The Portable Freeware Collection Forums

Hi everyone,

From what I have read in various places, 2.5" USB hard disk is the best medium for Portable Applications because of its high performance over flash drives.

I am wondering if there are many people around who owns a hard disk based mp3/mp4/PMP player (incl Ipod, etc) and uses it to run Portable Applications.

We have been encouraging our customer to uses our 2.5" hard disk based player to use it for this purpose but have no real idea on the approx percentage of the population who also uses it to run portable applications. I think it would be interesting to know if someone can tell me.

Thanks
Eric

I won't vote because I run the app on several different USB Thumb Drives as well as two Portable HDDs

''Performance'' is going to be largely affected by the size of the portable application when you're comparing a flash drive to a USB HDD; even with 7 MB/s (or slower) read speeds on a crummy flash drive, if the portable software you run is smaller than a megabyte, load times and performance difference will not be within a human-noticeable threshold. In other words, for a significant portion of portable software, it doesn't matter which storage medium you use.

It tends to be write-intensive software (that's writing to the portable medium), raw file transfers and very large and bloated portable applications where a USB HDD will out-perform a flash drive. For example, a portable web browser would be more suited to a USB HDD than a flash drive.

Your question is still very valid though; I too am curious how many people use media players, USB HDDs and flash drives for their portable software. Which performs best has little bearing on what the average person will actually use and considering how popular media players are, I'm curious if they're often tasked with pocket app'ing.

Queue

I am surprised at the quick response on this forum, I thought this board is rather quiet......

Your question is still very valid though; I too am curious how many people use media players, USB HDDs and flash drives for their portable software. Which performs best has little bearing on what the average person will actually use and considering how popular media players are, I'm curious if they're often tasked with pocket app'ing.

True. (I also believe the average people don't know there is such thing as Portable Apps......., not like everyone knows what is a Ipod.)

Personally, I don't use portable apps much (because I carry my laptop around ), had tried running portable thunderbird on USB stick. The slow performance compared to the standard hdd installed version is significant. And I don't really like it running so slow.........can't image running openoffice on it.........when it is already rather slow using the standard installed version.....

Well, maybe I ask for too much? (considering that I don't like laptop either compared to desktop.......because it is so "slow"........... )

USB HDD

Pros:
- Bigger bang for the buck
- Higher speed esp. write speed

Cons:
- Bigger and heavier
- Theoretically more susceptible to physical abuse due to moving parts

USB memory stick:

Pros:

- Smaller and lighter
- Theoretically less susceptible to physical abuse due to no moving parts

Cons:
- Lower speed esp. write speed
- Finite number of write cycles esp. if your portable apps are using it for caching purposes.

I voted for USB HDD.

I use 4 kinds of media for my portable apps.
One is my non-portable HDD. I use portable apps because they make reinstallation of OS quicker.
I also use a cell phone. It has enough memory and bluetooth. Terribly slow, but I always have it by myself.
USB stick - I use it much more often than the cell because it's much faster. I keep it with my keys, so I also always have it when I need it...unless I left it hanging at the back of my computer
And finally - 2.5'' HDD PMP. It's big and I rarely use it, but it's the only one big enough to host not only my programs, but also games.

I'm pretty much the same as m^(2).
A couple of my phones are loaded up but will only be used if I've forgotten my flash drives or HDD.

I use my 2.5" Hdd regularly though, the Passports fit perfectly in a Nintendo DS Case for carrying around and mine's big enough to fit ALL of my programs on (And 100GB of comic books) including my thinstalled photoshop etcetera

Btw m^(2), how does your information on your phone affect it's capabilities?
Mine takes forever loading up its picture viewer because it includes every pic from every app I have

Local wrote:Btw m^(2), how does your information on your phone affect it's capabilities?
Mine takes forever loading up its picture viewer because it includes every pic from every app I have

It just reduces available memory, nothing more. Fortunately it's not stupid enough to search whole folder tree for something.