USB 3.0 Advice Needed

[Tekified]

Hey I have 2 questions really,

1. I'm undecided on the size of my next USB flash drive. 63GB or 128GB? I'm an IT technician and have a lot of ISO files
and various other tools that I'd like on it plus I'll be using true crypt for a hidden volume containing personal info.

The USB in question is the Kingston HyperX 64GB / 128GB USB 3.0

Note: I have USB 3.0 ports on my system.

2. Im wondering if I bought a 64GB / 128GB Crucial M4 SSD and used it as a external USB 3.0 drive. I wanted to do this as the Kingston HyperX USB flash drive isn't so good at small 4K read/writes which I'm told is beneficial if I'm going to have an OS running from it in future. The Crucial M4 SSD it's obviously pretty good at this but not sure how it would preform over USB 3.0 (if it even work at all).

Note: I'm fully aware that running an SSD over USB 3.0 is going to be much slower. The only reason im considering it as a portable USB drive is the price of the 64Gb is dirt cheap and it's 4K writes are much better than Kingstons HyperX USB 3.0 drive.

Any advise would be appreciated

 

[tomatthe]

Personally this would come down to convenience for me, if you don't mind carrying around the HD that's going to have better performance and be cheaper.

 

[Tekified]

Thanks for the reply. Do you know how the SSD would preform over USB 3.0? Looking for benchmarks but can't find much on it

 

[CaedenV]

USB3 is 5Gbps, or 625MBps, which is nearly as fast as SATAIII which is 6Gbps. In short, you are unlikely to bottleneck your SSD much, and the SSD will be worlds faster than the flash drive.
keep in mind that in the real world SSDs do not get 500+MBps except is the most optimal of situations. Really they get somewhere around 150-200MBps on non compressible files, and roughly double that (300-400MBps) for compressible information. So again, I highly dobut you will bottleneck your drive by going over USB3.
You also need to consider what you are transferring to. If booting off of your USB drive, then you are transferring to Ram, which should be quick, but transferring to/from a HDD/internet/network is going to be much slower than what the SSD can take advantage of.

As far as the size needed goes, it is kinda a dumb question for an IT guy. Add up the size of the ISOs you need on the drive and if it is more than 75% of the space on the 64GB drive then move up to the 128GB. The 75% number is arbitrary, but performance is lost as drives (flash/SSD/mechanical) get full, so you want to have space for some future files, without worry of hitting the 90% wall where things start breaking down.

I don't know if or how well TRIM works via USB3, so be sure to get a drive with it's own garbage collection system in place.

 

[Tekified]

Cheers I think I'll go for the Kingston HyperX 128Gb USB 3. I guess if I'm gunna be using GRUB4DOS with multiple OS's ill get the larger drive for convenience.

 

[muradw2]

Woah! 2 replies from the first day, yet my thread is empty for weeks!
Answer mine, please:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/282433-32-write-protected