I was a bit curious about the performance stats of my flash drive, especially with regard to Vista's ReadyBoost (which I haven't tried using yet). The idea is that a flash drive has much better random access performance than a harddrive, whereas a harddrive's sequential throughput is superior, but irrelevant for swap. So I tested it on my laptop's harddrive and a 2GB USB flash drive, using this simple but very useful tool called CrystalDiskMark. There's something I didn't expect: the random 4K write test was slower on the flashdrive.
How is that going to improve performance as a swap device? Is it filesystem related maybe? Still, the random read stats are quite telling. And the write performance might be ok if the system swaps well in advance.
