Now thats kinda cool :)

Originally Posted by Turboflash hype
Data stored on a flash memory device can be accessed much more quickly than data kept on the hard disk.

I saw these on some site with pre-order Vista, but surely USB 2.0 pen-drives (and at that lowish price) are too slow for cache-like purposes? :?

Can't find anything on read/write speeds...

Originally Posted by cpemma
I saw these on some site with pre-order Vista, but surely USB 2.0 pen-drives (and at that lowish price) are too slow for cache-like purposes? :?

Can't find anything on read/write speeds...

Originally Posted by Matt Ayers
2.5MB/sec throughput for 4K random reads and 1.75MB/sec throughput for 512K random writes

http://blogs.msdn.com/tomarcher/archive/2006/06/02/615199.aspx That explained quite a lot to me. I can imagine it would be useful for people running less than 512MB of memory, seems like a reasonable idea.

Originally Posted by alastor
I can imagine it would be useful for people running less than 512MB of memory, seems like a reasonable idea.

Flash is very low access time compared to HD, but anything over tiny files and the distance runner overtakes the sprinter AFAICS. But hey, 1Gb of Flash is dirt cheap compared to another 512k of DRAM.

And rather than the constant noise of HD thrashing, they have the silence of Flash memory thrashing...though "all pages on the device are backed by a page on disk." so maybe not. :(

The speeds Matt Ayers quotes are the minimum for a ReadyBoost™-suitable pen-drive, rather than the Corsair spec, so most any decent-brand USB2 ones should be OK. :)