Is it worth installing applications to removable flash media on Windows 7?

Question

Without the funds to buy a SSD for my soon to arrive laptop, and the knowledge that Visual Studio 2010 can be quite slow at times on a normal hard disk, I was trying to come up with possible solutions to improve performance. The laptop will have a 5400rpm drive and 8GB RAM.

ReadyBoost was one option that I was looking at as the laptop has a SD card slot which I don't intend on using, so could leave a large card in there and allocate it to ReadyBoost. However, as the machine will have 8GB RAM, I'm not certain ReadyBoost would do a huge amount as there should be plenty of RAM left of disk cache.

Then I remembered old Netbooks which used SD cards as their main storage, and wondered whether I could just install Visual Studio onto the SD card (or move it, and mount the SD card into Program Files?). Would that likely give better performance than loading from a hard drive? Kind of a poor man's hybrid drive?

Is this likely to:

1. work

2. give any noticeable benefit

3. cause any problems?

4. work better with a USB drive instead of SD card?

Answer 1

One issue would be moving the card. It would not just "mount" on the second system. There could be a number of files in folders like windews or windows/system32 (for example) that would be missing and there would be registry entries missing

You would need a Class 10 card but not sure if there would be a big performacne boost as some files would remain on the 5400 RPM drive

Using a 7200RPM drive with a larger cache could help( WD Black for example)

Is there a reason you do not want to install VS2010 and check performance and address issues?