OCZ Core 64GB MLC SSD Review.. (Testing in progress..)

[Sarduci]

I have a question. Can you achieve this same effect by just loading your data file on a USB flash drive and reference it from there? Seems a lot cheaper, even if it's not quite as fast. (Would still be much faster than a HD, right?)

No, the USB bus is polled and not bi-directional. The bus itself is silly inefficient and is slower than a IDE or SATA connection.

Right but it's access times still destroy the HDD right? Each time you answer me it seems you're only talking about transfer speed, and not addressing access times.

I know Vista made that Ready Boost technology just exactly for this purpose, to read small bits of data off flash drives for faster performance due to access times so I'm having a hard time seeing how this would be different.

If the bus isn't as fast as a physical drive, then I really don't care squat about access time since you'll never be able to get it out in time. USB is slower than a standard platter based drive regardless of access time unless you're talking about sending the same exact amount of data or less than USB can send in one chunk. Anything over that gets slaughtered by the physical drives ability to bulk send through or read/write at the same time. USB 2.0 is fail compaired to IDE/SATA/SATAII/Firewire800 simply because of design limitations.

Now, if you are compairing something like sustained data transfer in a continous block segment on the drive (aka MSSQL database) and you have a large read (say 4TB+ to a backup file) you lose all advantage in a SSD. No random seek takes away any kind of edge it has against the platter based system. Then it's all about shear throughput, and 15,000rpm SAS (serial attached SCSI) using a fiber switched infrastructure would blow it out of the water hands down. The limiting factor then in the controler interface of the drive system.