now back in the days of serial ata gen 2. when we were booting dinosaur
operating systems like Windows 7 a typical high performance SSD would be
rated somewhere in the neighborhood of around 230 to 250 megabytes a second for
reads and writes which got me thinking when sony released
sd cards that are rated up to
300 megabytes a second okay technically 299 on the rights could we boot Windows
from these and what would the experience be like
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these puppies have actually been out for quite a while but it took sony almost a
year to send them to us because apparently
uh they and along with anything else made of nand flash memory have been in
very very short supply so what's special about them is not really the capacity i
mean 128 gigs should be noted is
pretty decent for an SSD from you know
back when these kinds of speeds would have been reasonable
but it's not that it's that because these are sdxc2 so these are uh s2 cards
and high-end ones at that you've actually got additional contact pins on
the back of them that enable these extra speeds now what that means is that while
they are backwards compatible with devices and with card readers that are
only sdxc capable to get the most out of it we are
going to need a special reader so this is the uh the wow that's a terrible
product name i mean i guess it's descriptive this is the sony uhs2 compatible high speed
doesn't explicitly say it's an sd card reader but whatever minor details so
it's usb 3 and it's got a compatible slot back
there for all those extra pins now the reason we need this is that
while sd to SATA adapters which you know would
allow us to plug this into a SATA port
do actually exist in fact we covered a particularly abominable one of them a
little while ago on this channel takes 10 micro sds and then gives you one SATA
interface these products because they're
pretty stupid haven't been updated in a long time which means they're using very
outdated controllers in fact this is only running SATA 1 speeds and that was
the least of its problems in terms of performance so we actually need that
reader in order to plug our card into
the system at all oh we're also going to need this
Windows installed usb
all right so there's our install
drive
forgot about this so
you can install Windows to a usb device
um i was actually a little bit worried there that we just it wasn't going to
show up at all but you need a special type of Windows installation you can't
just do it by putting a usb install disk in the system and installing it to it it
doesn't like that so what we have to do is we have to create what's called a
Windows to go installation
now i've never successfully gotten that to work before
so yeah so we're going to use a utility called
rufus we're going to grab a Windows 10 image that we downloaded from microsoft
and then we just need to point it at
our usb drive and
create a bootable disk it's supposed to just be right here
so microsoft uh in their infinite wisdom
stopped allowing you to create a Windows
to go installer using the not the iso but the like
Windows media creation tool version
so what you have to do is actually find
a disk so fortunately i actually just i
when i was doing an audit of our of our software around here
um i just realized some of our Windows installs
were not 100
correctly legit uh so i just like ran out and bought a bunch of them so
otherwise i wouldn't have a genuine Windows 10 disc because otherwise we've
done everything digitally but what you need to have is an actual disk
and you have to create an iso from that
so that's what we're gonna have to do here we're gonna have to go back in time
and rip this disk okay so we've got a Windows 10 image
that theoretically should work now
your target drive doesn't have the fixed oh what the hell are we doing
no we don't want to use this shoot
we need this okay
hold on uh
no there we go no label 128 gig okay
hopefully this won't give us any errors
that doesn't bode well i think we're gonna have to get some
lunch or something i'm really hungry actually
here we are so that did take a fair bit longer than usual
but by all appearances this is like pretty
normal window stuff c drive
sony mrws1 usb device
cool all right so let's do some stuff then
oh okay i'm feeling a little bit of leg
wow actually hold up a hold on a second
like you see anything measured in milliseconds you go it's probably pretty small
but nine thousand milliseconds is nine
seconds of average response time
the main reason that we use SSD controllers
and not sd cards is not the read and write speeds because those are
sequential i mean the usb interface is part of the
problem because compared to SATA or
pci express NVMe it's much less optimized for random performance but the
other issue is that an sd card is a relatively simple device it's just a
little bit of nand flash and there's not really to my knowledge
really any logic on it um compared to an SSD which has like
these this complex controller it'll in a lot of cases have like a dram cache and
it has many nand flash dies on it and then it can
read from and write to them sometimes all at once in a very strategic manner
so that it can optimize performance and endurance
but even if it's not that bad i actually wouldn't recommend this as a daily
driver system because you would kill your sd card
probably very quickly it's like even though this sd card can
do you know 300 megabytes a second reads and writes you can see we're at 99 usage
at like one mega second total
and that's because it is not optimized
come on
bear in mind of course that this is all on an eight core extreme
edition processor or 10 core 10 chords excuse me
it's interesting that even when it's basically not doing anything zero to one
megabyte a second it still registers as being a hundred
percent active with average response times in the three
to five seconds range so we should get some drivers
so we need a goal for ourselves we've got Windows running off an sd card
but how normal is this experience
can we game off it we need to get a game going and steam is
still updating though i think this might actually be worse
than running a mechanical drive it's writing at a whopping 500 kilobytes
per second so it's clearly not doing a whole heck of a lot
no the graphics driver is not compatible
with this version of Windows how does it even know the difference
that's stupid like looking at this there's no
no there's no discernible difference here it's just Windows
so maybe it's just that we need
a bazillion updates which might be part of what it's been
doing in the background here it's got 79 of them downloaded it's making
everything so slow i really need steam to finish though
a full day a full day it took
over a full day
for all of those Windows updates to run utterly ridiculous
what we're doing now is with everything updated
the game installed but i haven't tried it yet
we're gonna find out how bad or good
is the experience this
is it okay we're in
so the first thing that's noticeable other than that razer's
gaming software managed to prompt me to install it itself
is that our display is scaling correctly this is great
so as long as no NVIDIA control panel though that's
weird but this is showing up
okay i really thought this was going to be a
lot better without stuff running in the background
like it's measuring it in bytes per second
half a megabyte a second
as far as i can tell it looks like we are ready to go to run
a game so i installed doom which means that my
drive is actually almost totally full like
isn't that trippy opening up this pc
and there's there's no drive there's just
usb i just don't know how long it's going to
take to launch
that's not bad
okay i haven't played a ton of doom but like
that seemed like a very serviceable load time
what did i do with this oh uh
oh we had a hitch there
hitch
those hitches might have actually been anomalies
this is not bad
i am impressed
oh there you go where'd he go
get over it oh
okay
leg leg honestly this experience is way better
than i expected you know i think the issues before with
a little bit of lag might have just been anomalies because this is really smooth
not bad at all
ah i mean the game is called doom so you
know i think we have our answer so
can you do it the answer is yes
so yeah it's a pretty crap experience to boot off of all things considered but
it's not designed for that kind of use and they're blazing fast for just
straight reads and straight rights and i still think it's
impressive that it works at all
i mean the fact that you can run Windows off of something
this big and it's usable not to mention that like
okay compared to when i got into pcs the capacity
is actually similar to what you might have gotten out of something like a mac
store diamond max 9 like the hard drive
i got for my first self-built computer was 120 gigs
and that is freaking incredible because i like to
tell myself that that wasn't that long ago
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