Gadgetory

now back in the days of serial ata gen - 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 $2.99 on the writes could we boot windows from these and what would the experience be like I fix its protec toolkit gives you the tools you need to tackle any electronics repair challenge visit ifixit.com slash linus at the link below and get yours today so these puppies have actually been out for quite a while but it took Sony almost a year to send them to us because apparently 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 SDXC - so these are UHS 2 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 gonna need a special reader so this is the the wow that's a terrible product name I mean I guess it's descriptive this is the Sony UHS 2 compatible high-speed it doesn't explicitly say it's a 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 SD s and then I gives you one stated 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these products because they're pretty stupid haven't been updated in a long time which means they're using very outdated controllers in fact this is only running SATA 1 speeds and that was the least of its problems in terms of performance so we actually need that reader in order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 at all we're also gonna need this windows installed USB all right so there's our install right looks like I forgot about this so you can install Windows to a USB device I was actually a little bit worried there that we just wasn't gonna 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 - 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 gonna use a utility called Rufus we're gonna grab a Windows 10 image that we downloaded from Microsoft and then we just need to point it at our USB Drive it's supposed to just be right here so Microsoft in their infinite wisdom stopped allowing you to create a Windows to go installer using the not the ISO Vata like windows media creation tool version so what you have to do is actually find a disk so fortunately I actually just when I was doing an audit of our of our software around here I just realized some of our windows installs were not a hundred percent correctly legit so I just like ran out and bought a bunch of them so otherwise I wouldn't have a genuine Windows 10 disk because otherwise we've done everything digitally but what you need to have is an act tool 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 up Oh what the hell are we doing no we don't want to use this shoot we need this okay hold on no there we go no label 128 gig okay hopefully this won't give us any errors 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 mrw s1 USB device cool alright 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 9,000 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 compared to an SSD which has like these it's complex controller it'll in a lot of cases have like a dram cache and then it has many NAND flash dyes 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 bear in mind of course that this is all on an eight-core Extreme Edition processor or 10 core 10 chord 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 lack 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 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 percent 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 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 Razors gaming software managed to prompt me to install it itself is that our display is scaling correctly this is great so as long as oh no Nvidia control panel though that's weird but this is showing up okay I really thought this is gonna be a lot better without stuff running in the background like it's measuring it bytes per second half a megabyte a second as far as I can tell it looks like we are ready to go and 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 gonna 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 I do with this oh oh we got a hitch there pitch those hitches might have actually been anomalies this is not bad I am impressed there you go oh yeah 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 leg might have just been anomalies because this is really smooth it's not bad at all ah I mean the games 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 writes 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 it's 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 a hundred and twenty gigs and that is freaking incredible because I like to tell myself that that wasn't that long ago private Internet access supports a variety of VPN protocols and types of encryption and authentication allowing you to dial in exactly the level of privacy protection that you need they've got apps for Windows Mac OS Android iOS Linux and Google Chrome with support for others coming soon you can connect up to five devices at the same time like your phone your laptop your desktop and their apps include DNS leak protection and ipv6 leak protection you can check it out today at the link in the video description and if you've already got it well you can give it as a gift as well so don't miss out so thanks for watching guys if you just like this video you can hit that button but if you liked it hit like get subscribed maybe consider checking out where to buy the stuff we've featured at the link in the video description though again not for booting windows off of maybe just for like a very high-speed camera for example 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