same drive. There will be no benefit in partitioning the drive.

And, ssd are as reliable as normal hard-drive. I still have Intel G1 80GB drives still going strong after 5 years of use.

240 GB SSD, I paid $80 for it.

• Gavotte RAMdisk

Your computer will only be as fast as its weakest link. Due to the limitations of your aging computer you won't even get close to full speed out of a new SSD no matter what you do. I build A/V production & gaming computers and have a fairly good working knowledge from 15+ of hands-on experience of what's needed to get the absolute most performance out of hardware. If your time is worth money to you then you're going to have to upgrade to much newer and faster hardware. I have customers that ask for magic solutions to make their old computers do things they weren't designed to do and my answer to them is there is no magic solution, they'll have to upgrade to get their desired results. The Intel i7 4790K & Z97 platform is my current recommendation for budget customers and the 5930K or 5960X & X99 platform for those who can afford them.