1. posterid:62228
  2. Portable version degrading

Re: Portable version degrading

Antony Stone
 

1. It's not USB. Roger said that what he's referring to as his "portable"
version is in fact on an internal hard disk. I know that may seem an odd use
of the word "portable", but at least it means we can rule out any problems to
do with externally connected devices.

2. The drive is (presumably) not the same one as contains Roger's "standard"
version of NVDA, because the "portable" copy is on a traditional spinning-rust
HDD, whereas his system drive is on an SSD, which is where I assume his
standard version of NVDA is installed. Therefore your suggestion to check how
full each drive is is well worth while, although I would still expect the
system only to have a single swap partition / file, so if it runs out of memory
running either version of NVDA, swapping will occur in exactly the same way
for each.

3. The drive containing the "portable" copy is an HDD, whereas the main system
drive is an SSD, so drive degradation of the portable copy is a possible
cause, agreed.


Antony.

On Monday 22 January 2018 at 23:30:13, tonea.ctr.morrow@... wrote:

Roger,

I've lost track of all the info you gave on the drive. But, I kept a sticky
note of things to check.


1) Check if the USB is version 3. Version 2 is quite a bit slower than
3. Also, most people think they can plug a USB 3 into any USB port and it
will still be a 3. Not true because the slowest wins. If you plug a USB 3
into a USB 2 port, it becomes a USB 2 drive. Vice versa is also true. A 2
drive into a 3 port runs at USB 2 speed. To get full USB 3, both the drive
and the port must be USB 3.

2) Fill status of the drive. If the drive is close to being full, it
may be having to swap data a lot. That can really slow down any
application. You wouldn't notice it on your regular applications because
they would run off the regular drive. However, you would notice it on
anything else that ran from the portable drive. I recommend less that 85%
full, but others here are more tech savy than myself.

3) Drive death immenent. I don't know what it is like to have a solid
state drive die. But, on a traditional spinning drive, the drive will mark
sectors as bad when the drive has trouble accessing them. This can result
in corruptions. And, as the drive has to work twice as hard to find all
the pieces it keeps moving, this can cause slower run time. Thus, you get
slower and slower and more frequent data corruptions in an application. I
don't remember how, but you can test for this.

Thank you Adriani Botez for reminding me of the 2 versus 3 issue. I lost
track of who suggested the other two...

Good luck and let us know the results,

Tonea
--
3 logicians walk into a bar. The bartender asks "Do you all want a drink?"
The first logician says "I don't know."
The second logician says "I don't know."
The third logician says "Yes!"

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